DataDirect Networks Closes Fiscal Year 2013 with Strong Business Momentum, Fueled by Increased Customer Bookings, Broadened Vertical Market Traction, and Key Product Advancements

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary

• DataDirect Networks (DDN) today announced tremendous momentum exiting fiscal year 2013, with 2^nd half revenue growth driven by rapidly expanding market demand for high performance block, file and object storage.
• A leader in high performance computing (HPC) market for 15 years, DDN provides storage designed to meet the scale and performance demands of data intensive environments.  2013 marked a transitional year where many markets accelerated adoption of HPC and storage products to meet their analytics, vertical application and data accessibility needs.
• While demand for DDN storage continues to increase in HPC, DDN is also seeing increased adoption in the highly data intensive market segments of cloud storage, life sciences, research, government, manufacturing, internet and telecommunications.  Highlights for the year included:

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Strong Business, Market and Customer Momentum

• DDN delivered breakthrough business results for the fiscal year ending Dec. 31, 2013, increasing bookings volume by 31 percent sequentially in 2H:13, while adding 122 net new customers over the year to a roster of the world's leading computing sites. This brings the total number of DDN customers to more than 1,100 and over 500PB of total storage capacity sold to date.
• This momentum illustrates the rapid acceleration in demand for the DDN product line in a broad set of commercial and industrial markets, where according to leading industry analyst firms, increased HPC spending is occurring.  Despite the challenging macroeconomic conditions in 1H:13, DDN delivered solid performance to close out the year, positioning the company well for growth in 2014.
• Across all markets, notable new and expanded customer relationships during the year included BP, Life Technologies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Suzuki and University of Bonn. These companies are adopting DDN technology to achieve significant competitive advantage by unlocking new opportunities to monetize their data, such as for scientific discovery, financial trading accuracy or improved seismic activity prediction, among other use cases.
• Company momentum was also driven by growth in adoption of DDN WOS® object storage for large scale web application adoption and for organizations with the need to address three primary use cases: cloud storage, content distribution and Hadoop archival.

Unmatched Technology Innovation in Big Data and Cloud Storage

• Over the course of 2013, DDN introduced a number of advances to its technology portfolio, building on the company's leadership in addressing end users' big data and cloud storage requirements, including massive scale out object storage, extreme performance, Hadoop-based analytics, and file system and workflow acceleration. These innovations included:
  • Hadoop and Big Data Storage: Analytics Platform – Launched in February 2013, the first Big Data appliance for the enterprise dramatically simplifies Apache Hadoop deployment, delivering up to seven times better analytics performance as compared to commodity clusters.
  • Object Storage: WOS Technology – Introduced in September 2013, WOS 3.0 and WOS 7000 appliance are leading the cloud revolution, delivering trillion-file scalability and 200x performance increases over previous generations. With multiple customer installs now at over 10PB and DDN's largest WOS install at 70-80 billion objects, DDN continues to achieve significant marquee brand wins.
  • Block Storage: SFA12KX^TM Appliance Series – Featuring the most advanced processor technology and a hyper-optimized operating system to deliver extreme performance at up to 48GB/s and 1.4 Million IOPS from a single appliance, the leading performance storage platform, the SFA12KX, was launched in November 2013.
  • Burst Buffer Cache: Infinite Memory Engine^TM (IME) – Previewed at Supercomputing '13 in November, IME technology, the industry's first distributed buffer cache system designed to accelerate parallel file systems, extracts the best performance efficiency across the I/O hierarchy, increasing system reliability multifold, while reducing exascale I/O TCO by millions of dollars.

Industry Accolades

• Independent recognition for the company's technology leadership in 2013 included:
  • Gartner – In March, DDN was positioned in the Challengers quadrant in Gartner's 2013 report, 'Magic Quadrant for General Purpose Disk Arrays'
  • IDC – In November, as a result of an expanding customer base and the breadth of capabilities in WOS technology, DDN was named a leader in the 2013 IDC 'MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage'
  • HPCwire – In November, DDN was awarded an unprecedented six awards for the annual 2013 HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards, maintaining its position as the most recognized storage company in HPCwire award history with 19 lifetime wins.

Strategic Technology Partnerships

• DDN's go-to-market mix evolved over the course of the year, with expansion of its global partner program and strong adoption with 100+ VARs worldwide.
• Additionally, key new technology, distribution and industry partnerships were established in 2013 in support of DDN's object storage momentum including Hyve Solutions, CommVault, ASG Atempo, Ctera, IRODS, and PogoPlug.

Supporting Quotes

Alex Bouzari, CEO, DDN

• "In summary, with momentum across all our business and technology lines, we saw strength exiting 2013, particularly in our commercial business. Now looking into 2014, our product roadmap is more targeted than ever as we remain laser focused on signing customers with webscale applications aligned with our HPC product line and WOS offerings. DDN is building momentum as more enterprise customers hit the NAS-wall; we're winning business away from competition who simply cannot compete on our levels of scale, performance and TCO; and, we're setting the stage for increased adoption of our cloud and object storage technology among the world's leading service provider and data center networks, positioning DDN for competitive differentiation and long-term growth."

Supporting Resources

• More on DDN Object Storage
• More on DDN Big Data Platforms
• More on DDN Infinite Memory Engine Technology
• More on DDN Customers
• More on DDN PartnerLink Program
• Follow DDN via Blog and Twitter

About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world leader in massively scalable storage. Our data storage and processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high growth IT environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity. DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver business results from their information. Our customers include the world's leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, media production, and security and intelligence organizations. Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, DDN's solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world's most scalable data centers to ensure competitive business advantage for today's information powered enterprise. For more information, go to www.ddn.com or call 1-800-837-2298.

©2014 All rights reserved. DDN, WOS, SFA12KX and Infinite Memory Engine are trademarks owned by DataDirect Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

DDN Media Contact:

Dani Kenison
Sr. Director, Global Corporate Communications
Email: [email protected]
Work: 408-990-2658

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