Big data storage firm DataDirect Networks is growing its market share by pursing an aggressive strategy that involves expanding their offering portfolio and strengthening the management team. The company’s most recent update is the announcement of Web Object Scaler 2.0, its object-based cloud storage appliance.

DDN has been around for a decade and has established a major presence across several fields, including supercomputing.  The launch of WOS 2.0, which is designed to store massive amounts of data will help the company become more competitive in the long run. Wikibon’s David Floyer wrote a study about the appliance and dug deeper into the topic in a study published this week.

WOS 2.0 features several big improvements, including scaling 70 percent fast than Amazon S3.  DDN also claims that the latest version of its offering can carry out  55 billion object retrievals per day and 23 billion object writes per day.  The infrastructure, which is targeted at ISPs and large scale as-a-service vendors, can also support up to 20 petabytes spread across hundreds of locations. In addition to these core features, DDN added a platform for billing, and support  to make WOS 2.0 even more attractive to its target audience.

DataDirect has been busy making new additions to its product portfolio, and managed to make several of these just in recent weeks.  In mid-September they unveiled the Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) 10K-X storage appliance, which integrates with NAS Scaler and is designed to power SAN, NAS and parallel file system applications. The emphasis with the appliance is put on boosting scalability and increasing long term RoI.

DataDirect is doing more than just developing new and improved products to stay competitive.  A week ago the company added Bill Louv to its Advisory Board. Louv is the CIO and senior vice president of GlaxoSmithKline’s Core Business Services unit, a Fortune 200 healthcare company.