DDN is known for storage systems that deliver extreme performance and capacity but also carry large price tags. To try to broaden its market, the vendor this week introduced lower-priced arrays, including one that starts at $100,000 during introduction pricing that runs until the end of June.

“We found there are a lot of customers and prospective customers looking to start with DataDirect at a lower price and form factor while benefitting from scalability,” DDN marketing VP Jeff Denworth said.

The new systems are the DDN SFA10K-M and SFA10K-ME. The 10K-M scales to 720 TB with InfiniBand or Fibre Channel networking and  with SAS, SATA or solid-state drives (SSDs). Customers can upgrade the 20u system to the larger SFA10K-X.

The SFA10K-ME is the same hardware as the 10K-M, but can be bundled with DDN’s GridScaler or ExaScaler parallel file systems. The promotional $100,000 price is for a SFA10K-M with eight InfiniBand ports, a 60-slot disk enclosure, and 16 GB of mirrored cache.

DDN says its new systems cost 40% less with a 57% smaller form factor than its larger SFA storage arrays.

“The news of dramatically smaller footprints and reduced-cost SFA entry points is not what we’re used to hearing from a company that is accustomed to extending the scalability and performance envelopes of big data applications,” Taneja Group analyst Jeff Byrne wrote of DDN’s new systems in a blog on the Taneja web site.

Denworth said the new systems fill a gap in DDN’s product line between the S2A6620 midrange storage for media/entertainment and high performance computing and the SFA10K-X high-bandwidth petabyte capacity platforms.

“Customers can grow the system as requirements and budget dictates,” Denworth said.

SFA10K-M customers can upgrade to DDN 10K or SFA12K systems, but they would have to take the systems offline. There are no non-disruptive upgrades.

DDN this week launched its SFA12K series, which will replace the SFA10K product that the vendor has had success selling to HPC shops.

DDN CEO Alex Bouzari said the biggest improvements over the SFA10K are the internal network inside the appliance, the storage processing that lets customers embed file systems or applications inside the appliance, and greater density.

The SFA12K has 64GB of memory and DDN claims it scales to 1 TBps with 25 arrays using InfiniBand or Fibre Channel connectivity. It also runs up to 16 virtual machines inside an array. The SFA12K holds up to 84 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SAS or SATA disks in one array – up from 60 drives in the SFA10K – and 840 disks in a rack. The SFA12K supports up to 600TB of eMLC solid-state drives (SSDs).

The SFA12K platform consists of three products. The SFA12K-40 is the highest performing model, hitting 40 GBps of bandwidth and 1.4 million flash IOPs. A SFA12K-20 handles 20 GBps and 700,000 flash IOPS, according to DDN. The SFA12K-20E is available with DDN’s ExaScaler or GridScaler parallel file systems running on the SFA12K-20 array. Customers can also embed applications natively within the SFA12K-20E.

The SFA10K could deliver 800,000 flash IOPS and 15 GBps of bandwidth. Bouzari said a new architecture was needed to keep up with larger data sets, cloud computer requirements and data center power and footprint restraints.

“In HPC, people are asking for levels of performance that just cannot be achieved by following the same old approaches,” he said. “Today you have large data centers being built and types of processing requirements deployed inside data centers that cannot be met with traditional architectures.”

Bouzar said IBM and Hewlett-Packard are among the DDN partners who will resell the new platform. The SFA12K won’t go GA until the second quarter of 2012, but DDN said it has more than 50 PB of orders including a 15 PB purchase by the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) in Munich. LRZ already uses DDN storage for its SuperMUC HPC supercomputer. DDN said Argonne National Laboratory has also purchased SFA12K technology for its IBM BlueGene/Q-based Mira supercomputer.

