Web Content
Slide, Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, and AOL rely on S2A Extreme Storage for the scalability, performance, density, and power efficiency they need to provide a sticky experience that will keep their hundreds of millions of users coming back.
As leading industry analyst Steve Duplessie of the Enterprise Strategy Group said "Now the wave of Web 2.0 is upon us, a natural fit for DDN, the company is becoming a high-performance back-end component of the Web 2.0 world--Shutterfly, Slide & Kodak Gallery--all have totally unpredictable growth characteristics".
The web usage model has changed over the last few years from one in which content was delivered to and consumed by users to one in which much of the content is generated by users, uploaded to content depots, and shared through extensive social networks. This usage model change leads to radically different requirements for storage: delivering consistent performance in the face of unpredictable user access patterns and media (video, audio, images), maintaining 24/7 availability, growing capacity within a small footprint, and enhancing power efficiency.
The S2A Extreme Storage platform's superior performance, scaling, and volumetric density make it ideal as the data infrastructure backbone for the most content-intensive companies, handling the storing and serving of online video, audio and image files. DDN's innovative S2A technology enables web content providers to reduce the overhead associated with data storage infrastructure while also enabling the long- term online storage of rich content. All of these vast capabilities were recognized recently by the leading analysts at Frost & Sullivan, which awarded DDN with the Digital Media Storage Innovation of the Year.
Highlights
- Delivers consistent high performance for large content files
- Enhances user productivity and experience
- Enables users to more quickly and reliably share favorite videos, music and photos with each other
- Enables 24/7 availability
- Reduces storage footprint and power requirements
Industry-Leading Throughput
With throughput in excess of 240GB/s and no disk write performance penalty, the S2A platform is able to deliver consistent high performance even at peak demands. As the core operating system of the S2A, DirectOS features the real-time DirectRAID Engine. This purpose-built system leverages high-speed FPGA parity calculation accelerators to deliver optimum large file data throughput and write performance that is equal to the S2A's read performance.
Protects High Capacity SATA Storage
Data protection technology enables enterprise-caliber data availability while delivering full system performance -- making SATA disk drives a truly viable option for business-critical storage applications. SATAssure features real-time parity checking for both read and write operations as well as partial drive rebuild capability, especially important for large capacity SATA disk drives, to ensure optimum data availability levels. Configured in RAID 6 8+2 parity sets, this no-compromise double-disk failure protection is essential for mission-critical environments requiring cost-effective SATA technology.
Ideal for Space, Power, Cooling Constrained Data Centers
Superior high-density storage array configurations from DDN hold as many as 1,200 drives in two racks (up to 75TB/ft2). With high-density S2A SATA configurations, environmental infrastructure costs are reduced without compromising performance or data availability. Other storage systems occupy significantly more data center space, consume more power and limit your scalability at a time when your user base is experiencing explosive growth.
The analysts at Wikibon summed it up well: "CTO's looking to develop high bandwidth applications for emerging Web 2.0 opportunities should investigate the DDN technology...DDN is leading this space with a combination of intense focus, years of R&D, substantial intellectual property and an impressive customer base."