DDN Intros New Big Data Appliances

Today Data Direct Networks announced a new series of products aimed at addressing the ever-growing demand for data storage. Among the items DDN rolled out this week was its SFA12K series of big data appliances, which are designed to appeal for big data, cloud and HPC storage environments.

The ability to have in-storage processing and the real-time I/O feature as well as an architecture that keeps data close to the processing point does make DDN attractive for big data workloads. According to Dave

This has already been a week full of big claims about accelerating big data applications via a number of mechanisms; from the network (consider the Mellanox announcement this week) to the storage side (Fusion-io’s news from today, for instance) everyone has answer to the questions of how to speed up big data in November.  

In addition to more generally stating its case for why customers with data-intensive problems should be looking their way, DDN provided details about three new models to add to its Storage Fusion Architecture. As you can see in the descriptions below, each is cognizant of latency—not to mention of encroaching competition.

Data Direct says that their SFA12K-40 “delivers the industry’s highest single-platform performance at over 40GB/s and 1.4 million flash IOPS.” The system is both InfiniBand and Fibre Channel-ready and is designed to upwards of 1TB/s in as few as 25 arrays. DDN put some fighting words out to NetApp, saying that this allows for “consolidation as much as 8:1” in comparison.

The SFA12K-20E is the virtualization-ready offering. The company says this product “extends DDN’s In-Storage processing to host DDN’s ExaScaler and GridScaler parallel file systems and/or customer applications natively within the storage array.” Outfitted with 40GB Ethernet and InfiniBand capability, DDN says the SFA12K-20E provides 20GB/s of bandwidth and 700k flash IOPs for latency-aware workloads.

Finally, the company’s SFA12K-20 combines “storage performance with a cost-optimized system configuration to economically deliver over 20GB/s and 700 flash IOPS from a single system.”

According to the company’s CEO and cofounder, Alex Bouzari, “With the SFA12K series’ groundbreaking ability to virtualize applications and store and process within the same appliance, we are delivering ideal storage and compute infrastructure solutions for organizations worldwide.”