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DataDirect Networks

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DDN (DataDirect Networks) is the largest privately-held data storage company,[1] and is headquartered in Chatsworth, California, USA.

DataDirect Networks (DDN)
Company typePrivate
IndustryComputer data storage
Founded1998
FounderAlex Bouzari
Paul Bloch
Headquarters
Chatsworth, California
,
United States
Key people
Alex Bouzari (Chairman, CEO)
Paul Bloch (President)
Ian Angelo (CFO)
Sven Oehme (CRO)
ProductsData storage hardware and software
Number of employees
1000 (2021)[2]
Websitewww.ddn.com

Summary

DDN provides storage systems for unstructured data and big data, like AI, analytics and high performance computing (HPC) environments, and is deployed at more than 10,000 customers across enterprise, government and academia sectors. 50% of the world’s largest oil and gas facilities, 40% of leading investment banks, 30% of the automobile and aerospace manufacturers, and 70% of the Top 100 supercomputer customers are powered by DDN’s high-performance data storage products.

Although privately-held, DDN announced that it had achieved record-breaking annual revenue of $400 million and its highest ever profitability in 2020. With an install base of more than 11,000 customers and a loyal global network of resellers and distributors, DDN delivered 52 percent in revenue growth from 2018 to 2020 under its DDN and Tintri brands. 2020 was also the fifth consecutive year of customer expansion, and revenue and profitability growth for DDN.[3]

Founded in 1998, DDN has over 20 years of experience in delivering Data Storage and Intelligent Infrastructure Hardware and Software for AI and Analytics, Multi Cloud Data Management, Enterprise IT Workloads, Government and Academia, and High Performance Computing.

In September 2020, DDN was rated #1 ahead of IBM, Dell EMC, Netapp and HPE in the Intersect360 User Survey for Storage. DDN was rated #1 overall, #1 in technical delivery, #1 in operational execution and #1 in future purchase intentions.[4]

While global pandemic challenges touched the lives of everyone across the globe, DDN’s Intelligent Infrastructure solutions played a key role in helping many of the world’s leading science and research facilities identify, prevent, treat, and pave the path to eradicate COVID-19. DDN’s storage systems at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital[5] and The Sanger Institute, part of the COVID-19 Genomics UK consortium (COG-UK),[6] are just two examples of the many leading research facilities relying on DDN to intelligently process massive amounts of data and deliver significant scientific breakthroughs.

DDN provides storage solutions for applications such as cloud storage services, supercomputing, life sciences and genomics, seismic processing, financial service trade and risk analysis, film production, live television broadcast, manufacturing, and video surveillance.[7]

History

DataDirect Networks, Inc, was formed in 1998 from the merger of two earlier companies, MegaDrive and ImpactData. Alex Bouzari is the company's CEO, chairman and co-founder.[8] Paul Bloch is president and co-founder.[9]

DDN concentrated on building high speed disk storage systems for customers like NASA, eventually delivering storage to five of their systems - Columbia, Schirra, RTJones, Hyperwall-2 and Pleiades by 2008.[10] With the explosion of “Big Data,” Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch realised that a wider "transformative" event was happening in IT, and that HPC-class storage would be needed for high-end analytics and data processing, with lightning-fast IO, and the ability to scale to much higher capacities.[11] Rather than follow a larger market served by mainstream system and storage vendors, Bouzari and Bloch decided to focus exclusively on fast access and high-capacity storage, particularly for unstructured data.[12]

DDN completed a $9.9 million round of venture capital financing in October 2001 with ClearLight Partners LLC and Digital Coast Ventures.[13] In 2002, the company ended its relationship with its venture capital financiers.[14] DDN created DataDirect Networks Federal, LLC, in 2005 - formalizing a team which holds the necessary clearances to support the company's focus on the U.S. government and intelligence community.[15]

In 2008, DDN reported that it had exceeded $100 million in annual revenue and claimed to provide storage systems for 48 of the top 100 supercomputers – with customers including Argonne National Laboratory and the NASA Ames Research Center.[16] In 2011, DDN reported that it had exceeded the $200M annual revenue mark,[17] and was reported to be the world's largest privately held storage company, based on 2009 revenues.[18] In 2013, the company built the storage system for Titan supercomputer.[19] DDN announced in 2016 that it powered 70 percent of the top 500 supercomputers worldwide, up from 67 percent in 2015.[20] In 2017, DDN earned the unicorn status.[21]

In September 2018, DDN purchased the virtualization focused storage company Tintri.[22] In May, 2019, DDN acquired the software defined storage vendor Nexenta. In November 2019, DDN finalized the acquisition of the IntelliFlash division, formerly known as Tegile, from Western Digital Corporation Western Digital.[23] These three acquisitions have been integrated to form an enterprise use case focused business unit under the Tintri Enterprise Business Unit.[24]

In February of 2021, DDN reported revenues of $400M annually and claimed 11,000 customers globally.[25]

Products

The company carries products that provide block, parallel file and object storage. Block storage devices store data in chunks with a maximum fixed length. Parallel file systems spread the data across more than one storage device to provide redundancy and increase performance. Object file systems separate the file metadata information from the rest of the file data and store them in separate devices. The Lustre and Spectrum Scale file systems are examples of parallel file systems that are supported by some of DDN's storage systems. High speed interconnects such as InfiniBand are also supported by some of DDN's storage systems.

The company also provides a storage management tool to configure and monitor DDN storage devices as well as a line of flash storage appliances. For example, DDN's Infinite Memory Engine (IME), a flash-native data cache, allows data to reside next to compute in a shared pool of non-volatile memory (NVM). In 2018, DDN introduced a line of all flash products designed to address AI and analytics workloads in GPU compute environments, known as A3I.[26]

DDN's enterprise business unit supplies solutions for virtualization, with Tintri, software defined unified storage, with Nexenta, and all flash primary unified storage, with IntelliFlash.

