DDN Opened Paris Advanced Technology Center With 50 Employees to Be Hired Next Year

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced revenue traction for the first six months of 2014, demonstrating a strong trajectory of profitable growth for the company heading into the second half of the year.

The company added more than 20 net new petabyte-class customers including one of world’s largest banks, a leader;in global oil and gas exploration, and a major Japan-based automobile manufacturing company, increasing the storage capacity sold year-to-date to over 250PBs.

In the first half of the year, DDN experienced more than 100% growth in its enterprise big data and object based business compared to the first half of 2013, driven by significant growth in financial services, life sciences and energy, exploration markets.

Building on the company’s 1H14 momentum which included new partnerships, expanded footprint and industry recognition, DDN also opened a Paris Advanced Technology Center to enhance its European technology.

Strong Enterprise and HPC Business, Market and Customer Momentum
As demand for DDN high-performance, massively scalable storage for big data and cloud use cases grows, current customers continue to broaden their use of the company’s technology offerings while new customers including James Cook University, Japan National Statistics Center (NSTAC), and NSW Office of Environment & Heritage.

Coinciding with sales growth, DDN has accelerated its worldwide employee hiring. The company has grown headcount 20% since Q1 and plans to add significant further headcount by year’s end. Key hires include new additions to the company’s technical, engineering, sales, marketing and quality assurance teams.

As a commitment to the European market and large user support needs, DDN has also added a new European Advanced Technology Center just outside of Paris. With upwards of 50 employees expected to be hired in the next year, the center will be a hotbed of R&D focused on innovation in areas such as end-to-end big, data lifecycle management and accelerating time to insight through analytics and application acceleration.

Building on its history of supporting the world’s largest, most data-intensive environments, DDN continued to strengthen its technology partnerships in a number of areas notably in supporting object and cloud storage environments. In addition to joining the Active Archive Alliance, DDN also announced a partnership with Hyve Solutions to release an enterprise OCP-compliant webscale object storage appliance.

DDN also invested in strengthening its teams in the first half of 2014, adding Molly Rector as the company’s first CMO, Bob Merkert as VP of federal sales, and current Cisco VP and treasurer Roger Biscay to its board of directors.

Technology Momentum
Fueled by Big Data, Cloud Computing and Web 2.0 Requirements
Rapid data center evolution fueled by such trends as cloud computing, mobility, big data and social networks is prompting customers to look to new technologies specifically designed to deal with rapidly growing amounts of data and changing workloads. The performance, efficiency, scale and density realities that organizations face today require infrastructures that integrate compute, storage and networking all managed by software, which aim to make infrastructures more programmable, automated, flexible and cost-effective.

DDN is focused on addressing these customer requirements and new workload demands with solutions founded on an integrated portfolio of offerings across different tiers of storage including fast data, persistent data and distributed data, all managed by an intelligent resource management layer.

Over the course of the first half of 2014, DDN’s focus on end-to-end data lifecycle for big data storage, analytics, cloud and hyperscale use cases, resulted in several new product introductions, including:

• Object Storage: WOS Technology – Enabling organizations to a build reliable, infinitely scalable storage pool for all their unstructured data needs, DDN WOS 360, announced in March 2014, redefines the architecture of scale-out storage infrastructures through a set of new data protection, archive, collaboration and distribution capabilities designed to meet the five key object storage requirements of customers today: scalability, accessibility, efficiency, reliability and performance. Delivering trillion-file scalability and 200x performance increases over previous generations, when used with the low cost Archive Node, in combination with Global ObjectAssure, WOS 360 helps drive down costs by up to 20%.
• Block Storage: SFA12K and SFA7700 Appliance Series – In June 2014, DDN announced an high density storage system with 5PBs in a single rack. The DDN SS8460 disk drive enclosures, in conjunction with DDN’s SFA storage platforms, nearly doubles the amount of storage in a single rack than was previously available, providing up to 40% more density as compared to the highest density storage array offerings available in the market, slashing operational expense by half and delivering performance and scalability for organizations looking to solve their big data challenges.
• File Storage: WOS-Bridge and EXAScaler and GRIDScaler – Allowing users to connect their parallel file systems to the cloud, WOS-Bridge, announced in June 2014, when deployed in conjunction with DDN’s parallel file system appliances, EXAScaler and GRIDScaler, provides users cloud tiering, content collaboration and archive of up to hundreds of petabytes of parallel file system data across local and remote sites and the cloud, all within one global namespace. This enables enterprises, researchers and educational facilities to increase time to discovery and insight, while reducing complexity of managing islands of information, and slashing storage TCO and management costs.

Industry Accolades
Independent recognition for the company’s technology leadership in the first half of 2014 included:

• Gartner – In February 2014, Gartner rated DDN excellent in its 2013 Critical Capabilities for Object Storage research report.
• NewBay Media – In April 2014, from a pool of hundreds of competing new products at the NAB show in Las Vegas, WOS technology was awarded media and entertainment industry’s Best of Show Award.

Alex Bouzari, CEO, DDN, said: “We are very pleased that our solutions for big storage, object and lifecycle data management are gaining significant recognition in many areas in the enterprise such as finance services, oil and gas, automotive and life sciences. We doubled our revenue in the enterprise big data and cloud markets in the first half of 2014, achieved profitability and opened a European advanced technology center in Paris. Our solid management team, comprehensive end-to-end big data and cloud storage product portfolio, global footprint and strong profitable growth, ideally position us to continue to,capitalize on the big data and cloud market opportunity in the second half of 2014 and beyond.”