Latest news with #DDN
Forbes
25-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Five Expensive Myths About AI Inferencing (And How To Fix Them)
Sven Oehme, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at DDN, drives innovation across both current and future products. The AI boom shows no signs of slowing, but while training gets most of the headlines, it's inferencing where the real business impact happens. Every time a chatbot answers, a fraud alert triggers or a recommendation pops up, that's inferencing at work: models applying what they've learned to fresh data, often in real time. Inference isn't a background process. It's the front line of customer experience, risk mitigation and operational decision making. Yet many organizations still treat inference as an afterthought. This mistake can quietly sabotage performance, inflate costs and undermine AI strategies. Here are five common misconceptions about AI inferencing and what leaders can do differently to future-proof their infrastructure. 1. 'Training is the hard part—inference is easy.' The reality: Training happens occasionally. Inference happens continuously. Once a model is deployed, inference workloads don't just run once; they run millions (sometimes billions) of times a day. This scale fundamentally changes the economic equation: Over the life of a production AI system, inference often consumes the majority of infrastructure resources and budgets. Consider financial services: Detecting fraud across millions of daily transactions requires high-speed, low-latency inference at massive scale. A delay of even a few milliseconds can translate into missed opportunities or real financial losses. What To Do: • Monitor and optimize GPU utilization beyond training phases. • Architect systems to feed inference engines consistently and efficiently. • Design infrastructure specifically for high-frequency, real-time operations, not just batch processing. 2. 'Our storage is fast enough.' The reality: Traditional storage architectures aren't built for AI inference at scale. High-performance inferencing demands real-time access to massive, often unstructured datasets—images, video, embeddings or live sensor data. General-purpose NAS or object storage solutions, while fine for archival or transactional workloads, often can't meet the concurrency and throughput demands of production AI systems. In healthcare, for example, AI-assisted medical imaging requires inferencing with minimal delay. Storage-induced latency isn't just an inconvenience; it can delay diagnoses. What To Do: • Prioritize parallel file systems and storage designed for AI data patterns. • Build for concurrent data access and real-time throughput, not just static speed benchmarks. • Evaluate storage performance under live AI workload simulations, not synthetic tests. 3. 'We'll optimize inference performance later.' The reality: Deferred optimization leads to baked-in inefficiencies. Once models go live, any infrastructure gaps, such as latency, underutilized GPUs and storage bottlenecks, are exponentially harder and more expensive to fix. Poor early decisions often show up as growing technical debt, operational slowdowns and cost overruns. In industries like retail, where real-time LLM-powered agents increasingly handle customer interactions, a few hundred milliseconds of added latency can translate into lost sales or degraded brand experience. What To Do: • Build high-performance data pipelines before models go into production. • Design systems that scale seamlessly under live inference loads. • Automate performance monitoring from day one, especially GPU and storage utilization. 4. 'Cloud storage scales inference just fine.' The reality: Cloud storage is flexible but can become a major bottleneck for inference. Cloud object stores often introduce unpredictable latencies and steep egress fees at scale, especially when serving inference workloads that demand low response times and massive concurrency. For use cases like autonomous driving or industrial inspection, these drawbacks can be dealbreakers. Cloud infrastructure excels for certain training and experimentation phases, but inference at scale often demands hybrid or edge strategies to maintain performance and cost efficiency. What To Do: • Deploy hybrid architectures that keep inference close to the data source. • Optimize for low-latency edge access and minimize unnecessary data transfers. • Balance flexibility with performance and cost predictability. 5. 'Edge inferencing is optional. We'll just send data to the cloud.' The reality: In many sectors, local inferencing is mandatory. From autonomous vehicles to smart factories, edge inferencing reduces response times, cuts costs and ensures resilience even when network connections are imperfect. Sending everything to centralized clouds for processing often introduces unacceptable lag, measured in lost opportunities, safety risks or operational disruptions. For example, in manufacturing, detecting an assembly line anomaly needs to happen within milliseconds. Cloud-based roundtrips simply aren't fast enough. What To Do: • Invest in edge-ready AI infrastructure with local inferencing capabilities. • Ensure models can operate independently while staying connected for updates and telemetry. • Prioritize high-throughput, low-power solutions suited for field deployments. The Bottom Line AI success isn't just about how well you train models. It's about how reliably and efficiently you can deploy them in the real world, under real-time conditions, at real-world scale. Organizations that take inferencing seriously—architecting from the start for speed, scalability and resilience—will unlock far more value from their AI investments. Those who treat it as an afterthought risk finding that their smartest models never reach their full potential. In today's AI economy, the real winners won't be those who build the biggest models. They'll be the ones who deploy them better. