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US sheriff’s department DOES need a petabyte class storage array

And that's just as well for big data muncher DDN

+Comment Profitability has been regained by privately owned DataDirect Networks, which produces storage arrays for supercomputers, the HPC market at large and the big data for enterprise market.

DDN said its bookings had grown 16 per cent year-over-year in 2014. It gained more than 150 customers with more than 1PB of storage in the year, including Imperial College London, Kern County Sheriff’s Department, Red Wind Casino, Trinity University, Turning Stone Casino, one of the world’s largest banks, a leader in global oil and gas exploration, a major Japan-based pharmaceutical company, and two leading automobile racing companies.

Impressive, but why on Earth would a US county sheriff’s department need a petabyte-class storage array? Well, when the firm explains that the Bakersfield, CA-headquartered department covers 8,000 square miles, has 1,200 staff on its rolls and also maintains both county and municipal jails as well as providing search and rescue, it becomes a little clearer. DDN says the array is for video surveillance purposes.

The company said staff numbers went past 600 in the year and that it had opened an Advanced European Technology Centre in Paris to strengthen its European business.

DDN’s traditional market is supercomputing/HPC. Moving into enterprise big data, web and cloud storage has given sales a boost. It says it saw 80 per cent year-on-year growth for sales of its Web Object Scaler (WOS) object storage platform. University College London has 3PB of WOS storage.

Paul Bloch, president and DDN co-founder, said: “We’re already seeing continued momentum in 2015 with new customer bookings as well as incredible 100PB+ opportunities being added to the pipeline in the two months of the year.”

He told us about some product roadmap ideas, including a follow-on to the existing SFA12k array, an SFA14k. this is likely to be a 4U base enclosure containing 72 SSDS, 48 of them using NVMe. Up to 1,700 disk drives could be attached to it and the overall bandwidth would be 60GB/sec. Block file and embedded (object) access would be offered.

He also said that the IME (Infinite Memory Engine) burst buffer technology would likely be available in software-only form with approved or certified hardware from, say, Dell, IBM and others. Eventually WOS could become available as software-only and then the SSE+A array software.

This unbundling of DDN software would enable customers to take advantage of commodity hardware where it was appropriate.

Bloch said competitors were following DDN but claimed they were three years or so behind its ability to integrate its product.

He claimed DDN only sees Cray and Xyratex in traditional HPC: "They are not relevant in the web/cloud enterprise space, nor do we see them as competitors in those areas that are large growth markets for DDN."

Comment

This bridging of the high-performance large-capacity HPC storage world and the similarly large capacity but less performance-centric enterprise world is paying off for DDN. Customers are willing to pay for its kit. We don't know what its annual revenue run rate is as privately owned companies don't generally give out that sort of information.

However, Bloch told us: "We're inching towards a $100m quarter," and we reckon quarterly revenues have reached about $80, giving DDN a $360m annual run rate.

We would think an IPO could be on the cards; it would let the founders and stock-holding staff get relative boatloads of cash for some of the equity they hold. What would appear to work against this theory, however, is that compared to EMC, NetApp and so on, DDN must be a minnow. It does have a strong position in the market, though, and should continue growing. El Reg's storage desk wonders if it might become an acquisition target.

Seagate has its HPC ClusterStor arrays, gained with its Xyratex acquisition. WD subsidiary HGST has its Active Appliance archive array, for which it is buying Amplidata. Both Seagate and WD see public and enterprise capacity clouds as large scale purchases of disk drives and want to move up the value stack.

Might the DDN business complement what HGST is doing for WD? Watch this space. ®

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