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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 November 2020, DDN announced they had won the business for University of Florida's new AI SuperComputer. Erik Deumens, director of information technology, UF said at the time, “Advancing our efforts to integrate AI across curriculum, improve research and empower students, as well as drive breakthroughs and discoveries are highly dependent on productive computing and efficient data systems, like those from DDN. We have a history of success with DDN storage systems powering our HPC computing and anticipate similar high productivity for our AI workloads."

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

Corporate

DDN operates in 20 countries worldwide with customers in over 50 countries.[26] Following acquisitions in 2018 and 2019, the company has around 1,000 employees and has been awarded more than 150 patents. Between 2018 and 2020, DDN increased its R&D budget by 65%, with approximately two-thirds of staff in R&D and customer-facing technical roles.[27]

Products

DDN is the leading provider of Intelligent Infrastructure products which bring simplicity, flexibility and efficiency for markets that are increasingly data-driven.[28] As IT operations have gotten more complex and the amount of available data continues to increase, DDN and its Tintri Enterprise Business unit have progressively focused on automation and analytics.[29] DDN has rounded out its portfolio through acquisition and internal development to address the full complement of storage and data management needs with AI enablement and monitoring, cloud native deployments, and optimizations for all environments and technologies including AI, analytics, GPUs, CPUs, networking, data center infrastructure, virtualized environments, cloud and containers.[30]

As the leader in Intelligent Infrastructure DDN delivers products that are tailor made for the changing environments many data driven companies find themselves in relative to explosive data growth.[31] Managing this growth is accomplished with systems that deliver simple scalability of performance and capacity along with insight that drives decision making and planning all simplified through automation and continuous optimization. DDN's leadership in at-scale deployments, including storage for the largest supercomputer in the world[32] along with automation capabilities it acquired with Tintri deliver the increased simplicity needed to gain real-time acceleration of business insight.

The realities created by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 along with the emergence of AI as a key technology for deriving business value has pushed organizations to seek out intelligent infrastructure.[33]

The company carries products that provide data management, NAS, block, parallel file and object storage.

DDN At-Scale

DDN’s At-Scale business unit primarily serves the AI and Analytics, Multi Cloud, Enterprise At Scale, Financial Services, Healthcare, Energy, Manufacturing, Government, Academia and High Performance Computing markets.

A3I Storage Solutions - Packaged storage solutions optimized to accelerate machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads which need to be closely coupled to GPU compute systems. For example, to support NVIDIA solutions such as NVIDIA DGXTM SuperPOD and NVIDIA DGXTM A100.[34] DDN is currently the only storage supplier with a reference architecture for the SuperPOD.[35]

EXAScaler Filesystem - Exa5 is the latest release of the EXAScaler parallel filesystem which is optimized for high-throughput, low-latency and massive concurrency and scale. It has a shared parallel architecture that allows for linear scaling and concurrent access from AI and HPC compute systems.[36] It features both appliance deployment models and cloud native deployment for hybrid and cloud AI and analytics workloads, like SAS GRID.[37]

SFA - The SFA platforms are the hardware platforms that underly the DDN file systems solutions. They are available as a block device or appliances running DDN’s filesystems in both EXAScaler and A3I configurations.[38]

DataFlow - Software to automate synchronization, backup, archival and migration of large-scale datasets. DataFlow is used for transferring data between cloud and data centers to support AI and HPC workflows and data archiving.[39]

DDN Insight - A scalable monitoring solution to monitor DDN storage systems and the networks, compute systems and workloads running on them.[40]

Tintri

DDN's Tintri Enterprise business unit supplies intelligent storage infrastructure solutions for enterprise use cases and workloads. Tintri products are aimed at virtualization (Tintri VMstore), software defined unified storage (Tintri NexentaStor), and all flash primary unified storage (Tintri IntelliFlash).

Tintri VMStore - Enterprise storage and virtualization appliances with NVMe, SAS and hybrid storage options. Automated management, QoS and analytics. Typically used for virtualized enterprise applications, VDI, databases and VMware Containers.[41]

Intelliflash - IOPs-intensive and low-latency storage with NVMe and hybrid options for mission-critical applications such as image recognition, transaction processing and media streaming. Also suitable for mixed workloads including, with support for both file- and block filesystem protocols. Support for automation, analytic insights and backup to cloud storage.[42]

NexentaStor - Software-Defined Storage (SDS) – software-only storage solutions, suitable for deploying on open hardware servers to support telecoms and cloud services, supporting object-, file-, and block filesystem protocols.[43]


Typical Deployments

DDN’s At Scale storage solutions are typically deployed for applications which need low latency, high capacity and sustained throughput. In 2019, IDC estimated the worldwide storage market at approximately $28.7B[44], while Intersect360 estimated the market for high-performance storage at approximately $5.8B[45]. Typical deployments include:

AI and Deep Learning AI compute systems, typically consisting of arrays of GPUs, require high-bandwidth parallel access to very large volumes of unstructured data, to accelerate ingest, classification, machine learning and inference. DDN and NVIDIA have published reference architectures for AI and Deep Learning at scale.[46]
Enterprise and Cloud at Scale Consolidation and orchestration of enterprise storage at scale, often looking to consolidate critical systems such as enterprise analytics, filesystems, virtual desktops, archiving and data management into a unified data platform, both in datacenters and the cloud.
Financial Services Analysis and decision making for high-frequency trading, typically requiring very low latency access to real-time trading records. 40% of leading global investment banks use DDN storage for high-speed analytics.
Life Sciences and Pharmaceuticals Analysis of clinical data such as imaging for automated diagnosis and predicting patient outcomes, and for bioinformatics such as molecular modeling, protein folding and genomic analysis. The Sanger Institute has one of the largest sequencing centers in the world, and runs genome analysis for COG-UK on DDN’s EXAScaler high performance storage systems.[47]
Autonomous Systems Data acquisition, Deep Learning, Machine Learning and inference to support self-governing systems, such as autonomous cars, boats, aircraft and manufacturing processes.
Imaging and Natural Language Processing Real-time analysis and classification of visual and audio data for video surveillance, industrial, environmental and aerospace applications.
Federal, Research & Academia National supercomputing resources for strategic research and development, including climate sciences, energy research, cosmology, and fundamental sciences. For example, the Fugaku supercomputer is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan.
HPC High-performance computing systems, used for analytics, simulation and modelling, such as computational fluid dynamics or research sciences. Examples include energy, aerospace and engineering. In September 2020, was rated #1 overall in the Intersect360 User Survey for HPC Storage.[48]

