Featured Customers

We knew our video surveillance deployment would never work out without the best possible storage solution," says an IT representative. "DDN storage systems were the perfect fit for our requirements and the only solution that provided us with the capacity and investment protection we needed for future expansion.

Computation and supercomputing allow us to address some of the nation's most challenging scientific problems. This mission-critical research can only be achieved through large-scale computational simulation and Big Data scalability," said Susan Coghlan, Deputy Division Director at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. "To achieve our scientific mission, our systems must be designed for the highest levels of performance and scalability."

The DDN storage provided us with the scalable capacity, small datacenter footprint and extremely high performance that we needed in order to design the state-of-the-art post production facility and having the system support 4 concurrent 4K streams at 1.2 GB/s is proof of that", said Roberto Quintanilla Herranz, Supervisor Post-production and Chief Image Department for CATA. “We chose DVS to implement the whole solution to ensure that all of the components would integrate and work well with each other. Also knowing that DDN and DVS have successfully deployed over a dozen solutions together was key in our selection process.

Simulation codes in plasma physics – a key to demonstrating fusion power is a viable and sustainable energy source – produce vast amounts of data and require extreme I/O performance and scalability," said Francois Robin of CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. "DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture, in combination with the Lustre file system, has the performance, scalability, and data integrity features necessary to process, generate and use massive amounts of data without creating bottlenecks.

We have been very impressed with the performance DDN delivers," said David A. Lifka, CAC director. "For genomics research – Cornell uses Solexa Sequencers and the DDN storage system is directly connected to the compute cluster, while at the same time continuing to provide backup and archive storage for our other projects and departments."
– David A. Lifka, CAC Director

To satisfy the demanding and highly varied requirements of the academic and commercial research community, CINECA needs a highly-efficient and highly-versatile storage infrastructure. Our new DDN SFA storage cluster with GPFS will deliver a 10-fold increase in site-wide resources and readies us for the ever-evolving needs of our most demanding applications," said Sanzio Bassini, Director of Supercomputing Application & Innovation at CINECA. "Our long-standing partnership with DDN and IBM helps us eliminate I/O bottlenecks and enable a level of scalability that is unachievable with conventional technologies.

DDN's solution gives The IT Center for Science (CSC) the flexibility to best support and scale our user services," said Kimmo Koski, Managing Director and Chair of CSC. “Their expertise in enabling organizations to manage the complexities of the Big Data is a critical asset to our organization.

DDN's WOS Object Storage System puts CSIR on a much lower cost curve compared to conventional storage, while also allowing our scientists at both Cape Town and Pretoria instant access to the immense amounts of scientific data we are generating.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world. CSIRO facilitates research in the areas of climate change, energy, environment, mineral resources, and other scientific disciplines. "CSIRO uses DDN for large-scale storage of scientific data sets," said David Toll, Chief Information Officer of CSIRO. "The performance and density of DDN’s storage has allowed our scientists to do things that were not possible before."

The US Department of Defense selected 2 Petabytes of WOS storage to build a multi-agency geospatial intelligence cloud. No other system provided the latency required & scalability needed for sensor data. Object storage technology enables rich data contextualization. Multi-Site Capabilities Refresh for the U.S. Department of Defense DDN has also aligned with Cray to greatly increase computational simulation capability for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMO). DDN will provide the HPCMO with SFA10000 systems that provide a combined capacity of 7.3 PB of raw storage to serve as the high-performance foundation for several Lustre File Systems. The resources will be distributed across three HPCMO resource centers to support the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) located at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio; the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) in Fairbanks, Alaska; and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

There was a huge sense of urgency for SPEED because the complete system had to be up and running in a new facility and on air within a matter of weeks, and there was absolutely no margin for error,” said Benjamin Desbois, General Manager, Dalet Digital Media Systems USA. “Dalet and DDN have a close partnership, having successfully deployed other broadcast workflows together, so we were confident that we could meet SPEED’s timeline and provide a seamlessly integrated digital workflow solution.

DDN has been a trusted partner for HLRS in building the fastest industrially used civil supercomputer in all of Europe. The scalability, performance, and efficiency of DDN SFA storage is helping HLRS expand its relationships with both the European research community and important corporate partners.

DDN is the recognized world leader in solutions for the type of massively scalable data-processing required for the incredible scale of theSquare kilomenter Array ( SKA) telescope," said Professor Andreas Wicenec, head of computing for ICRAR. "This project combines our expertise implementing and using in-storage processing of astronomical data based on commodity hardware with the most advanced HPC storage appliance supporting in-storage processing. With this combination we are very well prepared to design, develop and test solutions for the SKA data challenge.