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI and HPC Workloads Demand Highest Performance Data – DDN is the Undisputed Leader on IO500
CHATSWORTH, Calif., June 18, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DDN®, the world's leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, today announced that it has secured the #1 position against its competitors on the IO500 benchmark—the industry's gold standard for real-world storage performance in AI and HPC. If You Rely on GPUs, AI Workloads, or HPC Simulations, You Need the Best Technology to Achieve the Best Outcome. Whether your mission is curing diseases, protecting financial markets, or transforming entire industries with generative AI, your outcomes hinge entirely on Data Center and Cloud infrastructure performance. The latest IO500 benchmark confirms what top innovators already know: DDN isn't just leading the pack—we've left it behind entirely. IO500 Proves It: DDN Leads and Delivers 3x to 11x More Value Than Other Data Platform Technologies IO500 isn't just another benchmark—it's the gold standard for assessing real-world storage performance in AI and HPC environments. It plays a critical role in helping organizations determine which technologies to deploy and which vendors to trust. Unlike synthetic benchmarks that simulate hypothetical conditions, IO500 tests systems under real-world pressures—mixed workloads, complex I/O patterns, metadata-intensive operations, and concurrent tasks—exactly the kinds of challenges AI and HPC infrastructures face every day. The result? Clear, credible insights into how your infrastructure will perform when performance matters most. "AI is transforming every industry, and the organizations leading that transformation are the ones that understand infrastructure performance is not optional — it's mission-critical," said Alex Bouzari, Co-Founder and CEO of DDN. "Being ranked #1 on the IO500 benchmark is more than a technical achievement — it's proof that our customers can count on DDN to deliver the speed, scale, and reliability needed to turn data into competitive advantage. DDN is not just ahead. We have left the competition behind." In the critical 10-node production category—where real-world AI workloads operate under intense pressure and where the majority of customer use cases live—DDN isn't just ahead of the competition; it's setting a new industry standard. This leadership translates directly into tangible value for organizations: accelerating innovation, enabling the creation of superior products and services, and expanding the boundaries of what's possible with AI and HPC. [Add in final chart/scorecard] The information means that with DDN, your data center, GPU, CPU, AI, HPC infrastructure will deliver up to 11x more AI training sessions, simulations, and analytics runs per day compared to Weka or VAST. Simply put, you get a lot more done faster, save millions of dollars, while significantly accelerating your business outcomes. Why This Matters for Your AI and HPC Workloads AI and HPC cannot tolerate slowdowns—every minute of wasted compute time drains both budget and innovation momentum. Topping the IO500 rankings proves DDN delivers exceptional end-to-end performance that translates into real business benefits: Finance: A global hedge fund accelerated algorithm development 3x, reducing backtest time and cutting infrastructure costs significantly. Genomics: Researchers at TGen reduced genomics pipeline analysis from 12 hours to under 2, enabling faster, more cost-effective medical breakthroughs. Supercomputing: Leaders like CINECA, Helmholtz Munich, and Bitdeer AI maximize GPU efficiency and throughput with DDN, achieving higher utilization and lower TCO. Built for AI and HPC—From the Ground Up DDN delivers unmatched real-world performance thanks to its purpose-built architecture: Blistering Bandwidth at Scale: Multi-terabyte throughput proven in systems like NVIDIA's Selene and CINECA. Unmatched Metadata Performance: Handles billions of files, small I/O, and concurrency without compromise. Native Parallelism for AI: True parallel file access with no shim layers or rewrites. Pipeline-Aware Caching: Eliminates latency and idle GPU cycles. Enterprise Resilience: Trusted by NVIDIA, HPE, Dell, Lenovo, and national defense agencies worldwide. Why Competitors Can't Keep Up Weka requires manual tuning and fails under real-world concurrency. VAST underperforms on write-heavy and metadata-intensive workloads. Hammerspace lacks relevant deployments and