Notable awards and achievements

  • 2008: Frost & Sullivan World Disk Storage for Digital Media Market Product Differentiation Innovation Award.[49]
  • 2009: Frost & Sullivan World Disk Storage for Best Practice For Video Surveillance Capture & Archive.[50]
  • 2010: Deloitte's Technology Fast 500™.[51]
  • 2011:Named fastest growing $100M+ computer company by Inc. Magazine, its second year of inclusion on the Inc. 500|5000 list.[52]
  • 2012: Named America's fastest growing $200M+ privately held computer company by Inc. Magazine.[53]
  • 2013: Named fastest growing technology company over $100 million by the Los Angeles Business Journal for the 3rd year in a row.[54]
  • 2014: National Association of Broadcasters' Best of Show Award for its WOS object storage product.[55]
  • 2015: Best in Video Surveillance Data Storage Award for its GS7K appliance at the SIA New Product Showcase.[56]
  • 2019: IDC noted that DDN was the fastest growing all flash array vendor.[57]

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. ^ "About Us - DDN.com". DDN.com. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  27. ^ Alex Bouzari: Delivering Intelligent Technology and Infrastructure for a Changing World, retrieved 2021-03-17
  28. ^ icomm (2021-03-12). "Tintri drives intelligent infrastructure so you can get ready to 'let go of the wheel'". ITWeb. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  29. ^ Mellor, Chris (2020-12-10). "DDN reveals VMstore and Intelliflash updates for 2021". Blocks and Files. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  30. ^ Mellor, Chris (2020-12-10). "DDN reveals VMstore and Intelliflash updates for 2021". Blocks and Files. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  31. ^ "Total data volume worldwide 2010-2024". Statista. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
  32. ^ "DDN Installs 30 SFA18K Series Storage Hardware Devices as Second-Tier Storage". AiThority. 2020-11-17. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
  33. ^ "COVID-19 digital transformation & technology | McKinsey". www.mckinsey.com. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
  34. ^ "Integrated and automated management is a key component to handling data-centric growth". EnterpriseAI. 2019-12-30. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  35. ^ "What's New in Deep Learning & Artificial Intelligence from NVIDIA". NVIDIA. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
  36. ^ Robinson, Daniel (2018-06-27). "DDN Breathes New Life Into Lustre File System". The Next Platform. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  37. ^ "EXAScaler Cloud by DDN: A shared file system to use with SAS Grid on MS Azure". communities.sas.com. 2021-01-26. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
  38. ^ "DataDirect Unveiled Storage Fusion Architecture 10K-X". StorageNewsletter. 2011-09-20. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  39. ^ Nicolas, Philippe. "DataFlow, a collaboration between DDN Storage and Atempo". Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  40. ^ "DDN Announces New Solutions and Next Generation Monitoring Tools". HPCwire. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  41. ^ "DDN Completes $60 Million Tintri Acquisition and Enters Enterprise Virtualization Market". HPCwire. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  42. ^ "Tintri IntelliFlash – Product Brief". Evaluator Group. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  43. ^ Feldman, Michael (2019-05-06). "DDN Adds Nexenta to Expanding Storage Empire". The Next Platform. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  44. ^ "Worldwide and U.S. External Enterprise Storage Systems Forecast Update, 2020–2024". IDC: The premier global market intelligence company. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
  45. ^ July 24; 2020. "Worldwide HPC 2019 Total Market Model: Storage Revenue Shares". www.intersect360.com. Retrieved 2021-03-23. {{cite web}}: |last2= has numeric name (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  46. ^ "What's New in Deep Learning & Artificial Intelligence from NVIDIA". NVIDIA. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
  47. ^ "DDN Wins Multiple 2020 HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards". HPCwire. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
  48. ^ September 24; 2020. "HPC User Ratings Survey: Awareness, Satisfaction, Loyalty Across Processors, Servers, Storage, Cloud". www.intersect360.com. Retrieved 2021-03-23. {{cite web}}: |last2= has numeric name (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  49. ^ “2008 World Disk Storage for Digital Media Market Product Differentiation Innovation Award,” Frost & Sullivan, 2008]
  50. ^ “DataDirect Networks Scalable Storage Technology Recognized by Leading Storage Analyst as a Best Practice for Video Surveillance Capture & Archive,” Market Wired, 2009]
  51. ^ “Surge in Demand for Dynamic Content Infrastructure Propels DataDirect Networks Into Deloitte's Technology Fast 500(TM),” TMCnet, 2010]
  52. ^ “Top Computer Hardware Companies on the 2011 Inc. 5000,” Inc. Magazine, 2011]
  53. ^ “DataDirect Networks is named America's fastest growing $200M+ privately held computer company by Inc. Magazine,” Primeur Magazine, Sept 6, 2012]
  54. ^ “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]
  55. ^ 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]
  56. ^ 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
  57. ^ Moore, Ben. "IDC names DDN fastest-growing all-flash array vendor". datacenternews.us. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
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