Twelve SFA10K-X InfiniBand systems were selected by the International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC) to build a 100GB/s parallel file system. "We have selected DDN to provide a Big Data storage architecture that could not be developed with conventional storage technology.

With its balanced IOPS and throughput performance, DDN systems are an ideal platform for frame-accurate editing. Quite simply, the DDN proposal was the best fit for our requirements.

We have been ecstatic with the level of performance we have achieved with DDN. This has been a perfect match for IU's Data Capacitor because their disk system is capable of accommodating even the most aggressive data fire hose," said Stephen Simms, manager of the Data Capacitor project at Indiana University

The performance benefits of our DDN solution have enabled Keshet Broadcasting to deliver programming more quickly to our audience and the productivity gains we’ve enjoyed provide a considerably lower total cost of ownership than our previous solution,” said Shalom Lachiany, Post Production Manager, Keshet Broadcasting. “Thanks to DDN, we are now able to scale our production operations as our programming and production business evolves and as video continues to increase in definition.

In building a high-speed Big Data grid with other leading research institutions, we have demonstrated the power of leading-edge technologies including DDN | WOS and iRODS to facilitate collaboration on a level not previously achievable. said Jos van Wezel, Data Access and Data Management group lead, Steinbuch Centre for Computing at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. "The ability of researchers in different parts of the world to share work, data, and ideas in real time has the potential to revolutionize science, and we are very pleased to be part of this exciting project.

The deployment of BlueGene/L into Lawrence Livermore’s scalable scientific simulation envronment required a commensurate quantum jump in I/O scalability, performance, and reliability. Our mission drivers require a storage architecture that enables an extremely cost effective, scalable, and balanced I/O architecture that can be quickly and reliably deployed and operated while reducing complexity,” said Mark Seager, Assistant Department Head for Advanced Technology at Livermore. “We needed a asolution which was optimized for the unrelenting demands of scientific computing at the BlueGene/L scale.

In deploying a system of this scale, LRZ required the highest levels of scalability in performance, capacity and data protection to support the mission critical requirements of European scientific research communities,” said Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode of LRZ. “DDN’s advanced SFA technology will allow SuperMUC to scale to support up to 3 petaflop/s of computational capability and manage massive scientific datasets without the bottlenecks associated with conventional storage systems.

With the DDN xSTREAMScaler, we are able to ingest content 8x faster than with traditional video tape and we don’t have to spend time trying to find a specific tape and insert it into a VTR. And since the files are digital we no longer have to create duplicate tapes so we are able to save about $100,000 a year in tape purchases.

We are pleased to again select DDN technology as the backbone of Mediaset's mission-critical broadcast operations," said Marcello Dellepiane, President & CEO of MediaPower Group. "The process of a technology refresh gave us the chance to survey the market and understand all of our options, and we were very happy to find that DDN products continue to serve as the gold standard for streaming and capacity scalability to serve both our play-to-air and media archive requirements."
"Once again we are glad to select DDN & MediaPower for our mission critical applications," said Mauro Cassanmagnago, Deputy General Manager & Engineering Director of Videotime SpA (Mediaset Group).

For more than a decade, DDN has continually delivered data infrastructure solutions that are at the leading edge of the Big Data era," said Eyal Waldman, Chairman, President and CEO of Mellanox. "InfiniBand networks are widely deployed in low-latency trading environments due to their ability to execute trading strategies faster than traditional networks, and we are pleased that DDN has taken another important step by applying Mellanox Connect-X technology upstream to the capture of market data and development of trading strategies.

Thanks to DDN's design quality and commitment to support, our original product purchases have persevered through a full decade of 'round-the-clock usage," said Scott Sinno, CSC Systems Engineer for NASA. “Few disk-based products within the HPC/Enterprise storage sector can lay claim to a useful lifespan without major component upgrades anywhere near that long.

NCHC’s supercomputer offers high-performance computing (HPC) services to a wide range of research and industrial customers in Taiwan, and is ranked as one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Partnering with Acer’s computing and facility expertise, DDN provided a turnkey storage cluster capable of up to 90 GB/s of aggregate throughput based on its SFA10000 technology and integrated ExaScaler parallel file system, which incorporates the open-source Lustre® parallel file system.

