DDN confirms the convergence of HPC and enterprise storage

DDN, the largest private storage vendor, just participated for the 5th time to The IT Press Tour. Each time the team shared secure interesting news about the company and its products lines. As you know DDN operates with 2 business units addressing the technical and scientific world with its "At Scale" line essentially what we know as HPC. And the second one targeting the enterprise with Tintri brand with historically Tintri, Nexenta and Tegile IntelliFlash products acquired in 2018 and 2019 for the 2 latter.

Recognized as the obvious leader in HPC storage, DDN shipped 10+EB since its inception which means a lot and delivers approximately $600M annual revenue confirming as well its unicorn status.

The company has been also elected as a leader in the annual file storage Map 2020 by Coldago Research. You can access the report here.

Let's dig first in the "At Scale" business. The first key strategic decision taken a few years ago now is the abandon of IBM Spectrum Scale or GPFS in favor of Lustre, the open source distributed file storage software. DDN has acquired Whamcloud in 2018, the Intel business unit dedicated to HPC file Storage absorbed by Intel in 2012. In 2018, DDN sold probably 50/50 between Lustre-based storage named ExaScaler and GPFS-based named GRIDScaler but in 2020, 4 ExaScalers are sold vs. 1 other product representing the rest of the HPC product line. This is just impressive. During the recent months the product team has delivered a set of key things paramount for DDN market success: A3I, dataFlow and of course ExaScaler 5th generation.

AI is closer to HPC than we think and it triggers some needs in I/O, capacity and bandwidth requirements. It explains why ExaScaler is a good fit but also why some additions were added to the product:

• Global snapshot, a key feature super tough to achieve in a large distributed storage with many data servers,
• NAS and S3 protocols from the same namespace,
• Mixed storage media with intelligent data placement,
• Plus multi-tenancy and security features.

DDN occupies a unique position in the market explaining why its collaboration with Nvidia shows strong integration.

DDN ExaScaler supports real multi-cloud experiences being available on-remise but also on AWS, Azure and GCP. Dashboards, GUI, realtime monitoring and analytics made its product really compelling this year illustrated by a good traction.

At the same time, Exa5 is positioned as the unstructured product if choice with a very comprehensive in the file and object side from an access method perspective.

This convergence I affirmed for several years now is what DDN finally promoted as well. Enterprises needs HPC and HPC considers enterprise techniques as well, being reciprocally beneficial.

DDN also develops a new multi-cloud data services infrastructure that should be available in June when The IT Press tour will visit again DDN in California. Perfect for us.