Once again, storage system supplier DataDirect Networks has the top market share – roughly 70 percent – in the TOP500, said the company today. This is the eighth consecutive year DDN has been the top storage system supplier to the Top500, according to Molly Rector, DDN CMO.
Storage is the fast growing segment of the HPC market and has been for some time, according to market watcher IDC, and DDN has indeed been the perennial leader at the top end. Shown below are HPC market segment growth forecasts from IDC given at ISC 2016 two weeks ago. (For the full IDC outlook, see HPCwire article Around the HPC World in 81 Slides with IDC)
It should be interesting to watch how the high-end storage market segment evolves as Seagate (Xyratex) and EMC/Isilon (now owned by Dell) have both stated intentions to ramp up their HPC efforts. (See HPCwire article, Seagate Sets Sights on Broader HPC Market)
Virtually all of the HPC storage system suppliers are also turning their focus to the enterprise where organic growth opportunities are expected to be much larger than in the traditional HPC market.
“Our market share as the storage solution provider to the TOP500 has grown this year primarily due to expansion in the adoption of our end-to-end data management solutions,” said Rector. Heading into ISC 2016 DDN launched a high-end Lustre storage appliance (ES14K with Intel Enterprise Lustre) built specifically for HPC and data intensive Enterprise markets.
During ISC, DDN noted a significant deployment by Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City of DDN’s GS7K with 1PB of storage to speed patient diagnosis and disease treatments by fueling compute and data-intensive research from the world’s first whole genome sequencing center in a pediatric setting.
“With its focus on high-performance, scalable technologies, such as parallel file systems and burst buffer acceleration, DDN is well-positioned to continue to grow, addressing the intensifying demands of traditional HPC users, as well as expanding use cases in high performance business computing,” said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360.