Notable awards and achievements

  • 2008: Frost & Sullivan World Disk Storage for Digital Media Market Product Differentiation Innovation Award.[27]
  • 2009: Frost & Sullivan World Disk Storage for Best Practice For Video Surveillance Capture & Archive.[28]
  • 2010: Deloitte's Technology Fast 500™.[29]
  • 2011:Named fastest growing $100M+ computer company by Inc. Magazine, its second year of inclusion on the Inc. 500|5000 list.[30]
  • 2012: Named America's fastest growing $200M+ privately held computer company by Inc. Magazine.[31]
  • 2013: Named fastest growing technology company over $100 million by the Los Angeles Business Journal for the 3rd year in a row.[32]
  • 2014: National Association of Broadcasters' Best of Show Award for its WOS object storage product.[33]
  • 2015: Best in Video Surveillance Data Storage Award for its GS7K appliance at the SIA New Product Showcase.[34]

References

  1. ^ Dave Raffo (September 20, 2011). "DataDirect Networks discusses new system, IBM relationship". Storage Soup. Retrieved October 12, 2016.
  2. ^ "DataDirect Networks". Owler. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
  3. ^ Mellor, Chris (2021-03-02). "Your occasional storage digest with Arcserve, StorageCraft, DDN, and more". Blocks and Files. Retrieved 2021-03-16.
  4. ^ September 24; 2020. "HPC User Ratings Survey: Awareness, Satisfaction, Loyalty Across Processors, Servers, Storage, Cloud". www.intersect360.com. Retrieved 2021-03-16. {{cite web}}: |last2= has numeric name (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ ECA Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences – DDN, retrieved 2021-03-16
  6. ^ Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry) – DDN, retrieved 2021-03-16
  7. ^ Chris Mellor (March 15, 2013). "Private billion buck HPC player? You're going to have to go public - and SOON". The Register. Retrieved October 12, 2016.
  8. ^ "Exclusive Interview of Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks". StorageNewsletter. 2011-01-17. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  9. ^ "Paul Bloch - President & Co-founder at DDN Storage". THE ORG. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  10. ^ "NASA Selects DataDirect Networks' Proven S2A9900 Storage Solution for Pleiades Supercomputer". www.spaceref.com. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  11. ^ Mellor, Chris. "Alex Bouzari on his big data storage firm: First, we got rid of the VCs". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2021-03-16.
  12. ^ "DataDirect Networks: CEO Interview | Network Computing". www.networkcomputing.com. Retrieved 2021-03-16.
  13. ^ "DataDirect Networks Closes Series A Funding Round Of US Dollars 9.9 Million". Press release. DataDirect Networks. October 1, 2001. Retrieved October 12, 2016.
  14. ^ "How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds: Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks". One Million by One Million Blog. October 16, 2011. Retrieved October 12, 2016.
  15. ^ “DataDirect Networks Creates DataDirect Networks Federal, LLC. to Manage Its Significant Expansion in Government Markets ,” PR Newswire, June 6, 2005]
  16. ^ "Company Profile, DataDirect Networoks" (PDF). Taneja Group. September 2008. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 21, 2010.
  17. ^ Baltazar, H.: “DataDirect accelerates sales past $200m plateau, eyes analytics,” 451 Research, July 28, 2011]
  18. ^ Raffo, D.: “DataDirect Networks called No. 1 among private storage vendors,” Storage Soup , Jan 12, 2011]
  19. ^ James Plafke (April 16, 2013). "Titan supercomputer will have world's fastest storage at 1.4TB/s". Extreme Tech. Retrieved October 12, 2016.
  20. ^ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/07/ddn_ups_top_500_supercomputer_showing
  21. ^ http://www.storagenewsletter.com/2017/06/06/storage-unicorn-update-june-2017/
  22. ^ [1]
  23. ^ [2]
  24. ^ Burt, Jeffrey (2019-10-09). "DDN Uses Acquisitions to Grow In The Enterprise". The Next Platform. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  25. ^ Mellor, Chris (2021-03-02). "Your occasional storage digest with Arcserve, StorageCraft, DDN, and more". Blocks and Files. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  26. ^ [3]
  27. ^ “2008 World Disk Storage for Digital Media Market Product Differentiation Innovation Award,” Frost & Sullivan, 2008]
  28. ^ “DataDirect Networks Scalable Storage Technology Recognized by Leading Storage Analyst as a Best Practice for Video Surveillance Capture & Archive,” Market Wired, 2009]
  29. ^ “Surge in Demand for Dynamic Content Infrastructure Propels DataDirect Networks Into Deloitte's Technology Fast 500(TM),” TMCnet, 2010]
  30. ^ “Top Computer Hardware Companies on the 2011 Inc. 5000,” Inc. Magazine, 2011]
  31. ^ “DataDirect Networks is named America's fastest growing $200M+ privately held computer company by Inc. Magazine,” Primeur Magazine, Sept 6, 2012]
  32. ^ “Big Data Leader DataDirect Networks (DDN) Recognized as Fastest Growing Technology Company Over $100 Million on Los Angeles Business Journal’s List for Third Year in a Row,” Backup Review, Jan, 2013]
  33. ^ Grotticelli, M.: “And the Winners of NewBay Media’s 2014 Best of Show Awards Presented by 'Video Edge' Magazine Are ...”, Video Edge, May 9, 2014]
  34. ^ https://www.securityindustry.org/Pages/PressReleases/2015/MorphoWAVE-from-Safran-Morpho-Named-Best-New-Product-at-SIA%E2%80%99s-2015-New-Product-Showcase.aspx
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