DataDirect Networks takes aim at clustered NAS with SFA7700

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has announced a clustered NAS storage platform, the SFA7700 hybrid flash storage appliance. 

The SFA7700 uses DDN’s SFA OS operating system in a dual-controller storage platform. The base system supports up to 60 flash and spinning disk drives for up to 240TB in 4U of rack space, expandable to 396 disks in just 20U and 960TB of capacity.

The SFA770 joins the SFA10K and 12K product range. All play in a similar market, clustered and scale-out NAS, with the high end reaching into high-performance computing. The 10K hardware features the 10K-E, which allows performance-hungry apps to live inside the array.

Multiple instances of SFA7700 hardware can be scaled using DDN’s EXAscaler and GRIDscaler clustering platforms that use either Lustre or GPFS parallel files systems to provide a single datastore of up to Petabyte capacity.

The SFA7700 is the first DDN platform with the Storage Fusion Xcelerator automated tiering feature, which moves data between flash and spinning disk as well as caching hot read and write data.

DDN is attempting to make a move from niche high-performance computing to big data and clustered NAS, providing file access storage from scalable clusters of devices.

DDN aims to compete with clustered NAS suppliers including EMC Isilon, IBM SONAS, HDS BlueArc, NetApp Engenio and Oracle Exadata.

Clustered NAS offers benefits of scalability and flexibility because hardware devices can be scaled out while maintaining common access to single parallel file system that usually runs to billions of files and Petabytes of capacity.

Also, customers can often decide to add more disk capacity or further processing power to speed input-output operations per second (IOPS).