On this episode, I’m with Molly Rector (CMO at DDN Storage) and we talk about:
(due to the scarce audio quality, the transcript is not as good as usual)
Enrico: [inaudible 00:00:02] and welcome to
another [inaudible 00:00:03] Juku.Beats. Today, I’m with Molly Ractor, CMO,
Chief Marketing Officer at DDN. Hi Molly, how are you?
Molly: I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for having me, today.
Enrico: Good … thank you very much for
being here with me. You know the format of this podcast, so this is only five
minutes chat and I will ask you three questions. First of all, I would like to
start with the fact that you recently showed very good results. Can you please
have something about that and how things are going for DDN and explain why you
are growing so well in the very high hand HPC and enterprise market.
Molly: Right, thanks Enrico … it has been exciting. DDN,
while we are a privately held company, do reach results better business epic
quarter so that we can have the market, the buyers, understand the financial
position, as well as the market position of DDN. We released our 2014 fiscal
year growth and accomplished 6% year over year growth, which in the market
where many other storage companies were either flat or even shrinking in double
digit types of numbers, really shows the need for DDN technology has really
grown in the market.
DDN has done a very successful job of moving
beyond just traditional HPC, which is still the core of our business with us
having the storage power in 67% of the top 100 largest super computers. But
also, delivering our high performance and storage solutions to other markets,
such as the web cloud service providers or building surface infrastructures on
both our performance and object storage solutions.
Financial services groups … 72% for us last
year … energy exploration grew over 200% … so, some of the new enterprise
HPC applications are really starting to adopt DDN and primarily, for a couple
of different reasons, but they need the high performance mix style that we can
handle in our traditional HPC storage solutions for both in-house stating
analytics and data search ability.
Then also, the fact that we tie it out and
have SSB caching. We have persistent hard drive storage, scale out to object
storage and we’re now even connecting to tape, all on a single unified solution
that’s really helping to build demand for customers for lots of different types
of work role models.
Enrico: In fact, you have this multi tier
strategy that involves [inaudible 00:03:05] answer, appliances on the front end
and objects thrown [inaudible 00:03:09]. Can you explain it better to our
listeners?
Molly: You bet … object storage … when it first came out,
was very clearly a great new solution for how to store large quantities of data
efficiently. It has the issue, though, of how do you get data in and out of it?
Lots of customers liked the concept of object storage, but couldn’t quite
figure out how to integrate it into their environment, so new data centers
often would be built with object storage and a key foundational element, but
existing data centers couldn’t really figure out how to integrate to the IP
infrastructure.
What DDN has done is integrate object storage
transparently as part of just [inaudible 00:03:53] storage solutions. We put a
high performance style system and our clustered file system in front of our
storage solutions and then the customers simply just need to pick and choose
what type of technology they need.
If they need lots of flash … if they
actually need a large archive or a mix of those types of things … if all
integrated behind a single file system … that makes it very easy to get the
data into the object store, but it also makes it very easy to, over time, grow
your system wherever you need the capacity or the performance.
That wholly integrated object stored is just
another tier storage that makes it much easier for customers to adopt. We’ve
seen huge adoption in the last year. I believe the number is 70% or
approximately that, of growth of object storage and adoption for us in the last
12 months.
Enrico: Good … so, from this point of view
and from the point of view of your company, how do you see the market for the
next six, nine months? What DDN have in mind for the next future?
Molly: You bet … what we’re really seeing for the next …
for the coming year, we do have several product releases coming out, being a hardware
storage provider … we constantly are updating our processors or the capacity
of the disc drives we support, the performance of our systems and that is key
to us.
As we look into some of the major trends, the
idea … and, we’ve already talked about this when we do our … it’s really
the concept of these converged infrastructures or hyper converged
infrastructures, where customers can use a single system to accomplish their
performance, their scale, their content distribution, to multiple geographic
locations or data centers, all in a single system.
I really believe they’re the direction of the
future that instead of having to buy four or five different technologies for
those different needs, that you can go to a single solution or a single vendor
to bring in the type of converged infrastructures … I think is the trend.
We have some pretty fantastic amounts that
are coming out this year that will be delivered in that area. Even though we’re
already delivering that space, continuing to pack more performance in density
and technology options into those infrastructures will be a focus for DDN in
the coming years.
Enrico: Okay Molly, thank you very much. A
lot of news and we will follow you during the … thank you very much for your
time.
Molly: You bet … thank you.
Enrico: Okay, ciao …
