In our opinion, Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Platforms, 2025 (subscription required) is a vital guide for IT and infrastructure leaders assessing which emerging technologies will have the greatest business impact in the years ahead. To us, one of the most strategically important categories on this year’s Hype Cycle is Intelligent Platforms – and DDN is recognized as a Sample Vendor.
We believe, this recognition isn’t just a nod to DDN’s technical excellence. It’s a validation of its role in enabling enterprises to extract real-time intelligence, performance, and value from data at every stage of the AI and analytics lifecycle.
What We’re Seeing Across Industries
From biotech to federal research, and from GenAI-native disruptors to Fortune 500s, we’re seeing a consistent shift:
- Cloud-first strategies are hitting cost and performance limits. Teams love flexibility, but not runaway GPU bills or unpredictable throughput. The best are now rebalancing with hybrid strategies or alternative AI cloud providers.
- Data workflows are too fragmented to support scaled AI. Training here, inferencing there, fine-tuning everywhere—without unified access, performance breaks down and insights slow.
- Control is becoming a top priority. As inference moves closer to production, leaders want environments where they control performance, cost, and data security—not just consume it.
Underneath all this, what customers want is clear: infrastructure that gets smarter as their AI scales up.
Why Intelligent Data Platforms Matter
This is where intelligent data platforms shine – and where we’re seeing the most momentum among high-performing AI teams.
Gartner defines that “intelligent platforms provide the administration composability of infrastructure and programmable API functions with automated and generative AI (GenAI) infrastructure intelligence. They integrate compute, storage and networking assets with some or the entire application software stack, creating dedicated workload architectures. Intelligent platform vendors also include components such as application intimacy, management tools, OSs, and virtualization bought and/or consumed as a service.”
They are purpose-built for:
- Supporting data-centric AI pipelines
- Automating performance optimization
- Enabling real-time, policy-driven data movement
- Aligning infrastructure behavior with business priorities
In short, intelligent data platforms are the foundation for turning raw data into business value — quickly, reliably, and at scale.
Data Intelligence: The Missing Layer for Scalable AI
We believe, DDN’s recognition as a Sample Vendor in this category reflects its leadership in building AI-native, intelligent storage architectures. Unlike legacy vendors retrofitting features into old platforms, DDN has built its infrastructure from the ground up for data-intensive, multi-workload environments like AI training, inference, simulation, and real-time analytics.
With products like DDN Infinia, enterprises gain:
- Intelligent tiering and pipeline-aware data services that optimize performance dynamically
- Real-time I/O telemetry and system-level insight, enabling automated tuning and smarter resource allocation
- Multi-tenant-aware architecture to support cloud-like service models and internal chargeback
It’s more than just performance. Data intelligence is the modern control plane. It’s the missing layer legacy infrastructure was never built to support – one that understands model behavior, automates tuning, and surfaces actionable insight.
It’s how our customers are modernizing infrastructure without rearchitecting from scratch. It’s how they’re making infrastructure future-ready, not just “AI-capable.”
NVIDIA’s enterprise AI strategy embraces this same principle – and DDN is recognized as a key storage partner of NVIDIA’s AI Data Platform – helping deliver it at global scale.
Whether it’s reducing idle GPU time, accelerating model deployment, or compressing time-to-insight, DDN transforms infrastructure into a proactive enabler of business outcomes.
Proven Business Impact
Enterprises across industries are using DDN’s intelligent data platform to accelerate innovation, streamline operations, and deliver measurable outcomes. Examples include:
- AI-Powered Drug Discovery at Scale
A global pharmaceutical company reduced drug candidate screening time by 60% by using DDN to automate high-throughput AI pipelines and manage metadata-rich compound libraries — accelerating trial cycles and time-to-market. - Real-Time Manufacturing Optimization
An advanced manufacturing firm deployed DDN to unify AI model training and IoT analytics, enabling real-time defect detection and process optimization. This led to a 40% reduction in material waste and improved production efficiency without expanding compute resources. - Accelerating Financial Model Training
A multinational financial services firm used DDN Infinia to boost throughput for AI-based risk modeling and portfolio simulations, resulting in 4× faster model training, faster market response times, and a 35% reduction in infrastructure costs.
These real-world impacts show how DDN’s intelligent data platforms help enterprises do more with data – faster, smarter, and at lower cost.
DDN: Infrastructure That Thinks, Scales, and Wins
As enterprises evolve from storing data to acting on it in real time, DDN provides the performance, automation, and intelligence to lead that transformation.
For organizations looking to operationalize AI, maximize infrastructure value, and future-proof their data strategy, DDN is the intelligent foundation that delivers.
Ready to define your AI infrastructure strategy?
Gartner, Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Strategy, 2025, 17 June 2025
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