DataDirect Networks (DDN) claims to have had a strong fiscal 2013, in large measure because of increased demand for storage and high performance computing (HPC).
DDN has been in the HPC space for over 15 years, and has been steadily increasing its product portfolio. And despite all those years in HPC, DDN believes that last year was a bit of a tipping point where the adoption of HPC, and the storage to support it accelerated greatly.
“With momentum across all our business and technology lines, we saw strength exiting 2013, particularly in our commercial business. Now looking into 2014, our product roadmap is more targeted than ever as we remain laser focused on signing customers with webscale applications aligned with our HPC product line and WOS offerings. DDN is building momentum as more enterprise customers hit the NAS-wall; we're winning business away from competition who simply cannot compete on our levels of scale, performance and TCO; and, we're setting the stage for increased adoption of our cloud and object storage technology among the world's leading service provider and data center networks, positioning DDN for competitive differentiation and long-term growth,” said Alex Bouzari, DDN CEO.
The company claims that in the last half of last year, bookings went up 31 percent, and the company landed 122 new customers. That means DDN now has over 1,100 customers representing over 500PB of storage. New clients include BP, Life Technologies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Suzuki and University of Bonn.
Last year DDN also launched several technical initiatives including the Hadoop and Big Data Storage: Analytics Platform that came out in February. This is actually a Big Data appliance that makes it easier to deploy Apache Hadoop and at the same time achieve deeper analytics.
In September, DDN launched Object Storage: WOS Technology. “WOS 3.0 and WOS 7000 appliance are leading the cloud revolution, delivering trillion-file scalability and 200x performance increases over previous generations. With multiple customer installs now at over 10PB and DDN's largest WOS install at 70-80 billion objects, DDN continues to achieve significant marquee brand wins,” the company said.
Gartner Says…
DDN isn’t just blowing its own horn, but has Gartner tooting along as well. Last March, DDN was put in the ‘challengers’ quadrant in the 2013 Gartner 'Magic Quadrant for General Purpose Disk Arrays' report.
“Improvements in scalability, availability, performance and functionality of midrange storage systems have blurred the boundaries between network-attached, midrange and high-end storage systems,” Gartner said.
Challengers, according to Gartner, are “…executing well enough to be a serious threat to vendors in the Leaders quadrant. They have strong products, as well as sufficient credible market position and resources to sustain continued growth. Financial viability is not an issue for vendors in the Challengers quadrant, but they lack the size and influence of vendors in the Leaders quadrant.”
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
