Company Profile: DDN
Reference in HPC storage and leading the pack in AI storage with their data intelligence platform approach
By Philippe Nicolas | July 3, 2025 at 2:02 pmCompany name:
DDN (aka DDN Storage and even in the past DataDirect Networks)
Legal name: DataDirect Networks Inc.
HQ and offices:
HQ in Chatsworth, CA, USA
Full location offices list available here
Website:
ddn.com
Date founded:
1998
Founders:
Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder
LinkedIn profile
Paul Bloch, President and co-founder
LinkedIn profile
The Story of Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch
Fueling Innovation at the Edge of What’s Possible
When Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch co-founded DDN, they weren’t just starting a company — they were building a platform for innovation. At a time when traditional computing systems were straining under the weight of growing data demands, Alex and Paul saw an opportunity to rethink data architecture from the ground up. Their shared vision? To create a new class of infrastructure designed specifically for the most ambitious computing challenges in the world.
From day one, innovation has been at the core of what DDN does. Alex and Paul built the company around a singular mission: to empower the brightest minds across science, industry, and technology with the tools they need to solve the unsolvable. Whether it’s accelerating breakthroughs in healthcare, powering next-gen autonomous systems, or scaling AI to production — DDN’s data intelligence platform and parallel processing technologies have become mission-critical to the world’s most demanding use cases.
With over $500 million invested in R&D, Alex and Paul have led DDN to the forefront of high-performance computing and AI infrastructure. The platform they pioneered enables enterprises to leverage GPU-powered AI and massively parallel data systems to create products and services once thought impossible — across industries like autonomous driving, financial services, national research, and robotics.
For more than 20 years, their leadership and long-term vision have made DDN the go-to platform behind the world’s fastest supercomputers, largest AI workloads, and most ambitious scientific research. But more than just technical excellence, their story is one of enduring partnership, shared conviction, and a relentless drive to push the limits of ‘what can be done.’
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Financial funding:
$300 million at $5 billion valuation from Blackstone announced January 9, 2025 (official announcement here)
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Employee numbers:
~1,000 with around 60% engineers
Revenue:
Approx. $800 million with a rapid growth fueled by AI storage related business
Technology:
DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, empowering organizations to maximize the value of their data with end-to-end HPC and AI-focused solutions. Its customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyperscalers to cutting-edge research centers, all leveraging DDN’s proven data intelligence platform for scalable, secure, and high-performance AI deployments that drive 10x returns.
Products:
DDN promotes 3 flavors: Platforms, Systems and Software.
EXAScaler and Infinia are 2 software products available as software or in systems, ready to use.
EXAScaler is a HPC storage platform based on Lustre parallel file system and extended by several developments by DDN. It is well adopted by top supercomputer clusters sites and users communities worldwide and is seen as a reference in the domain perfectly illustrated by the IO500 list.
Infinia is a modern high performance object storage platform developed from scratch by DDN leveraging new design and architecture to address and solve new high demanding data oreinted workloads associated with AI.
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The company also has announced xfusionai as a combined solution based on EXAscaler and Infinia software. We found Industrsync and Inferno.
Customers:
xAI, NVIDIA, NASA, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, MLB, Bitdeer AI, etc. A full list is available here.
Workloads/Use cases/Applications:
Any domain requiring high performance storage and sustainable IOs. The unique partnership synergy with Nvidia is a key differentiator in the industry.
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Target market:
Organizations and enterprises that require high-performance, data-intensive computing infrastructure, particularly those at the forefront of AI, HPC, and large-scale data analytics.
Competition:
VAST Data, Weka, Hammerspace and other HPC storage related players
Comments
Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch know each other since they were at CalTech in the early 80's. It confirms that DDN is also a human adventure between 2 brilliant engineers who morphed into clever business men.
Regarding the creation of DataDirect Networks, it was the result of the merge of MegaDrive and ImpactData.
About the Infinia product, the following image illustrates services layers with the control, data and storage planes. The early adopters and recent customers using Infinia confirm a strong adoption especially at really large scale.
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