DataDirect Networks (DDN) today took the wraps off the latest version of its Web Object Scaler (WOS) and accompanying storage appliance. This time around, instead of boasting about the platform’s ability to handle billions of reads/writes, the Chatsworth, Calif.-based technology company is emphasizing its “trillion-file scalability.”

With enterprise Big Data applications and cloud-enabled workloads squarely in his company’s crosshairs, Jean-Luc Chatelain, executive vice president of Strategy and Technology for DDN, detailed the advantages of the new WOS 3.0 storage software and the WOS7000 Object Storage Appliance, which goes on sale this month.

He said in statement that the “latest version of WOS object storage technology conquers issues of speed and scale to provide rapid time to insight, helping our customers grow their businesses and take advantage of the new era of cloud computing.” Another benefit: cost savings.

DDN claims that its linearly-scalable, global storage platform can cut storage costs by over 50 percent compared to the services offered by “pay-as-you-go” public cloud storage providers. The company also claims a lead in the sheer amount of storage its platform can handle.

According to DDN, its technology sidesteps the scalability restraints imposed by conventional file storage setups “by enabling the federation of WOS clusters of up to 983 petabytes and 32 trillion unique objects.” Such an implementation requires 32 federated WOS clusters, each of which supports up to 1 trillion objects and is made up of 256 WOS object storage servers.

In terms of delivering storage services, the platform can retrieve 256 million objects per second with sub-50 millisecond latency and achieve throughput performance of 10 terabytes per second. DDN asserts that its platform can deliver over a 200x performance increase “over the current peak performance of even the largest public cloud storage services.”

Software enhancements include integration with the company’s GRIDScaler parallel file storage system that enables both object storage and file storage on a single platform. WOS 3.0 also includes support for parallel search of user-defined metadata across a WOS cloud comprised of up to 8,000 cluster nodes. Data protection is provided by erasure coding and synchronous/asynchronous replication capabilities that can be used individually or in tandem.

A fully populated rack of preconfigured WOS 3.0-powered WOS7000 appliances offers 2.5 PB of storage capacity. New hardware improvements provide power and cooling savings over previous generations.

DDN’s approach could help enterprises turn their Big Data from a storage management headache into a business-boosting resource, according to ESG senior analyst Terri McClure. The company’s tech “is designed to help users deal with the problem of scalability and exponential growth of unstructured data, while also offering the opportunity to harness the value of that data with integrated search, collaboration and DR capabilities,” she said in a statement.