Naver From Korea Selects DDN AI Storage

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that Korea’s NAVER Corporation has selected its A³I AI400X systems as its choice of storage solution to enhance numerous AI services and research projects.

NAVER, Korea’s search engine provider and creator of the popular LINE messaging service, has expanded its ventures from photo and video applications to mobile payment services. NAVER CLOVA is an AI platform integrating speech and image recognition and artificial neural network translation to provide an interactive engine, which first launched in August 2017. It currently supports Korean, Japanese and English and has experienced increased demand in recent years.

It selected A3I AI400X AI storage systems based on a careful PoC developed together with the DDN technical team. Having already deployed one of the largest commercially used NVIDIA DGX SuperPODs to scale out R&D within its AI services, its technical team was looking for a storage system to deliver the performance required by large-scale AI models.

DDN’s AI400X scalable storage reference architecture for NVIDIA’s SuperPOD combines simple deployment and management with the powerful scaling advantages of DDN’s EXAScaler Lustre file system solution.

With this reference architecture, along with a reference architecture for smaller NVIDIA DGXA100 POD solutions, DDN is a NVIDIA partner with solutions for all sizes of AI projects. In actual application testing, the DDN architecture surpassed competing systems in both read and write performance by a margin.

“The AI workloads that power today’s mobile applications increasingly require data center architectures that allow for massive scaling, which is really the core of DDN’s expertise,” said Alex Shim, country manager, DDN in Korea. “We are excited to work with the NAVER team on building the data center of the future for deep learning and AI technologies.“

“We are excited to collaborate with DDN, which is a leading storage manufacturer in AI processing industry,” commented a NAVER CLOVA representative. “With DDN’s expertise in AI storage, NAVER will continue to lead AI research and develop products that create value for our users.“