DDN Increasing Bookings by 31% Sequentially in 2H13

DataDirect Network, Inc. (DDN) announced momentum exiting fiscal year 2013, with 2nd half revenue growth driven by expanding market demand for high performance block, file and object storage.

In HPC market for 15 years, DDN provides storage designed to meet the scale and performance demands of data intensive environments. 2013 marked a transitional year where many markets accelerated adoption of HPC and storage products to meet their analytics, vertical application and data accessibility needs.

While demand for DDN storage continues to increase in HPC, DDN is also seeing increased adoption in the data intensive market segments of cloud storage, life sciences, research, government, manufacturing, internet and telecommunications.

Highlights for the year included:

Business, Market and Customer Momentum
DDN delivered breakthrough business results for the fiscal year ending Dec. 31, 2013, increasing bookings volume by 31% sequentially in 2H13, while adding 122 net new customers over the year to a roster of leading computing sites. This brings the total number customers to more than 1,100 and over 500PB of total storage capacity sold to date.

This momentum illustrates the acceleration in demand for its product line in a broad set of commercial and industrial markets, where according to leading industry analyst firms, increased HPC spending is occurring. Despite the challenging macroeconomic conditions in 1H13, DDN delivered solid performance to close out the year, positioning the company well for growth in 2014.

Across all markets, notable new and expanded customer relationships during the year included BP, Life Technologies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Suzuki and University of Bonn. These companies are adopting its technology to achieve competitive advantage by unlocking new opportunities to monetize their data, such as for scientific discovery, financial trading accuracy or improved seismic activity prediction.

Momentum was also driven by growth in adoption of DDN WOS object storage for large scale web application adoption and for organizations with the need to address three primary use cases: cloud storage, content distribution and Hadoop archival.

From a regional perspective, strong international expansion across Europe, the Middle East, Japan and AsiaPac has led to increased staffing of operations in 19 countries worldwide.

Technology innovation in big data and cloud storage
Over the course of 2013, it introduced a number of advances to its technology portfolio, building on the company’s leadership in addressing end users’ big data and cloud storage requirements, including massive scale out object storage, performance, Hadoop-based analytics, and file system and workflow acceleration.

These innovations included:

Hadoop and Big Storage: Analytics Platform – Launched in February 2013, the big data appliance for the enterprise simplifies Apache Hadoop deployment, delivering up to seven times better analytics performance as compared to commodity clusters.
Object Storage: WOS Technology – Introduced in September 2013, WOS 3.0 and WOS 7000 appliance are leading the cloud, delivering trillion-file scalability and 200x performance increases over previous generations. With multiple customer installs now at over 10PB and largest WOS install at 70-80 billion objects, DDN continues to achieve significant marquee brand wins.
Block Storage: SFA12KX Appliance Series – Featuring advanced processor technology and an optimized OS to deliver performance at up to 48GB/s and 1.4 million IO/s from a single appliance, the storage platform was launched in November 2013.
Burst Buffer Cache: Infinite Memory Engine(IME) – Previewed at Supercomputing ’13 in November, IME technology, a distributed buffer cache system designed to accelerate parallel file systems, extracts the best performance efficiency across the I/O hierarchy, increasing system reliability multifold, while reducing exascale I/O TCO by millions of dollars.

Industry Accolades

Gartner – In March, DDN was positioned in the Challengers quadrant in Gartner’s 2013 report, Magic Quadrant for General Purpose Disk Arrays
IDC – In November, as a result of an expanding customer base and the breadth of capabilities in WOS technology, DDN was named a leader in the 2013 IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage
HPCwire – In November, DDN was awarded six awards for the annual 2013 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, maintaining its position as the most recognized storage company in HPCwire award history with 19 lifetime wins.

Strategic Technology Partnerships

DDN’s go-to-market mix evolved over the course of the year, with expansion of its global partner program and adoption with 100+ VARs worldwide.
Additionally, new technology, distribution and industry partnerships were established in 2013 in support of DDN’s object storage momentum including Hyve Solutions, CommVault, ASG Atempo, Ctera, IRODS, and PogoPlug.

Alex Bouzari, CEO, DDN, said: “In summary, 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.”