DDN reaches $400M in 2020

DDN, the HPC storage leader for a few decades, confirms its position of largest storage vendor with the $400 million annual revenue bar. The company who positions itself as a key player in AI and multi-cloud has extended its market coverage with enterprise offering.

This is just a confirmation but a significant one, DDN is just the largest private storage vendor. All other larger vendors are public.

Founded in 1998 following a merge between MegaDrive Systems and ImpactData, the company is historically known to be the leader in HPC storage and more globally for scientific and technical environments.

Famous for its super fast block storage array, we all remember S2A and later SFA, the team recognized rapidly the need to provide also optimized high performance file storage based on Lustre and IBM GPFS parallel file systems. EXAScaler and GRIDScaler were born and have extended the reputation of the company. Later DDN iterated object storage first as Bucket FS in 2008 to become WOS in 2009. Adding all these flavors qualified DDN as a U3 player developing Unified, Universal and Ubiquitous solutions.

And the end-to-end portfolio with a real BFO - block, file and object - approach explains DDN's success. Products are globally used by the top research centers, universities and enterprises having serious storage challenges.

In the trajectory of the company, a few years ago, one episode some people have in mind revealed a management mistake that has weakened the business but it was rapidly solved by Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch. This episode has marked a delay in the trajectory caused by the same person who almost destroyed 2 other companies burning tons of money for nothing as Dire Straits says. But it's history we just expect that this won't happen again, 3 times is enough, so please never recruit this person again and especially gives him management responsability and authority, he will kill your company.

As a market opportunity, HCI was attractive and DDN decided to make a try with its Wolfcreek product but its adoption didn't reach original expectations.

The management recognized for quite long time that the file system service really structures storage and secures the business relation between the vendor and users. IBM GPFS now Spectrum Scale available as GRIDScaler changed its license agreement and accelerated DDN's decision to "own" its file system. They then acquired Whamcloud, the Intel Lustre business division that is now exclusively promoted by the company with the last iteration ExaScaler 5. Whamcloud was a company founded by Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch.

IO performance is almost synonymous of DDN and we have to mention IME - Infinite Memory Engine - its burst buffer based on NVM.

We also must mention that the team has jumped into AI as a natural fit and extension for its fast file storage line being a read intensive type of workload. They develop A3I as an integrated solution with NVidia DGX systems and iterates with SuperPod in 2020. DDN is also one of the rare vendor that officially partners with Nvidia for GPD Direct Storage. The 2 others are VAST Data and WekaIO and we see some interesting results from Pavilion Data.

HPC has entered the enterprise for specific use cases and it was a segment globally ignored by DDN leaving millions to others. This triggered a real strategy illustrated by three acquisitions, we should say bargains. Tintri, Nexenta and IntelliFlash, the latter coming from WDC following the acquisition of Tegile Systems in 2017. WDC tried to build a system business that finally never took off, the company also sold ActiveScale to Quantum early 2020, the object storage product came from Amplidata acquisition by HGST, WDC subsidiary, in 2015.

And it's a winning idea as adoption is really good. DDN jas also adopted a new logo to indicate the start of a new era. Tintri, as a well respected brand, was kept as the enterprise business entity promoting VMstore and the rest. IntelliFlash General File Services is an example of integration of NAS between Nexenta and IntelliFlash. Recent VMstore iteration towards database is a clever move surfing on the success of VMstore for VM, it makes sense.

These various product facts and market trends confirm once again the convergence of HPC and enterprise with features coming from each side to feed products on the other side. And simply it means a real push of ExaScaler with enterprise features to enterprises. In other words when the demand is related to unstructured data the answer is ExaScaler and for structured one it's IntelliFlash.

DDN continues to play a dual game with commercial and open source software.

For two years in a row, Coldago Research elects DDN as a leader in file storage for HPC and enterprises.

Before concluding, we have to mention DDN's cloud strategy. It is addressed as well as a real multicloud offering available on AWS, Azure, GCP and on-premise of course. GCP recommends ExaScaler for HPC storage needs.

in 2021, we expect to see VMstore iteration around new databases like Oracle, some cloud mobility especially for AWS and new NVMe flavors. IntelliFlash should also received a major refresh related to security and data protection on any kind of product instance. And we think the team is working on something big again very U3 oriented...

We can't say it's just the beginning but for sure DDN has entered into a new era.