Record 4Q14 for DDN

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced sustained upward momentum led by profitable, double digit year-over-year growth worldwide.

This momentum is the direct result of market demand across enterprise and web/Ccloud sectors for DDN’s storage and data management solutions.

For the year ending December 31, 2014, DDN bookings grew 16% year-over-year with 31% growth compared to Q4 2013, while the company increased its total number of net new petabyte-class customers by more than 150 organizations managing mission critical data.

DDN’s continued expansion of its customer base of key new enterprises includes 111.5.com, Imperial College London, Kern County Sheriff’s Department, Red Wind Casino, Trinity University, Turning Stone Casino, one of world’s largest banks, in global oil and gas exploration, a major Japan-based pharmaceutical company, and two automobile racing companies.

DDN increased its team count to over 600 staff and opened an advanced European technology center in Paris, France to fuel European technology innovation and expansion.

With 80% growth year-on-year, the DDN Web Object Scaler (WOS) object storage platform achieved accelerated adoption into Web, cloud and service providers as their content distribution and data archive infrastructure.

Year end results demonstrate accelerating sales momentum and execution
Throughout 2014, DDN continued to solve large scale data management problems for more than a third of financial services, aeronautics, automotive, oil and gas, and life sciences organizations, and two thirds of the Top100 largest HPC sites.

Most recently, the company also achieved success at the international Supercomputing 2014 show in New Orleans, LA earning six HPCwire awards to make DDN the most highly awarded performance storage company in the world.

DDN also received accolades for its storage offerings from industry analysts and was positioned in the Challengers quadrant in Gartner’s 2014 report, Magic Quadrant for General Purpose Disk Arrays. Gartner describes Challengers in the broad general-purpose disk array market as, “A vendor [that] participates in the broad general-purpose disk array market and execut[es] well enough to be a serious threat to vendors in the Leaders quadrant. They have strong products, as well as sufficient credible market position and resources to sustain continued growth.”

Customer momentum fueled
by big data, cloud computing and Web 2.0 storage requirements
The momentum DDN is seeing in new customer acquisition is due in large part to the fact that legacy storage architectures can no longer meet user demands of large scale data environments. Large scale data environments are evolving throughout a variety of enterprise, research, web, cloud and video environments. These modern data sets require storage infrastructure that is designed to accommodate large scale, mixed IO and often multi-data center environments.

Throughout 2014, DDN expanded its portfolio of the world’s highest performance, large scale storage solutions with integrated tiering, SSD storage and cache, cloud, hybrid, block, file and tape products.

DDN wrapped up the year with Q4 announcements that continued to expand its portfolio with an S3 cloud connector and a new enterprise parallel file system appliance designed for ease of use and deployment of performance storage technology within the Enterprise.

Building on leadership as the de facto standard for Lustre-based environments, DDN introduced in late 2014 the next generation EXAScaler appliance offering differentiated capabilities for small file performance, complete 24x7x365 support and scale to support tens of thousands of clients with a single solution.

Unleashing a new I/O provisioning paradigm, DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME) SDS application proved in customer environments around the world that this new game changing technology accelerates IO by 1,000x, parallel file systems by 100x, and applications by 10x.

Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder, DDN, said: “As our 2014 results and momentum into the first quarter of 2015 demonstrate, DDN’s product strategy to offer integrated end-to-end solutions for large scale data problems is in high demand. DDN is leading the industry with innovation in application acceleration, high performance file systems and both private and public cloud enabling solutions. We are taking bold steps across our entire business, staffing our field and technical service organizations with the most technical solution support staff in the world and providing innovative solutions that solve today’s most complex storage challenges to deliver business and scientific results at a faster pace than ever thought possible.“

Paul Bloch, president and co-founder, DDN, said: “Demand for DDN technology drove tremendous growth in 2014 as DDN became known as the technology and solution provider for large scale, high performance, data intensive environments.We have maintained our competitive edge with growth in HPC while addressing the need for our product solutions in the data intensive use cases of Enterprise, Web and cloud environments.We’re already seeing continued momentum in 2015 with new customer bookings as well as incredible 100PB+ opportunities being added to the pipeline in the two months of the year.“

To watch 2014 DDN Year in Review