DataDirect Networks Introduces Massively Scalable Cloud Storage System

CHATSWORTH, CA -- 06/22/09 -- DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN), the leading data infrastructure provider for the most demanding, content-intensive environments -- including hundreds of the world's largest photo, video, online gaming, music, social networking sites, broadcasting, post production, and high performance computing facilities, today announced Web Object Scaler (WOS), a scalable, multi-site cloud storage system designed to solve the performance, scalability, and infrastructure management challenges created by global content creation, storage and distribution.

In today's on-demand world, content-intensive applications, such as websites, social networks, photo sharing, e-bills, bank check processing and medical and document imaging, are creating demanding challenges on file and storage systems. These applications are driving file counts into the tens of billions and driving file request rates beyond what traditional storage and file systems were designed to handle. Further exacerbating the problem is the need to distribute content among multiple data centers, for disaster recovery or in order to place content close to the requesting user to keep latency to a minimum.

"File and object-based data is changing the world of content storage. The real-time need to quickly and very cost effectively access and retrieve that data from anywhere across the globe, requires a completely new approach to data handling systems design," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder, DataDirect Networks. "We took a 'build it from the ground up' approach and designed in collaboration with the very customers whose problems we were trying to solve."

Bouzari continued, "With input from customers such as Slide Inc., the world's leading social entertainment company and application provider for Facebook and MySpace, the result was WOS, an easy to set up storage cloud that can start very small, yet scale to service the needs of tens of millions of users accessing hundreds of billions of files and multiple petabytes of information, from anywhere in the world."

Ideal for storing billions of files and objects across geographically dispersed data centers, WOS delivers:

• Simplicity: WOS clouds create a single, global namespace for billions of files distributed among multiple sites; all managed from a single, easy to use, web-based GUI
• Scale: A single WOS cloud can start with just a few Terabytes of storage, yet scale to Petabytes of data and hundreds of billions of files
• Performance: Over 1 Million random file reads per second can be sustained, enabling direct, low-latency content service to huge user counts
• Content Distribution: WOS supports automated policy-based content replication and distribution among multiple data centers with automatic load balancing
• Robust Data Protection: The WOS cloud has no single points of failure and multiple self-healing capabilities to maintain seamless delivery of content under all conditions

Unlike traditional storage and file systems which were designed to be deployed in a single location, WOS is an object-based, globally clustered storage system that addresses the needs of content scale-out and distribution. Its intelligent software allows for a massively scalable content delivery platform to be created from small building blocks, enabling the system to serve entry-level needs, yet easily and non-disruptively grow to multi-petabyte scale.