trials in IO500 benchmarks. Your AI is Only as Good as Your Infrastructure In AI and HPC, every second of compute time matters. Bottlenecks don't just slow you down—they delay discovery, reduce ROI, and waste GPU resources. DDN's #1 result in the IO500 is not just a benchmark—it's proof that DDN customers are leading the future. Explore the full IO500 results: Read our latest blog: AI and HPC Workloads Demand Highest Performance Data – DDN is the Undisputed Leader on IO500. About DDN DDN is the world's leading AI and data intelligence company, empowering organizations to maximize the value of their data with end-to-end HPC and AI-focused solutions. Its customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyperscalers to cutting-edge research centers, all leveraging DDN's proven data intelligence platform for scalable, secure, and high-performance AI deployments that drive 10x returns. Follow DDN: LinkedIn, X, and YouTube. View source version on Contacts DDN Media Contact: Amanda LeeVP, Marketing – Analyst and Media Relationsamlee@
Business Wire
18-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
AI and HPC Workloads Demand Highest Performance Data – DDN is the Undisputed Leader on IO500
CHATSWORTH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- DDN ®, the world's leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, today announced that it has secured the #1 position against its competitors on the IO500 benchmark —the industry's gold standard for real-world storage performance in AI and HPC. "Being ranked #1 on the IO500 benchmark is more than a technical achievement — it's proof that our customers can count on DDN to deliver the speed, scale, and reliability needed to turn data into competitive advantage," said Bouzari. If You Rely on GPUs, AI Workloads, or HPC Simulations, You Need the Best Technology to Achieve the Best Outcome. Whether your mission is curing diseases, protecting financial markets, or transforming entire industries with generative AI, your outcomes hinge entirely on Data Center and Cloud infrastructure performance. The latest IO500 benchmark confirms what top innovators already know: DDN isn't just leading the pack—we've left it behind entirely. IO500 Proves It: DDN Leads and Delivers 3x to 11x More Value Than Other Data Platform Technologies IO500 isn't just another benchmark—it's the gold standard for assessing real-world storage performance in AI and HPC environments. It plays a critical role in helping organizations determine which technologies to deploy and which vendors to trust. Unlike synthetic benchmarks that simulate hypothetical conditions, IO500 tests systems under real-world pressures—mixed workloads, complex I/O patterns, metadata-intensive operations, and concurrent tasks—exactly the kinds of challenges AI and HPC infrastructures face every day. The result? Clear, credible insights into how your infrastructure will perform when performance matters most. 'AI is transforming every industry, and the organizations leading that transformation are the ones that understand infrastructure performance is not optional — it's mission-critical,' said Alex Bouzari, Co-Founder and CEO of DDN. 'Being ranked #1 on the IO500 benchmark is more than a technical achievement — it's proof that our customers can count on DDN to deliver the speed, scale, and reliability needed to turn data into competitive advantage. DDN is not just ahead. We have left the competition behind.' In the critical 10-node production category —where real-world AI workloads operate under intense pressure and where the majority of customer use cases live—DDN isn't just ahead of the competition; it's setting a new industry standard. This leadership translates directly into tangible value for organizations: accelerating innovation, enabling the creation of superior products and services, and expanding the boundaries of what's possible with AI and HPC. [Add in final chart/scorecard] The information means that with DDN, your data center, GPU, CPU, AI, HPC infrastructure will deliver up to 11x more AI training sessions, simulations, and analytics runs per day compared to Weka or VAST. Simply put, you get a lot more done faster, save millions of dollars, while significantly accelerating your business outcomes. Why This Matters for Your AI and HPC Workloads AI and HPC cannot tolerate slowdowns—every minute of wasted compute time drains both budget and innovation momentum. Topping the IO500 rankings proves DDN delivers exceptional end-to-end performance that translates into real business benefits: Finance: A global hedge fund accelerated algorithm development 3x, reducing backtest time and cutting infrastructure costs significantly. Genomics: Researchers at TGen reduced genomics pipeline analysis from 12 hours to under 2, enabling faster, more cost-effective medical breakthroughs. Supercomputing: Leaders like CINECA, Helmholtz Munich, and Bitdeer AI maximize GPU efficiency and throughput with DDN, achieving higher utilization and lower TCO. Built for AI and HPC—From the Ground Up DDN delivers unmatched real-world performance thanks to its purpose-built architecture: Blistering Bandwidth at Scale: Multi-terabyte throughput proven in systems like NVIDIA's Selene and CINECA. Unmatched