Control Cost. Protect Budgets. Maximize ROI.
The AI infrastructure boom has triggered a sharp spike in the NAND flash pricing. Flash — the foundation of SSDs and all-flash storage systems — has entered a major price upcycle, with industry reporting that prices have more than doubled in several categories since mid-2025, driven by extraordinary AI demand, constrained wafer supply, and manufacturers prioritizing higher-margin memory production (Source: Tom’s Hardware, “Phison CEO: NAND Prices Have More Than Doubled,” Nov 2025).
For customers scaling AI, HPC, and data-intensive environments, this surge translates directly into higher storage costs, less predictable budgets, extended procurement timelines, and growing pressure to overbuy flash capacity today to hedge against even higher prices tomorrow. The financial consequences compound quickly — especially for organizations built around flash-heavy architectures where every expansion relies on purchasing more NAND at market rates.
This is where DDN changes the equation.
Rather than forcing customers to absorb flash volatility, DDN has been perfecting a strategy which offers better choices while still driving business acceleration with the fastest technologies. DDN Hot Pools and unique data management enables the transparent combination of flash with the much lower cost of spinning disk storage even at extreme scale. DDN is engineered to reduce dependency on NAND while delivering more performance per flash dollar.
At the system level, DDN consistently enables customers to achieve required throughput with 50–70% less flash compared to typical all-flash deployments. That efficiency isn’t theoretical — it is validated by DDN’s performance leadership across IO500 benchmarks, real-world AI production environments achieving 40–60% higher GPU utilization, and sustained delivery of up to 2x more throughput per terabyte at scale. The result is simple and powerful: customers buy less flash to achieve better performance, lowering immediate capital spend and insulating their infrastructure from ongoing flash price inflation.
But on-prem efficiency alone is not the whole story. DDN’s architecture is fundamentally designed for hybrid data operations — enabling customers to run their most performance-critical workloads on-premises while seamlessly shifting or bursting workloads to cloud when budgets tighten, supply is constrained, or expansion timing becomes unfavorable. Because our platform is not locked into all-flash designs, customers are never forced to commit to large flash purchases just to keep scaling. Instead, they gain real deployment flexibility — using cloud elasticity as a financial safety valve during NAND price spikes and returning to on-prem investment when market conditions stabilize.
Complementing the technology advantage, DDN also addresses the most painful aspect of the NAND surge — financial uncertainty — through smart pricing and packaging models designed for volatile markets. Customers can align procurement with real business need rather than flash market timing through modular purchases, capacity-on-demand, term and lease programs, and blended CapEx/OpEx structures that combine on-prem deployments with cloud elasticity. These commercial options smooth cost curves, reduce upfront commitments, and eliminate the pressure to “panic buy” flash capacity in response to short-term price spikes.
Together, these capabilities enable a new outcome: measurable economic resilience. Across large AI storage deployments, customers leveraging DDN’s flash efficiency plus hybrid elasticity are achieving up to 30% lower total cost of ownership versus flash-only alternatives, while simultaneously accelerating deployment timelines and improving system utilization.
The bottom line is clear:
In a market where flash prices are volatile and rising, all-flash competitors leave customers exposed to uncontrollable cost escalation. DDN delivers performance leadership with built-in economic flexibility — helping customers minimize flash dependency, stabilize budgets, and maintain ROI — no matter what the NAND market does next.
NAND flash is a type of non-volatile memory used to store data in everything from SSDs and phones to USB drives and memory cards. It keeps data even when power is removed, unlike DRAM or regular RAM.
NAND has entered a major price upcycle, with industry reporting that prices have more than doubled in several categories since mid-2025, driven by extraordinary AI demand, constrained wafer supply, and manufacturers prioritizing higher-margin memory production. For customers scaling AI, HPC, and data-intensive environments (which use NAND flash exclusively), this surge translates directly into higher storage costs, less predictable budgets, extended procurement timelines, and growing pressure to overbuy flash capacity today to hedge against even higher prices tomorrow.
DDN Hot Pools and unique data management enables the transparent combination of flash with the much lower cost of spinning disk storage even at extreme scale. DDN is engineered to reduce dependency on NAND while delivering more performance per flash dollar. The result is simple and powerful: customers buy less flash to achieve better performance, lowering immediate capital spend and insulating their infrastructure from ongoing flash price inflation.
DDN’s architecture is fundamentally designed for hybrid data operations — enabling customers to run their most performance-critical workloads on-premises while seamlessly shifting or bursting workloads to cloud when budgets tighten, supply is constrained, or expansion timing becomes unfavorable.
Complementing the technology advantage, DDN also addresses the most painful aspect of the NAND surge — financial uncertainty — through smart pricing and packaging models designed for volatile markets.
