DDN Ranked #1 Position on IO500 Benchmark

DDN (DataDirect Networks Inc.) announced that it has secured the #1 position vs. its competitors on the IO500 benchmark – the industry’s gold standard for real-world storage performance in AI and HPC.

If You Rely on GPUs, AI Workloads, or HPC Simulations, You Need the Best Technology to Achieve the Best Outcome.
Whether your mission is curing diseases, protecting financial markets, or transforming entire industries with GenAI, your outcomes hinge entirely on data center and cloud infrastructure performance. The latest IO500 benchmark confirms what top innovators already know: DDN isn’t just leading the pack we’ve left it behind entirely.

IO500 Proves It: DDN Leads and Delivers 3x to 11x More Value Than Other Data Platform Technologies
IO500 isn’t just another benchmark, it’s the gold standard for assessing real-world storage performance in AI and HPC environments. It plays a critical role in helping organizations determine which technologies to deploy and which vendors to trust. Unlike synthetic benchmarks that simulate hypothetical conditions, IO500 tests systems under real-world pressures-mixed workloads, complex I/O patterns, metadata-intensive operations, and concurrent tasks, exactly the kinds of challenges AI and HPC infrastructures face every day.

The result? Clear, credible insights into how your infrastructure will perform when performance matters most.

“AI is transforming every industry, and the organizations leading that transformation are the ones that understand infrastructure performance is not optional – it’s mission-critical,” said Alex Bouzari, co-founder and CEO, DDN. “Being ranked #1 on the IO500 benchmark is more than a technical achievement – it’s proof that our customers can count on DDN to deliver the speed, scale, and reliability needed to turn data into competitive advantage. DDN is not just ahead. We have left the competition behind.“

In the critical 10-node production category, where real-world AI workloads operate under intense pressure and where the majority of customer use cases live, DDN isn’t just ahead of the competition; it’s setting a new industry standard. This leadership translates directly into tangible value for organizations: accelerating innovation, enabling the creation of superior products and services, and expanding the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and HPC.

0500 10-Node Production Results

The information means that with DDN, your data center, GPU, CPU, AI, HPC infrastructure will deliver up to 11x more AI training sessions, simulations, and analytics runs per day compared to Weka or VAST. Simply put, you get a lot more done faster, save millions of dollars, while accelerating your business outcomes.

Why This Matters for Your AI and HPC Workloads
AI and HPC cannot tolerate slowdowns every minute of wasted compute time drains both budget and innovation momentum.

Topping the IO500 rankings proves DDN delivers exceptional end-to-end performance that translates into real business benefits:

• Finance: A global hedge fund accelerated algorithm development 3x, reducing backtest time and cutting infrastructure costs.
• Genomics: Researchers at TGen reduced genomics pipeline analysis from 12 hours to under 2, enabling faster, more cost-effective medical breakthroughs.
• Supercomputing: Leaders like CINECA, Helmholtz Munich, and Bitdeer AI maximize GPU efficiency and throughput with DDN, achieving higher utilization and lower TCO.

Built for AI and HPC – From the Ground Up

DDN delivers real-world performance thanks to its purpose-built architecture:

• Blistering Bandwidth at Scale: Multi-TB throughput in systems like NVIDIA’s Selene and CINECA.
• Metadata Performance: Handles billions of files, small I/O, and concurrency without compromise.
• Native Parallelism for AI: True parallel file access with no shim layers or rewrites.
• Pipeline-Aware Caching: Eliminates latency and idle GPU cycles.
• Enterprise Resilience: Trusted by NVIDIA, HPE, Dell, Lenovo, and national defense agencies worldwide.

Why Competitors Can’t Keep Up

• Weka requires manual tuning and fails under real-world concurrency.
• VAST under-performs on write-heavy and metadata-intensive workloads.
• Hammerspace lacks relevant deployments and trials in IO500 benchmarks.

Your AI is Only as Good as Your Infrastructure
In AI and HPC, every second of compute time matters. Bottlenecks don’t just slow you down, they delay discovery, reduce ROI, and waste GPU resources. DDN’s #1 result in the IO500 is not just a benchmark, it’s proof that the company’s customers are leading the future.

Resources:
Explore the full IO500 results
Blog: AI and HPC Workloads Demand Highest Performance Data – DDN is the Undisputed Leader on IO500.