DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a privately-held data storage company, and is headquartered in

Chatsworth, California Chatsworth is a suburban neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles, California, in the San Fernando Valley. The area was home to Native Americans, some of whom left caves containing rock art. Chatsworth was explored and colonized by the Spanish be ...

, USA.

Summary

DDN provides storage systems for

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, num ...

and

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

, like AI, analytics and high performance computing (HPC) environments, in enterprise, government and academia sectors. Although privately-held, DDN announced that it had achieved annual revenue of $400 million and its highest profitability in 2020. With more than 11,000 customers and a network of resellers and distributors, DDN delivered 52 percent in revenue growth from 2018 to 2020. 2020 was also the fifth consecutive year of customer expansion, and revenue and profitability growth for DDN. DDN provides storage for applications such as

cloud storage Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on "the cloud". The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is t ...

services,

supercomputing A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

life sciences This list of life sciences comprises the branches of science that involve the scientific study of life – such as microorganisms, plants, and animals including human beings. This science is one of the two major branches of natural science, the ...

and

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...

, seismic processing, financial service trade and risk analysis, film production, live television broadcast, manufacturing, and video surveillance.

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. Paul Bloch is president and co-founder. 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 The Pleiades (), also known as The Seven Sisters, Messier 45 and other names by different cultures, is an asterism and an open star cluster containing middle-aged, hot B-type stars in the north-west of the constellation Taurus. At a distance of ...

by 2008. With the explosion of “

Big Data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

,” 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. 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. DDN completed a $9.9 million round of

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

financing in October 2001 with ClearLight Partners LLC and Digital Coast Ventures. In 2002, the company ended its relationship with its venture capital financiers. 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. 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 Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory operated by University of Chicago, UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facil ...

and the

NASA Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

. In 2011, DDN reported that it had exceeded the $200M annual revenue mark, and was reported to be the world's largest privately held storage company, based on 2009 revenues. In 2013, the company built the storage system for Titan supercomputer. DDN announced in 2016 that it powered 70 percent of the top 500 supercomputers, up from 67 percent in 2015. In 2017, DDN earned the

unicorn The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead. In European literature and art, the unicorn has for the last thousand years o ...

status. In June 2018, DDN acquired the Lustre storage team from Intel, reviving the Whamcloud brand. In September 2018, DDN expanded further with the purchase of the virtualization focused storage company Tintri. In May, 2019, DDN acquired the

software defined storage Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storag ...

vendor Nexenta. In November 2019, DDN finalized the acquisition of the IntelliFlash division, formerly known as Tegile, from

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...

. These last three acquisitions became the Tintri Enterprise Business Unit. In February 2021, DDN reported revenues of $400 million and claimed 11,000 customers. DDN operates in 20 countries with customers in over 50 countries. Following acquisitions in 2018 and 2019, the company has around 1,000 employees and has 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.

Products

The company carries products that provide

data management Data management comprises all disciplines related to handling data as a valuable resource. Concept The concept of data management arose in the 1980s as technology moved from sequential processing (first punched cards, then magnetic tape) to r ...

network-attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...

, block data storage, clustered file systems and

object storage Object storage (also known as object-based storage) is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data a ...

. Customers typically need low latency, high capacity and sustained throughput.

References

{{reflist Companies based in Santa Clara, California Internet technology companies of the United States Companies established in 1998 Computer storage companies