DDN HPC 1Q14 Bookings Grew 17% Y/Y

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced momentum and new customer adoption of its storage solutions among traditional and commercial HPC customers.

This traction builds on recent DDN news and its continued investment in HPC with innovations in cloud storage, cache-centric appliances and massive-scale technologies to support the road to exascale computing.

A growing list of worldwide organizations such as Omnicom, Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, Louisiana State University and Hokkaido University continue to invest in DDN’s HPC storage solutions, extending the benefits of accelerated insight and collaboration to millions of users around the globe.

HPC bookings in 1Q14 outpaced other markets as more commercial organizations with big data initiatives turn to DDN storage for its performance, scalability and efficiency. DDN also continues to deliver on enterprise requirements including density, security, manageability, data protection and data collaboration features. This focus is driving increased revenues and new customer demand for DDN storage among verticals including financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, web, cloud and telco, government labs, academic research and security/lawful intercept.  

Q1 HPC bookings grew 17% year-over-year, driven by growth in financial services, life sciences and energy exploration markets. Financial services, alone, grew 188% sequentially.

Growth in these verticals is due in large part to rapid market adoption of HPC storage across specific commercial segments where customers are faced with the challenges of big data performance, capacity, distribution or cloud collaboration at scale.

Among life sciences organizations (genomics and biopharma), in Q1 DDN also saw larger deal sizes where businesses selected DDN as their primary storage for sequencing, data analysis, collaboration and distribution workflows. Often, these customers have higher numbers of instruments, significant data imports from other sources, or extremely high projected growth rates and require the performance and parallelism offered through DDNs SFA12K or SFA12KX-based GRIDScaler and/or EXAScaler with GPFSor Lustre parallel file systems.

Much of DDN’s strength in Q1 also came from large cross-sell and upsell opportunities across its global customer base, where organizations recognize tangible business benefits of DDN’s single platform approach to its WOS cloud storage and GRIDScaler and EXAScaler file storage products. The added capability of being able to bridge data into DDN WOS for automated sharing of data and/or results across geographies also makes DDN solutions for collaboration, retention and publication needs.

DDN also saw good Q1 momentum due to its established global presence with strong international sales, support, services and partner footprint, and approximately a third of revenues originating outside of the United States. When not sold directly to end users, DDN systems and solutions are delivered through channel partners including a network of distributors, VARs, resellers and integrators.

Molly Rector, CMO, said:” DDN’s continued growth in HPC is due to our ability to solve the performance and capacity needs of the entire data lifecycle.  Current customers are rapidly expanding their DDN footprint by introducing a DDN primary storage tier for high IO/s, small file, memory-centric applications. These in-memory technologies from DDN seamlessly integrate with the shared storage environment and ultimately tier off to the cloud if needed. As more HPC organizations rely on DDN for their big data analytics, distribution, collaboration and archive needs, we’re helping drive quantifiable benefits to their businesses and bottom lines.”