Safeguarding the warfighter requires relevant information to be delivered in real-time. The historical process of offline acquisition and analysis is not enough in today’s theatres. The Large Data system proves that there is a better way."
– Hank Dardy, Chief Scientist for the Center for Computational Science at the Naval Research Center

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) hosted at Australian National University (ANU) is deploying DDN storage to power their new Fujitsu Petaflop system. When deployed, the DDN storage subsystem will have a capacity of over 12 petabytes and will be capable of achieving over 120GB/sec of bandwidth through its file system to power one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. "NCI will be using DDN storage to provide Australian researchers with world-class high-end computing services," said Professor Lindsay Botten, Director of the National Computational Infrastructure at ANU.

NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer is designed by Cray as a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) system, and is built with more than 380,000 AMD processor cores and 25,000 compute nodes, and is designed with an integrated archive environment that is scalable to over 500 petabytes and 100GB/s of storage performance. To accelerate access to this massive storage environment, NCSA selected DDN SFA12K storage systems with InfiniBand™ connectivity to consolidate their archive infrastructure using only a small number of very high-speed DDN enterprise storage systems.

Our high-performance DDN system meets our most stringent requirements with ease, and it saves us time and money, says Keske. "The engineering effort we put in to maintain the system is minimal compared to our legacy configuration. DDN works all the time – there’s never a need to take it offline, reformat it, or fine-tune it. And in our 24/7 highly collaborative environment, the system needs to work in real-time. In our business there is no such thing as just ‘good enough.’

The Spider parallel file systems at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, three of the largest parallel file systems in the world, powered by DDN, Dell, Mellanox, and Lustre supported by Whamcloud, have provided unprecedented reliability in supporting the I/O needs of all major compute systems at our Leadership Computing Facility. On our largest file system we have achieved 100% availability in 8 of the 12 months of 2011 with scheduled availability of 99.26% over the entire year. The stability of this system is unprecedented given its scale." "Galen M. Shipman, Technology Integration Group Leader, National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at ORNL

With a long history of deploying DDN technology for our supercomputing programs, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has enjoyed a collaborative and strong partnership with DDN as we work to use HPC to solve some of the world’s most difficult and important scientific problems in energy, engineering, and basic sciences," said Buddy Bland, Leadership Computing Facility Project Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We congratulate DDN on attaining this position in the HPC marketplace.

PhotoBox manages one of the web’s largest and fastest growing inventories of digital images,” said Graham Hobson, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of PhotoBox. “Our DDN infrastructure serves as the cornerstone of our operations and ensures seamless, instant access to our users’ rich content while allowing us to grow in whatever direction our business takes. The TCO savings that we’ve achieved with our new DDN system supports our CAPEX/OPEX objectives while also freeing up budget to support new data-intensive revenue opportunities.

DDN occupies a unique position in the spectrum of storage. A lot of arrays are designed for enterprise IT, but they are expensive with features that aren’t needed in this space. They don’t handle bandwidth well. At the other end of the spectrum are cheap arrays, but they fail to deliver. DDN is unique in that they have all the relevant enterprise features of enterprise arrays with sequential I/O throughput that nobody else that I am aware of can deliver.”
– Scott La Vertu, PTA Network Services Manager

We are very pleased to work with DDN on a solution that reduces the complexity of our storage environment and accelerates our research efforts," said Phil Butcher, Head IT, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "Our DDN storage solution is helping organization meet its challenging research objectives.

There was a huge sense of urgency for SPEED because the complete system had to be up and running in a new facility and on air within a matter of weeks, and there was absolutely no margin for error,” said Benjamin Desbois, General Manager, Dalet Digital Media Systems USA. “Dalet and DDN have a close partnership, having successfully deployed other broadcast workflows together, so we were confident that we could meet SPEED’s timeline and provide a seamlessly integrated digital workflow solution.

The STAC-M3 Benchmark suites were specified by trading firms on the STAC Benchmark Council to reflect real business workloads," said Peter Lankford, Founder & Director of STAC. "Capital markets organizations find STAC-M3 reports useful because STAC-M3 is the only community-developed standard for understanding the capability of different software and hardware to perform an important class of analytics. In the case of storage, STAC-M3 reports on systems such as those provided by DDN are providing important insights into the potential for new architectures to accelerate tick-data applications. We are especially pleased that DDN chose to be the first to test how well their system scales as the dataset grows, since data volumes in the industry are ballooning.

DDN, the world’s largest privately-held information storage company, today announced the Stanford University Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine selected DDN technology to provide massive scientific workflow scalability to its gene sequencing research.

Dell and DDN have always been a good choice for us to deploy and manage very scalable data sets,” says Jordan. “The solution delivered by Dell is designed to grow as we grow – and the price is right to get the most out of our budget.

