Tom Leyden, Director of Product Marketing with DataDirectNetworks, began his presentation for the Open Compute Summit with an arresting statement: “I am here to explain to you how a proprietary software vendor can help the Open Compute community be more efficient in building scale-out object storage, and how we leverage OCP to make our scale-out storage better, more efficient and easier to use for our customers.”

Leyden started with a couple of details regarding DataDirectNetworks.

“DDN has been around for about 15 years. We are a California-based company, but we are active worldwide. Our history is mostly HPC. Eight out of ten super computers are  powered by DDN storage so we have some experience in scalability and performance, even beyond what is used today in web scale-out applications.”

DDN is a leader in massively scalable platforms and solutions for Big Data and cloud applications.

“The DDN product portfolio is not all about object storage but it will soon be,” forecasted Leyden. We have a series of Block & File scale-out Storage platforms, we have Analytics Infrastructures and we understood over the past few years that the future is object storage, especially for unstructured data.

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• A long history of object storage

WOS was first designed in 2008, when DDN was one of the first companies to understand that the feature of unstructured data to leverage to build scale-out object storage platforms was that “more than 80 percent of the unstructured data being generated will never be changed again,” explained Leyden. “It’s mostly immutable data.”

DDN has a lot experience building scale-out file system storage; they learned that, when you scale out file systems, your TCO goes up. The process cannot be stopped. Because of the complexity of scaling out file systems, when you have to go into the tens and hundreds of petabytes towards the exabytes, you cannot avoid the TCO going up.

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“Because we recognize that most of the unstructured data is immutable, we figured out that the filing system was mostly there for the lock-in mechanisms, for people to collaborate on the same data sets without making that data corrupt by collaborating on it at the same time. If that data is never changed, we don’t need those lock-in mechanisms. That is the key value of WOS object storage: it’s the only platform that doesn’t have any file system or lock-in anywhere in the architecture. It’s the purest object storage product on the market,” swears Leyden. “The application talks directly to the object on the disk level, without any file system in between.”

Initially the core features of WOS were:

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• Scalability
• Performance
• Reliability

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Later on they added:

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• Data protection mechanisms
• Vertical search technology

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Debunking the myth of slow object storage

“We are the only object storage platform that stores the metadata in the back-end, with the objects, in what we call a ‘key value store’. As we scale out our platform into the hundreds of petabytes, our customers can still search that data in a very efficient way,” promises Leyden.

He went on to proudly detail the HDD performance: “Our object storage is being used in HPC by companies who run the biggest supercomputers; that is how scalable, efficient and fast we can make object storage.”

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• What to demand from object storage

In an earlier presentation from Facebook, Leyden heard that the two main requirements of infrastructure according to them were flexibility and efficiency.

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When DDN designed WOS, they looked at five key requirements:

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• Efficiency
• Scalability
• Accessibility
• Reliability
• Performance

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“We aim to allow our customers to optimize for any choice of requirements that is important for them. That is flexibility,” Leyden emphasized.

The DDN | WOS object storage software represents scale-out object storage for cloud and Big Data.

WOS meets all object storage requirements:

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• Scales seamlessly for # objects, EB capacity and distributed sites
• Wide choice of protocols, rich application ecosystem
• Highest efficiency: low overhead, no bandwidth abuse, lowest management cost
• Provides all-round data protection
• Provides high performance for throughput, IOPS, and low latency
• No trade-offs, no compromises

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Scaling WOS

“The cool thing about WOS is that you can build your object storage cloud with just one storage node,” said Leyden, telling the audience about one of their customers who thanked them three months ago for only taking 24 minutes to deploy a WOS storage cloud.

DDN | Open Compute Project

“We are happy to be part of the OCP community and through our partnership with Hyve, we are already an OCP compliant solution. This partnership adds to the flexibility. Customers can still choose to buy integrated DDN hardware but with Hyve they have the opportunity to go for smaller nodes, for higher density, for more compute power,” explained Leyden. “We are leveraging OCP, enabling the OCP community to build more scalable and more efficient storage platforms.

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• The integrated Hyve and DDN solution

“The cool thing about having proprietary software that is pre-integrated with OCP hardware is that it allows you to leverage all the benefits of OCP hardware,” said Leyden. “If you choose to put an open source technology on that hardware, you have to do all the integration yourself, losing a lot of the benefits of that OCP hardware platform.”

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• Object storage cost breakdown

“A TCO study revealed that public cloud is clearly the most expensive solution. If you compare open source software solutions to pre-integrated proprietary software and OCP hardware, you’ll find that, in the end, your TCO is a lot lower than with an open source solution,” explained Leyden.

“The choice of object storage platform should not be a pure TCO cost, thinks Leyden. “As far as accessibility is concerned, choosing proprietary software can actually be more open than open source, because we provide a wide range of protocols; we support application specific protocols and file system gateways.”

“I think it’s pretty clear that, if you need performance, proprietary software is still the way to go,” concluded Leyden.