Seagate Shutting Down ClusterStor Business, Said DDN

According to DataDirect Network, Inc. (DDN), as Seagate Technology plc prepares to lay off 600 more people, leaving its HPC customers worldwide in a tough spot, DDN steps up and reaffirms its support and dedication to an HPC market it served for 20 years

DDN announced that, with an unwavering 20-year dedication to HPC and large-scale storage systems and thousands of mission-critical customers, it is stepping up its efforts to provide an immediate path to safety for the many users left stranded in the wake of Seagate shutting down its ClusterStor product line.

The company is in data center infrastructure for big data and cloud storage applications. Its storage and processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high growth IT environments to achieve high level of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity.

DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver results from their information. Customers include the world’s leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, financial services, media production, and security and intelligence organizations.

Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world’s most scalable data centers to ensure competitive business advantage for today’s information powered enterprise.

Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch started DDN two decades ago with a true commitment to HPC. The firm grew to become the market leader in this industry, delivering innovations for thousands of mission-critical customers worldwide, from high-performance block and file storage systems, to object storage, SSD solutions, burst buffers and many other industry firsts with hundreds of millions of dollars invested to serve the HPC industry.

“It is a sad day when an industry built on long-term commitments is left in disarray, but DDN is stepping up to manage a smooth transition into the safe, stable, high-performance and industry-winning storage solutions to which every HPC customer is entitled,” said Alex Bouzari, DDN co-founder and CEO. “We created DDN to provide a higher standard of excellence for storage in the HPC industry, and will continue to do so. Ours is the opposite of a short-term whim, or accounting experiments that some large conglomerates engage in, ignoring the devastation that will hit their customers after they walk away abruptly from their failed experiment.“

“DDN’s pledge is to deliver the very best and most versatile storage solutions in the world to our HPC customers. We are offering, starting immediately, a full range of very advantageous storage upgrade and file system support programs to our stranded friends following this announcement,” said Paul Bloch, DDN co-founder and president. “DDN will craft the ideal mix of Spectrum Scale (GPFS), Lustre*, disk, SSD, burst buffer, block, file and object storage systems to meet and exceed all HPC customer requirements, present and future.”

DDN’s storage solutions have been designed and perfected for two decades to address the needs of HPC and high-performance workloads and applications.

Among many other benefits, it offers:
• The best ‘performance uptime’ of the market
• A range of disk and SSD-based solutions for best-in-class and open solutions truly tailored to HPC customer needs
• SFA storage appliances, IME SSD software and WOS object storage to protect HPC customer investments today and tomorrow against unpredictable constraints
• Appliances that are here to stay and that provide sustainable ROI without redesign hassle
• A continued commitment to deploy and support turnkey HPC data ecosystems, including Lustre and Spectrum Scale systems