Founded in 1998, DataDirect Networks is a provider of large storage systems for unstructured data and big data, like AI, analytics and high performance computing environments. The company is headquartered in Chatsworth, California, USA, has about 1000 employees, and in 2011 called itself the largest privately held information storage company. Acquisitions in 2018 and 2019 added product lines which address more standard IT workloads like virtualization, databases and file sharing. DDN provides storage for applications such as cloud storage services, supercomputing, life sciences and genomics, seismic processing, financial service trade and risk analysis, film production, live television broadcast, manufacturing, and video surveillance.
History
The company was founded in 1988 under the name MegaDrive Systems. MegaDrive merged with ImpactData, in 1998, to create DataDirect Networks. Alex Bouzari is the company's CEO, chairman and co-founder. Paul Bloch is president and co-founder. DDN completed a $9.9 million round of venture capital financing in October 2001 with ClearLight Partners LLC and Digital Coast Ventures. In 2002, the company ended its relationship with its venture capital financiers. DDN created DataDirect Networks Federal, LLC, in 2005 - formalizing a team which holds the necessary clearances to support the company's focus on the U.S. government and intelligence community. In 2008, DDN reported that it had exceeded $100 million in annual revenue and claimed to provide storage systems for 48 of the top 100 supercomputers – with customers including Argonne National Laboratory and the NASA Ames Research Center. In 2011, DDN reported that it had exceeded the $200M annual revenue mark, and was reported to be the world's largest privately held storage company, based on 2009 revenues. In 2013, the company built the storage system for Titan supercomputer. DDN announced in 2016 that it powered 70 percent of the top 500 supercomputers worldwide, up from 67 percent in 2015. In 2017, DDN earned the unicorn status. In September 2018, DDN purchased the virtualization focused storage company Tintri. In May, 2019, DDN acquired the software defined storage vendor Nexenta. In November 2019, DDN finalized the acquisition of the IntelliFlash division, formerly known as Tegile, from Western Digital CorporationWestern Digital.
Products
The company carries products that provide block, parallel file and object storage. Block storage devices store data in chunks with a maximum fixed length. Parallel file systems spread the data across more than one storage device to provide redundancy and increase performance. Object file systems separate the file metadata information from the rest of the file data and store them in separate devices. The Lustre and Spectrum Scale file systems are examples of parallel file systems that are supported by some of DDN's storage systems. High speed interconnects such as InfiniBand are also supported by some of DDN's storage systems. The company also provides a storage management tool to configure and monitor DDN storage devices as well as a line of flash storage appliances. For example, DDN's Infinite Memory Engine, a flash-native data cache, allows data to reside next to compute in a shared pool of non-volatile memory. In 2018, DDN introduced a line of all flash products designed to address AI and analytics workloads in GPU compute environments, known as A3I. DDN's enterprise business unit supplies solutions for virtualization, with Tintri, software defined unified storage, with Nexenta, and all flash primary unified storage, with IntelliFlash.
