DataDirect Networks, the privately-held maker of high-performance storage systems, has released an update to its Web Object Scaler (WOS) software and introduced a new appliance built for use in large-scale data archives. The product updates address rapidly growing enterprise demand for cost-effective capacity, which DDN chief marketing officer Jeff Denworth says has catapulted his firm into the center of some of the hottest trends in IT.

“That convergence of HPC [high-performance computing] and analytics or web-scale content delivery and processing is actually happening at DDN,” Denworth told SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante in a 2013 interview on theCUBE. “We’re seeing a ton of really, really exciting projects where you’re talking about the petabyte club, I would say that more our customers are starting to talk in terms of exabytes, so we’re closing fractional exabyte orders today.”

WOS 360, as the latest release of the company’s object storage platform is branded, introduces a feature called Global ObjectAssure that provides distributed erasure coding for geographically dispersed deployments. It’s designed for use cases that require extensive data protection and low network latency, notably archiving, and complements the existing replication and local copy capabilities of the solution.

The upgrade is joined by WOS 7000 Archive Node, a low-cost object storage appliance that can hold as many as 60 4-terabyte SAS drives for a total of 240 terabytes and packs up to 64 gigabytes of memory. The 4U chassis includes a 60-slot tray with support for 10 and 20 GbE plus InfiniBand, and as many as 256 units can be included in a cluster.

DDN announced these latest additions to its portfolio in conjunction with a new application integration program called WOS Connect that provides vendors with the resources they need to incorporate the platform into their solutions.