Modern enterprises are generating and using more data than ever before. Whether it’s coming from edge devices, cloud-native applications, large-scale simulations, or analytics pipelines, the need for reliable, high-performance data infrastructure is now critical. But while compute capabilities have rapidly advanced, many organizations are finding that their data storage systems haven’t kept pace with growing demands. Traditional storage treats data as passive, simply something to store and retrieve.
As a result, companies face growing inefficiencies in how data is collected, organized, accessed, and moved, especially across hybrid environments. These inefficiencies show up in longer processing times, higher cloud bills, underutilized resources, and greater operational complexity.
DDN Infinia flips that model by treating data as active, queryable, and governed, making data instantly accessible by any application or user across edge, cloud, or core. Just this week, DDN Infinia was named Most Innovative AI Infrastructure Product of the Year by CRN for addressing these very issues. But this recognition wasn’t just about new features. It marked a shift in what enterprise storage can and should deliver: consistent performance, lower complexity, better economics, and operational flexibility across environments.
What’s Slowing Down Your Data-Driven Workloads
Organizations today face growing pressure to extract value from massive volumes of structured and unstructured data spread across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. Legacy storage architectures weren’t built to handle this scale or complexity. Traditional file systems buckle under the weight of today’s data demands, while cloud object storage can be expensive and slow to scale for performance.
This creates delays in decision-making, rising infrastructure costs, and inefficiencies across data pipelines. As organizations become increasingly reliant on real-time data movement, processing, and analysis to power digital services, their infrastructure must evolve. What’s needed is a modern, intelligent data platform – one that unifies access, applies real-time policy controls, and supports multi-modal AI workloads from ingest to inference.
Driving Business Outcomes with a Unified Storage Foundation
DDN Infinia is a software-defined data platform designed specifically to eliminate the storage challenges that limit enterprise performance and scalability. It unifies the capabilities of a high-performance object store, a global metadata catalog, and a distributed control plane that works across environments.
Instead of treating storage as a backend utility, Infinia makes storage a core enabler of AI success: integrating seamlessly into data pipelines, application frameworks, and orchestration layers. It handles mixed workloads, integrates with modern software frameworks, and supports a range of data formats and protocols without needing separate silos.
Where traditional storage platforms can require costly tuning to meet specific performance needs, Infinia is designed to provide consistent performance out of the box. It delivers multiple TB/s of throughput with sub-millisecond latency; enough to keep even the largest workloads moving efficiently. This is especially important for businesses that need to reduce idle infrastructure time and increase system utilization.
Flexible Infrastructure for Diverse, Distributed Workloads
One of the platform’s defining advantages is its native object-based architecture. With full S3 compatibility, Infinia supports modern data workflows while offering enterprise-grade enhancements such as advanced metadata tagging, policy-driven tiering, and built-in security features like immutable object lock and legal hold.
This combination allows organizations to treat data not just as a byproduct of operations, but as a managed asset. Teams can tag, search, and automate actions on data in real time, improving both operational efficiency and governance. With support for thousands of metadata tags per object, organizations gain granular visibility and control which is critical for AI training, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and real-time analytics.
Infinia’s distributed control plane supports full tenant and sub-tenant isolation, giving teams or business units the ability to manage their environments independently while maintaining centralized oversight. For service providers or large enterprises running shared environments, this level of isolation and control is crucial for maintaining performance and security standards.
Built to Win Awards – Engineered to Deliver Value
CRN’s recognition of Infinia was based on more than technical specs. It was driven by the platform’s ability to solve practical problems that enterprises face every day.
Infinia boosts system throughput by up to 30% and accelerates I/O operations like checkpointing and metadata queries up to 600x faster than legacy systems. That translates into lower infrastructure waste and better utilization of compute resources, whether in a data center or a cloud environment. Faster object listings, checkpointing, and metadata searches also reduce the time spent managing and preparing data, ultimately freeing up teams to focus on higher-value work.
Beyond performance, Infinia helps lower infrastructure costs by minimizing unnecessary data movement, reducing reliance on expensive cloud tiers, and shrinking deployment footprints. For organizations running large-scale analytics or simulation pipelines, these savings can quickly become significant.
Industry Leaders Solving Real Challenges with Infinia
Across industries, Infinia is being used to address core operational needs:
In life sciences, it supports high-speed indexing of genomic and molecular data, accelerating research and diagnostics. In financial services, Infinia supports fraud detection and risk management by enabling secure, low-latency access to massive volumes of transactional and behavioral data. Institutions use it to monitor high-frequency trades in real time, flag anomalies, and maintain continuous compliance with evolving regulatory requirements.
The best example of DDN Infinia’s impact is a well-known AI training company running a popular GPT, operating at massive scale, who selected Infinia as their foundational storage platform after comprehensive evaluation of all available technologies. In an industry where every minute of GPU idle time costs thousands of dollars, their testing revealed that traditional storage solutions would create unacceptable bottlenecks, while Infinia regularly delivers object listing performance more than 75x faster than traditional solutions, directly translating to maximum GPU utilization and competitive advantage.
Business-Critical Results:
- 75x faster object listing (30M objects/second) eliminates data discovery bottlenecks
- >1.1TB/s model loading across 150,000 simultaneous connections maximizes GPU utilization
- 5-6PB daily ingestion enables continuous training on fresh data without storage constraints
- Dramatic reduction in model development cycles through eliminated I/O wait times
This customer built their AI infrastructure from the ground up, choosing Infinia after discovering that traditional storage solutions would require 15-30 minute waits for training data location, while Infinia provides instant availability at this massive scale. The performance gap was so significant that traditional storage would have resulted in GPU clusters sitting idle burning money, while Infinia enables immediate productivity from day one.
When training runs cost $50,000-$500,000 per experiment, storage performance isn’t infrastructure – it’s competitive advantage. Infinia delivers the scale and performance required for serious AI development, transforming storage from a bottleneck into an accelerator that traditional solutions simply cannot match.
Scalable Infrastructure that Meets Tomorrow’s Demands
The volume and complexity of enterprise data will only increase. Organizations need infrastructure that scales with those demands, without locking them into expensive or inflexible platforms. Infinia’s architecture is designed to meet that for the next generation of business and technology challenges.
From policy-driven storage management to flexible deployment options and deep integration with existing systems, Infinia offers a level of control and performance that’s rare in enterprise storage today.
For organizations seeking to modernize infrastructure while improving ROI, reducing cloud spend, and accelerating AI time-to-insight, Infinia provides a purpose-built foundation for long-term success. Whether you’re building an AI factory or modernizing data infrastructure, Infinia is built to meet the challenge. Ready to see Infinia in action? Visit our website to explore how your AI and analytics workflows accelerate with DDN.
