Increased adoption among the upper echelon of the most demanding systems

CHATSWORTH, Calif., Dec. 3 -- DataDirect Networks (DDN), the leading data infrastructure provider for scalable, content-intensive enterprises, today announced that the company has significantly increased its adoption by the world's fastest supercomputers, as ranked by the November 2010 36th edition of the TOP500 list available at www.top500.org. As the list of record for the world's fastest HPC systems, the TOP500 list serves as the industry's leading barometer of trends and leadership across the clustered computing marketplace.

Having focused on the unique challenges of the HPC industry for over eight years, DDN's increasing adoption in many of the world's most data-intensive computing datacenters on this list validates key DDN product design decisions and strong customer focus. DDN's dominant share of storage systems for the TOP500 supercomputers increased across all geographies and all application areas. This resulted in an increase of DDN's share of storage in a number of categories, including:

• 44 percent of the total performance delivered by the total TOP500 list leverages technology from DDN.
• DDN experienced a 8 percent increase in usage by the Top 100 systems, now serving 57 percent of the Top100 supercomputers -- more than any other company.
• DDN continues to deliver more bandwidth to the TOP500 list than all other storage companies combined.

"Supercomputing has become a top priority for governments, universities, and private corporations around the world," said Alex Bouzari, cofounder and CEO, DDN. "In every market and application we serve, DDN works very hard to establish our highly-differentiated solutions as the gold standard by which others are measured, and we are pleased to be the platform of choice for organizations solving the challenging and increasing demands of complex HPC centers."

DDN continues to increase its leadership in HPC storage by delivering products that are strongly differentiated by a focus on two key strategies. First is the Open Platform strategy that gives customers the option to choose among four world-class file systems and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) systems that meet the full range of HPC application requirements. Second is a focus on leadership in performance that accelerates HPC users' applications. This allows customers to achieve industry-leading performance in both streaming and random data access by choosing high performance technologies such as native InfiniBand and solid state disks to meet their demanding storage requirements. DDN HPC-optimized storage solutions provide diagonal scalability, allowing customers to increase capacity and/or performance as their application needs dictate. The Open Platform strategy and leadership performance are the key reasons why 3/4 of the top 20 supercomputers leverage DDN systems.

"DDN is an established vendor in the HPC market, with a set of solutions that are tailored for the demanding needs of HPC environments," said Earl Joseph, Ph.D., IDC program vice president for high performance computing. "Given the company's product focus and expertise in HPC, their growth in this area is not a surprise."

Recognition of DDN's storage leadership in HPC was reiterated at the recently concluded SC10 conference, where HPCWire, a leading industry publication, recognized the DDN Storage Fusion Architecture for its groundbreaking innovation. Combining industry-leading storage performance with intelligent virtualization, this advanced platform eliminates storage gateways and networking which have been traditionally required to build a clustered, parallel HPC storage environment -- while also lowering latency to increase application performance.

About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks, Inc. is the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, content-intensive environments in the world -- including the largest online gaming and music sites, social networking applications developers, photo and video sharing services, high performance computing environments, and seven of the 10 largest supercomputers in the world. Having sold hundreds of petabytes of storage systems worldwide, the company's storage technology delivers massive throughput, scalable capacity, consistency, efficiency and data integrity for today's extremely competitive and evolving markets. For more information, go to www.ddn.com or call +1-800-TERABYTE (837-2298).

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Source: DataDirect Networks, Inc.