DDN claims the SFA10000-X can handle mixed workload read-write speeds of 15 GBps with solid-state drives (SSDs). It holds up to 600 drives for a maximum capacity of 1.8 PB in a rack. DDN aims the system at Big Data (analytics and a large number of objects), media and content-intensive applications. It will replace the S2A9900. DDN already has a SFA10000-E system aimed at highly virtualized environments.

DDN said Italian research center Cineca in June acquired a SFA10000-X from IBM. DDN Marketing VP Jeff Denworth offers the deal as proof that the relationship with DDN and IBM remains solid. IBM recently issued an end-of-life notice to customers for its DCS9900 – based on DDN’s S2A9900 — and suggested the DCS3700 that IBM sells from DDN competitor NetApp Engenio as a replacement.

The Engenio platform has competed with DDN for years, and is now in the hands of NetApp – another IBM partner. Denworth said IBM and DDN still have OEM deals for two other systems – including the S2A 6620 that IBM sells as a backend to its SONAS — and said IBM may have plans for the SFA10000-X.
“IBM discontinued one system among the portfolio we sell through them, and that system is four-year-old technology,” he said.

So why didn’t IBM replace the SFA99000 with the SFA10000-X? “All I can say is the SFA10000-X has a certain customer profile,” Denworth said. “I can’t make any statements about IBM’s intentions for that product.”

DDN executives call DDN the world’s largest privately held storage vendor, and claim they are doing well enough that the loss of any single partner wouldn’t break the company. DDN claims 83% revenue growth from 2007 through 2010 and is on a pace for more than $200 million in revenue this year.

Yet despite a flurry of storage system vendor acquisitions last year and others looking to go public, DDN remains independent and private. DDN EVP of strategy and technology Jean-Luc Chatelain said an IPO will only happen if the terms are enticing enough.

“We’re privately held, and we like it that way,“ he said. “An IPO is not an end for us, it’s a means. If we can use an IPO as a tool for additional currency for growth, we’ll look at that.”

DDN is growing its executive team. Chatelain joined from Hewlett-Packard in February. This month DDN hired former HP executive Erwan Menard as COO, Adaptec veteran Christopher O’Meara as CFO, and Quantum veteran William Cox as VP of worldwide channel sales.

On the technology front, DDN is using enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) SSDs for the first time with the SFA10000-X. It is also embracing the Big Data label that storage vendors have been throwing around since EMC acquired scale-out NAS vendor Isilon late last year.

“DDN has been doing Big Data since 1998, everybody else is ust catching up,” Chatelain said. “I don’t like the term, but everybody’s using it now. Our customers do Big Data for a living.”

DDN is preparing to launch – probably next month – a NASScaler product that DDN’s EVP of strategy and technology Jean-Luc Chatelain said will be “aimed at the NetApp market” rather than HPC.

“It has standard IT NAS-type behavior,” Chatelain said. “We realized the demand for the density, bandwidth, capacity and performance that we used to see in specialty machines has migrated toward the traditional NAS market. It’s the standard NFS behavior on top of high performance computing.”

The NASScaler will be DDN’s fourth file storage system, to go with its xStreamScaler for media and entertainment, GridScaler for cloud and HPC and ExaScaler for supercomputing.

DDN bills itself as the largest private storage vendor, an assessment that IDC agrees with. DDN executives claim the vendor generated $180 million in revenue in 2010 and grew about 40% in 2009 and 2010. The vendor’s storage sells into what EMC calls “big data” markets, which are the same ones NetApp intends to chase with LSI Engenio. Those markets include HPC, media and entertainment, digital security, and as a platform for cloud providers.

It will take awhile before DDN can provide NetApp with solid competition in mainstream NAS, but the vendors will contend for both end user customers and OEM partners in the HPC space. The Engenio 7900 Storage System competes with DDN’s products, and is sold by OEMs including Cray, Teradata and SGI.

“It will be interesting to see what happens now,” Chatelain said. “NetApp is not focused on the domain where we play. NetApp is not a brand name in the world of high performance computing or rich media. We are known as people committed to those verticals.”