Data Sheet
GRIDScaler Product Family
The New Scale-Out
NAS for Data-Intensive
Enterprises
Diverse Enterprises
Choose Gridscaler For
Faster Results, More
Control And Better TCO
Fannie Mae uses GRIDScaler to drive
450% faster risk analytics, saving
millions of dollars in licensing costs.
Suzuki Motors uses GRIDScaler to
improve design and test workflow
performance 5x while lowering costs.
Biocomplexity Institute uses
GRIDScaler to predict outbreaks and
prevent spread of deadly diseases
like Ebola.
The Investment Banking Arm of
a Large International Bank uses
GRIDScaler to feed 100s of program
trading clients and to reduce key
analytics metrics completion time by
over 80%.
Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) uses
GRIDScaler appliances to accelerate
massive scientific simulations for over
300 researchers across Germany.
University College London (UCL) uses
the single namespace capabilities
of GRIDScaler to harness high
performance and object storage for
massive scale at a low cost.
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Innovative enterprises demand high-performance infrastructures to harness data growth
and provide insight from analytics. The modern data center requires next generation NAS
solutions to keep pace and efficiently deliver high speed data ingest and processing, as
well as long-term data retention and global collaboration. DDN GRIDScaler appliances
scale up or out, leveraging SSD-accelerated, hyper-converged, parallel architectures to
deliver high performance for financial services, manufacturing, energy, life sciences and
web/cloud hosting workloads.
Game-Changing Data Center Performance and Flexibility – Today and Tomorrow
Traditional NAS solutions were deeply customized for data sizes and patterns of 5+
years ago; they are fundamentally bottlenecked by network protocols and dependent on
architectures that have no flexibility to avoid performance and capacity tradeoffs. Low
density nodes with power hungry CPUs each house small numbers of drives, so that scaling
equals sprawl and added complexity of managing many devices. Their fixed architectures
inhibit modification; new technologies are incorporated very slowly—keeping them behind
the innovation curve. Value added features are also licensed per node, astronomically
increasing the cost of scaling.
Converged Multiapplication Data Services
GRIDScaler appliances support modern NFS SMB S3 Hadoop OpenStack
IT initiatives by fulfilling the needs of
I NT ERFAC ES
next-generation big data and traditional
applications which require high-performance, Snap Quotas Replication Cloud Archive Data Encryption
Shots Tiering Reduction
security, reliability, and comprehensive data
management. By leveraging a single platform DATA S ERVI C ES
to serve file (NFS/SMB/PFS), cloud (S3/Swift/
Cinder), and analytics (Hadoop) demands,
GRIDScaler enables customers to greatly
simplify their IT infrastructure. With data
management interfaces to cloud (S3/DDN WOS),
GRIDScaler also makes it easier to consume on-demand storage as a secondary tier. All of
this functionality is provided at a much lower cost than traditional storage arrays.
Hybrid Architecture Improves TCO and Takes Advantage Of New Technologies
Grow a GRIDScaler appliance with all-SSD, SSD-accelerated or all HDD options. Mix and
match the right storage media for your workloads and independently scale out or up to
create the right sized building blocks for your environment with complete cost control.
Start with a small system and grow performance and/or capacity for a data storage
infrastructure that has fewer systems to manage, lower power, heating and cooling
requirements and much a smaller data center footprint.
ddn.com/products/parallel-file-system-gridscaler
DDN Unique Software-Defined Capabilities Deliver Optimal Utilization
SFA Declustered RAID (DCR) significantly improves rebuild performance by
increasing the pool of disks which participate in backing a redundancy group,
allowing reading and writing to many times the RAID member count (eg 10 disks
HDD for SSD for Speed
in 8+2). DCR allows for the striping of data across a much larger set of physical Capacity & Reliability
disks than was previously available in traditional RAID and greatly increasing the
Up to 63GB/s Up to 693GB/s
parallelism of drive rebuilds. It is this parallel process that enables rebuilds to run
>12PB HDD >6PB SSD
much faster than traditional RAID. In addition to decreasing recovery times, DCR
IN 1 RACK
can also result in increased storage efficiency and higher IOPs performance.

2 COMPUTE
CONTROLLERS CONNECTIVITY
• 16x EDR ports
• 4x 18-Core lntel CPUs
• 16x 40/100 GbE
• 768GB DDR4 Memory
• I8x Intel Omni-Path
• Redundant Power

CONVERGED
• Parallel File System
• 12 Gb SAS Network

EXPANSION • Compute

• 72 x 12Gb/s SAS 2.5” slots

(48 x PCIe NVMe)
• 4 x 480GB SATA SSD System Drives
• 4 x 480GB SATA SSD App Drives
• Multi-Vendor Drive Sourcing EXPANSION: SS9012 GRIDScaler appliances combine the accessibility of network data protocols
• Add 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10 with the industry’s fastest and densest embedded storage solutions for 10-30x
or 20 Enclosures
higher performance and 2-6x higher capacity per data center rack U.
• 90 Drives Each

Technical Specifications

GS200NVX® GS400NVX® GS7990X® GS18KX®

Protocols NFS v3, CIFS SMB 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1, Linux and Windows Parallel FS Clients

Metadata All GRIDScaler appliances feature distributed metadata

File Servers Per Base Enclosure All GRIDScaler appliances feature 4 NSDs

Supported Raid Levels RAID 1/5/6

Up to 256 Snapshots per Volume – policy driven, Snapshot Rollback, DirectProtect & DirectProtect+,
Data Protection Online and Automatic Storage Rebalancing, High Speed Defragmentation
Replication Synchronous Data and Metadata, Asynchronous using WOS

Capacity Optimization Policy-Driven Background File Compression

Quotas (users, groups, file sets), Optional DDN Insight centralized configuration and monitoring solution,
Data and System Management Optimized backup, Multi-site data sharing and disaster recovery, Hybrid cloud storage capability
Custom Configurations Custom configurations of GRIDScaler, including configurations with external NSDs are available

About
DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world’s leading big data storage supplier to data- ©2019 DataDirect Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. DataDirect Networks, the DDN Logo,
GRIDScaler, GS200NVX, GS400NVX, GS18KX, and GS7990X are trademarks of DataDirect
intensive, global organizations. DDN has designed, developed, deployed, and optimized Networks. Other Names and Brands May Be Claimed as the Property of Others.
systems, software, and solutions that enable enterprises, service providers, research v13 (10/19)
facilities, and government agencies to generate more value and to accelerate time to
insight from their data and information, on premise and in the cloud.

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