Metadata Performance: Handles billions of files, small I/O, and concurrency without compromise. Native Parallelism for AI: True parallel file access with no shim layers or rewrites. Pipeline-Aware Caching: Eliminates latency and idle GPU cycles. Enterprise Resilience: Trusted by NVIDIA, HPE, Dell, Lenovo, and national defense agencies worldwide. Why Competitors Can't Keep Up Weka requires manual tuning and fails under real-world concurrency. VAST underperforms on write-heavy and metadata-intensive workloads. Hammerspace lacks relevant deployments and trials in IO500 benchmarks. Your AI is Only as Good as Your Infrastructure In AI and HPC, every second of compute time matters. Bottlenecks don't just slow you down—they delay discovery, reduce ROI, and waste GPU resources. DDN's #1 result in the IO500 is not just a benchmark—it's proof that DDN customers are leading the future. Explore the full IO500 results: About DDN DDN is the world's leading AI and data intelligence company, empowering organizations to maximize the value of their data with end-to-end HPC and AI-focused solutions. Its customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyperscalers to cutting-edge research centers, all leveraging DDN's proven data intelligence platform for scalable, secure, and high-performance AI deployments that drive 10x returns.
Business Wire
16-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
DDN's Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch Named EY US Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2025 Greater Los Angeles Award Winners
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- DDN, the global leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, today announced that Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) has named Co-Founders Alex Bouzari, CEO, and Paul Bloch, President, the Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2025 Greater Los Angeles Award winners. Entrepreneur Of The Year is the preeminent competitive awards program for entrepreneurs and leaders of high-growth companies. For 40 years, EY US has celebrated ambitious entrepreneurs who are transforming industries, impacting communities, and creating long-term value. Bouzari and Bloch were selected by an independent panel of judges composed of past winners, leading CEOs, and industry luminaries. Candidates were evaluated on criteria including long-term value creation, entrepreneurial spirit, purpose-driven commitment, and demonstrable impact and growth. 'For us, this recognition is not just about individual achievement — it's a celebration of the company and community we've built together over nearly three decades,' said Bouzari. 'DDN started with a simple belief — that if you harness data the right way, it can change the world. Today, that belief drives everything we do, from advancing AI to enabling medical breakthroughs and powering the fastest supercomputers on the planet. This award belongs to our extraordinary team, our customers and partners, and especially to Paul — my friend, co-founder, and fellow entrepreneur.' 'This award is deeply meaningful because it reflects the power of enduring partnership and shared purpose,' said Bloch. 'From day one, Alex and I set out to solve some of the world's most complex data challenges — not for the sake of technology alone, but to enable real-world impact. Today, our solutions drive breakthroughs in AI, science, healthcare, and industry. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together, and honored to share this recognition with Alex, our extraordinary DDN team, and the innovative customers who push us to keep evolving.' From their beginnings as Caltech classmates, Bouzari and Bloch founded DDN with a vision to unlock the full potential of data at scale. That vision has since evolved into a global AI and data intelligence powerhouse, supporting innovation across industries including healthcare, life sciences, climate science, energy, and autonomous systems. As Greater Los Angeles award winners, Bouzari and Bloch are now eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2025 National Awards, to be announced at the Strategic Growth Forum® in November. The overall national winner will then advance to compete for the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™ Award in June 2026. Entrepreneur Of The Year celebrates diverse types of leadership — from original founders and transformational CEOs to multigenerational leaders redefining legacy businesses. The program has honored innovators such as Reed Hoffman and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn, Sheila Mikhail of AskBio, Eric Yuan of Zoom, and Howard Schultz of Starbucks Coffee Company. For more information, visit About DDN DDN is the world's leading AI and data intelligence company, empowering organizations to maximize the value of their data with end-to-end HPC and AI-focused solutions. Its customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyperscalers to cutting-edge research centers, all leveraging DDN's proven data intelligence platform for scalable, secure, and high-performance AI deployments that drive 10x returns. Follow DDN: LinkedIn, X, and YouTube. Sponsors Founded and produced by Ernst & Young