To address the demand for scalable data infrastructure solutions in the digital media, Internet and high performance computing sectors in Japan, DataDirect Networks, Inc., announced it is investing half a billion yen to rapidly expand its sales and support operations throughout Japan. This investment will fuel the company's expansion in these key sectors and enable it to accelerate its growth trajectory in the world's second largest economy.

Analog TV broadcasting will end in Japan in July 2011, and the Association for the Promotion of Digital Broadcasting Japan recently announced that as of March, more than 32 million digital terrestrial television sets are already in use. With the transition to 100-percent digital environments, DataDirect Networks Japan is aggressively partnering with major broadcasters, post production and digital intermediate facilities to ensure a seamless transition to all digital content.

"The transition to digital and high definition content is a global phenomena that will reshape sectors in the media and entertainment industries ranging from content creation, to post-production, to content delivery," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems Research at IDC. "Storage solutions like those from DataDirect Networks that deliver the scale and performance characteristics required for next generation digital content will allow content creators and distributors in Japan to quickly and effectively make this transition while delivering more and better content than ever before."

"In addition to digital media, DataDirect Networks' data infrastructure solutions are ideal for scientific and modeling applications used in research and product development laboratories," said Scott Genereux, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Support, DataDirect Networks. "Japan is the second largest market for high-performance computing solutions and we have seen year-over-year growth in this sector. This new investment will enable us to grow our resources quickly and expand our partnerships, allowing us to better serve our Japanese customers and their unique business requirements."

One of DataDirect Networks' HPC clients in Japan, Tsukuba University, currently has the number two supercomputer in the country and the largest Lustre file system installation in Japan. The T2K system, as it is referred to, was able to achieve 76.4 teraflops on the standard Linpack benchmark, a measure of a system's floating point computing power. Additionally, its I/O cluster achieved over 12 gigabytes per second from five DataDirect S2A platforms with more than one petabyte of disk capacity.

Commenting on today's announcement, Robert Triendl, General Manager of DataDirect Networks Japan, said, "Our solutions are optimized for clients that demand extreme performance and scalability for their applications and that create and process large content files and unstructured data. Conventional data storage systems are simply unable to handle these intricately complex data patterns; different data and I/O patterns truly require different storage. That's why we have been successfully working with many leading Japanese customers and partners, and we look forward to further expanding these relationships."

General-purpose, cache-centric storage architectures are not designed for the content explosion taking place today -- an explosion which requires real-time, purpose-built platforms designed for massive throughput and scalable capacity. Only DataDirect Networks delivers the types of next generation data infrastructure platforms required to support the consistent, massive streams of large image files and unstructured data driving the content explosion, enabling users to thrive in their extremely competitive markets.