DataDirect Networks, a leading storage company, has had a few significant developments this week, among them the announcement of its new NAS Scaler enterprise file storage platform, a cost-efficient and scalable multi-protocol network-attached storage (NAS) solution. NAS Scaler is designed for high-growth cloud service providers, unstructured data, and machine-generated data sets, and offers the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.  It’s DDN’s entry into this arena, vastly expanding its business offerings and presence within the cloud.

NAS Scaler provides multi-protocol, multi-tenant access to NFS, CIFS, HTTP and FTP clients into a scalable, petabyte-scale storage pool. This is managed by up to 12 NAS Scaler gateways, and comes alongside a great deal of automation and acceleration the offering provides.

“Enterprise Data Management: NAS Scaler provides a full complement of tools and capabilities — such as snapshots, clones, mirroring, and asynchronous replication and integrated backup support- to manage high-volume unstructured data and media content automatically.”

NAS Scaler also supports dynamic storage caching and data tiering to accelerate in-demand content, as well as to optimize high-capacity media. The offering can be configured to up to 600 hard drives in a single rack, lowering costs by up to 65% while supporting over 15GB/s per storage volume and hundreds of thousands of file operations per second.

All of these feautures combined make DDN’s NAS Scaler a pretty attractive offering, but it hasn’t hit general availability just yet. The product is available for order immediately, and will be shipping in 3 months.

DataDirect Networks had some other major announcements lately, too. The company’s GridScaler Parallel HPC Storage Infrastructure is now powering Stanford University’s Genomics Research Center. Moreover, news crossed the wire that European personal cloud storage and sharing service PhotoBox has began to harness the DDN S2A9900 content storage infrastructure to power its cloud.

A bit earlier, DataDirect also announced that its Web Object Scaler (WOS) offering won the New Product Showcase Award at the International Security Conference. Another cloud scaling company had a recent as well – Scality teamed up with CTERA Networks to offer data protection to its customers.