Analysis

posted on 02 July 2008 09:10

Extreme scale out storage provider DataDirect Networks (DDN) is spening 500 million yen ($4.7225 million) to expand its Japanese operations. According to sources it is also thinking about a possible IPO in nine months or so, depending upon market conditions.

DataDirect Networks takes a BlueArc-like approach to storage and has controllers based on FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) front-ending SATA disk drives. It is designed inside a Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) architecture with data being processed in parallel through the FPGAs. All the controller logic is in hardware and it brings enterprise data integrity and reliability and speed, blinding speed, to the capacity-centric SATA drives. It has built itself a strong market supplying organisations in the supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC) markets who need storage systems that can scale and store huge amounts of data and access it very, very quickly.

DataDirect is building out its Japanese operation to better supply the digital media, Internet and high performance computing sectors in Japan. It wants to accelerate its growth trajectory in the world’s second largest economy.

Analog TV broadcasting will end in Japan in July 2011, and the Association for the Promotion of Digital Broadcasting Japan recently announced that as of March, more than 32 million digital terrestrial television sets are already in use. With the transition to 100-percent digital environments, DataDirect Networks Japan is aggressively partnering with major broadcasters, post production and digital intermediate facilities to ensure a seamless transition to all digital content.

Richard Villars, Storage Systems Research VP at IDC, said: “The transition to digital and high-definition content is a global phenomena that will reshape sectors in the media and entertainment industries ranging from content creation, to post-production, to content delivery. Storage solutions like those from DataDirect Networks that deliver the scale and performance characteristics required for next generation digital content will allow content creators and distributors in Japan to quickly and effectively make this transition while delivering more and better content than ever before.”

Scott Genereux, Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Support SVP for DataDirect Networks, added this: “In addition to digital media, DataDirect Networks’ data infrastructure solutions are ideal for scientific and modeling applications used in research and product development laboratories. Japan is the second largest market for high-performance computing solutions and we have seen year-over-year growth in this sector. This new investment will enable us to grow our resources quickly and expand our partnerships....”

One of DataDirect Networks’ HPC clients in Japan, Tsukuba University, currently has the number two supercomputer in the country and the largest Lustre file system installation in Japan. Its I/O cluster achieved over 12 GB/sec from five DataDirect S2A platforms with more than one petabyte of disk capacity.

DataDirect Networks believes that general-purpose, cache-centric storage architectures are just not designed for the content explosion taking place today - meaning EMC CLARiiON, HP EVA, NetApp FAS arrays and the like. 

It requires real-time, purpose-built, platforms designed for massive throughput and scalable capacity. It reckons that it is the only supplier able to deliver the types of next generation data infrastructure platforms required to support the consistent, massive streams of large image files and unstructured data driving the content explosion, enabling users to thrive in their extremely competitive markets.

BlueArc has its Titan products in this market. HP has recently announced its ExDS9100 extreme data storage system for this general market. NetApp has its GX cluster products and EMC has its developing Hulk (Inifiniflex 10000)/Maui system. IBM has its own DIV technology which it has said it is aiming at this market and its Deep Computing group sell DataDirect Networks storage under a rebranded DCS9550 name.

A Data Direct Networks IPO was thought to be possible last summer but nothing happened. The underlying market development looks favourable for an IPO although the current worries about credit crunches and a potential slowdown will obviously affect any potential DataDirect Networks IPO go/no-go decision.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}