LLP, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards include presenting sponsors PNC Bank, Cresa, LLC, Marsh USA, and SAP. In Greater Los Angeles, sponsors also include ADP, Cooley, Los Angeles Business Journal, Vaco, and Big Picture. About Entrepreneur Of The Year Founded in 1986, Entrepreneur Of The Year has celebrated more than 11,000 ambitious visionaries leading dynamic businesses in the US and nearly 60 countries around the world. The US program includes 17 regional programs whose winners advance to national recognition at the Strategic Growth Forum® in November. The overall national winner represents the US at the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™ competition. Learn more at About EY EY is building a better working world by creating new value for clients, people, society, and the planet, while building trust in capital markets. Enabled by data, AI and advanced technology, EY teams help clients shape the future with confidence and develop answers for the most pressing issues of today and tomorrow. EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited. For more information, please visit
Business Wire
10-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
DDN Launches Next-Gen Data Intelligence Platform at ISC 2025 to Power AI and HPC at Enterprise Scale
HAMBURG, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2025, DDN, the global leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, announced the official launch of its next-generation appliance: AI400X3 and enhancements to its end-to-end AI software, Infinia 2.1. Together, these innovations form the core of the DDN Data Intelligence Platform, purpose-built to meet the performance, security, and scalability demands of modern enterprises accelerating AI and HPC deployments. This milestone reinforces DDN's leadership in high-performance data infrastructure, offering enterprises a unified solution to accelerate SLA timelines, lower TCO, and unlock data-driven innovation at scale. Accelerating Enterprise AI and HPC with the DDN AI400X3 Powered by DDN EXAScaler® software, the AI400X3 delivers: Up to 70% higher write throughput and 55% higher read throughput over the previous generation Seamless integration with NVIDIA DGX™, NVIDIA GB200, Spectrum-X™, and BlueField® DPUs for future-ready AI infrastructure Enterprise-grade multi-tenancy with per-tenant isolation, VLANs, quotas, and access controls Proactive drive failure management and online upgrades with zero downtime, ensuring unmatched availability Real-time health monitoring, automated orchestration via EMF APIs, and seamless integration with enterprise collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams By simplifying deployment and reducing software complexity, the AI400X3 slashes operational costs and streamlines management—freeing IT teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. NVIDIA-approved reference architectures featuring the AI400X3—validated for both NVIDIA GB200 and NVIDIA HGX B200 platforms—are available now at Introducing Infinia 2.1: Intelligent Data Services for AI Workflows The latest release of Infinia 2.1 expands support for complex, high-throughput data pipelines. New features include: Infinia Hadoop Connector (in preview) for high-performance Hadoop and Spark workloads using native S3-compatible access Expanded observability through native integrations with Datadog, Chronosphere, and OpenTelemetry These capabilities enable enterprises to gain deeper visibility into their infrastructure, reduce issue resolution times, and maintain data pipeline efficiency from edge to core. Built for Business Outcomes: Speed, Simplicity, and Scale The combination of AI400X3 and Infinia 2.1 delivers clear advantages for enterprise IT leaders: Accelerated time-to-value for AI model training, inference, and complex simulations Improved SLA compliance with multi-tenant performance guarantees and real-time diagnostics Lower operational cost with simplified architectures and fewer VMs to manage Enhanced data security and tenant isolation for CSPs and internal business units Future-proof infrastructure built to scale with emerging AI and HPC workloads 'DDN is empowering enterprises to run AI and HPC at scale with confidence,' said Sven Oehme, CTO at DDN. 'The AI400X3 and Infinia 2.1 give organizations the tools to meet the demands of AI-driven transformation—delivering performance, control, and cost-efficiency in a single, unified platform.' Meet DDN at ISC 2025 Join DDN at Booth #E01 at ISC 2025 in Hamburg to see live demonstrations of the DDN Data Intelligence Platform in action. Learn how leading enterprises, CSPs, and research institutions are using DDN to accelerate innovation and reduce time to insight. For more information, visit About DDN DDN is the world's leading AI and data intelligence company, empowering organizations to maximize the value of their data with end-to-end HPC and AI-focused solutions. Its customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyperscalers to cutting-edge research centers, all leveraging DDN's proven data intelligence platform for scalable, secure, and high-performance AI deployments that drive 10x returns. Follow DDN: LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