Highly reliable and flexible storage at the multi-petabyte scale is critical for the research community. This demonstration shows that we are able to use WOS to create a globally accessible storage cloud. Integration with iRODS helps to make large-scale data collections with complex policy-based workflows available to scientists and engineers around the world," said Chris Jordan, Data Management and Collections Group Lead, Texas Advanced Computing Center, the University of Texas at Austin. "We support world-class science and engineering research, and we are now working with increasingly diverse applications from other domains," TACC Director Jay Boisseau said. "In both our science research support and in our projects from new communities -- industry, humanities, etc. -- we are seeing a rapidly growing need to be able to host, manage and organize massive data collections, and to support the development and availability of new types of data applications. We're excited to partner with DDN and Dell to provide new capabilities for our growing user community.

Before we received the DDN | EXAScaler file storage system, TGEN was not able to support this level of next- generation sequence alignment – our existing systems could simply not deliver enough performance."
James Lowey, TGen Director of HPC

Our research interests involve the use of modular, scalable data appliances, like WOS, which grow to multiple petabytes independently of applications and underlying operating systems. The ability of WOS to automate management policies and validate trustworthiness of digital objects is key to its use in our infrastructure.
” Dave Pcolar, Head of Library Systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"An iRODs-based WOS infrastructure greatly minimizes the effort required to manage and distribute large scientific data sets and make them available for such research." Reagan Moore, Chief Scientist for Data Grids, UNC-Chapel Hill and RENCI

DDN's WOS Cloud provides unique behind the firewall security and easy file access by Web Browser and iPhone/iPad clients, providing our researches and students instant access to the immense amounts of scientific data we are generating.
- Fumikazu Konishi, Associate Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology

TV Today selected NAS Scaler because it would allow us to meet immediate requirements of low-res edit/browsing in the production environment and also provide future scalability on throughput for high-res editing and near-line archival, said Prince Sharma, Vice President-Technology of TV Today Networks in India. "This will also help synergize with other companies in our group to share content for multi-format delivery. The scalability with throughput will help in securing our investment for the future.

“We had a simple services proposition that would eliminate the need for research teams to manage racks of servers and data storage devices,” says Wilkinson. “Of course, this meant we’d need a highly scalable storage infrastructure that could grow to 100 PBs without creating a large storage footprint or excessive administrative overhead.”

DDN's reputation for technology and quality preceded the company, in deploying this new resource we were also pleased by the system's low total cost of ownership at scale", said Dan Majchrzak, University of South Florida Director of Research Computing. "DDN's technology and the deep Lustre expertise of its staff are important assets for our high performance computing (HPC) team and the University's scientific agenda.

The ability of the SFA to cost-effectively handle all of Virginia Tech’s high-performance computing needs has prepared the university to enter a new era of breakthrough research, said Harold “Skip” Garner, the executive director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. “DDN is helping us move to the next stage of the institute’s development with passion, excitement, and a firm commitment to helping address some of society’s most important problems in the life sciences and biomedicine. With DDN’s technology in place, our researchers are only limited by their imaginations,” Garner said. “DDN’s technology stood out from other storage options for a lot of reasons, including its industry leading performance, its dramatically lower total cost of ownership, and its vast scalability for handling the huge datasets used by our researchers,” said Kevin Shinpaugh, director of high-performance computing and information technology services for the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. “But what is most impressive about the SFA is its ability to handle orthogonally divergent computing tasks, such as managing both home files and scratch files, with no performance trade-offs.

It came down to price-performance,” said Au. “Every unit had to meet a certain level of performance and they all met that. So it came to price and then total cost of ownership.” He said DDN was 20 to 40 percent of the cost of other solutions in the market. Another element in TCO that was crucial was the small footprint of DDN. “We are talking 1-2 racks as compared to 6-7 racks,” said Paul Massie, YouSendIt’s Senior Director of IT and Operations. Saving space in the data center can create considerable cost savings, Massie explained. “This was a business critical decision we were making, between price-performance, total cost of ownership and reliability,” Au said. The appliances must have a performance level where thousands or tens of thousands of files are accessed at the same time with no degradation of performance. And the results? “We are very happy with the performance and the flexible way we store the data, and being able to scale,” Au said. “This is very extensible."

With the HP DDN solution operating at around 50 per cent utilisation, we’ve seen performance rise from 500MB per second to over 3.5GB per second, without data loss. Moreover, the system will now scale to 1.2PB, satisfying the needs of users for the foreseeable future.