Vendor Name: DataDirect Networks (DDN)
Principle Location: Chatsworth, Calif.
Web Site: http://www.ddn.com/
Founders/Principles:
- Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder: Mr. Bouzari has more than 20 years of storage industry experience and in running profitable, fast-growth technology companies. He was CEO of Personal Writer Inc. and co-founder of MegaDrive Systems Inc.
- Paul Bloch, President and Co-Founder: Mr. Bloch has more than 20 years of experience with start-up and management businesses. He served as president of Personal Writer Inc. and MegaDrive Systems Inc. He was a director at Hi-Tech Consulting Group, a European management consulting firm based in the United States.
- Jean-Luc Chatelain, Executive VP, Strategy and Technology: Mr. Chatelain joined DDN in February 2011 from Hewlett-Packard where he was responsible for leading HP's entry into ILM. He has several decades of experience as a technology industry leader. He founded Persist Technologies Inc., a provider of reference information storage software acquired by HP. He co-invented the SmartCell, the world's first application-centric enterprise storage technology, and created a breakthrough medical imaging workflow technology for Cemax-Icon, which drove growth for the company before it was acquired by Imation/Eastman Kodak.
- Philippe Ciampossin, VP, R&D, and CTO of Software: Mr. Ciampossin came to DDH from Hewlett-Packard where he was CTO of the Information Management Business Unit, part of HP Software and Solutions. He was VP and co-founder of Zantaz spin-off Persist Technologies, which was acquired by HP in 2003. There he developed enterprise-scale archiving solutions to manage reference information for global 5000 companies in a private cloud paradigm.
- Bret Webber, VP and OEM Evangelist: Mr. Weber has nearly 30 years of experience, most of it at LSI Corp. and its various antecedents. where he was chief architect for the Engenio Storage Group and an LSI Fellow. He holds more than 30 patents in storage software, hardware. and systems and helped to create standards for end-to-end data integrity that became part of the T10 DIF Protection Information Model.
- Gordon Manning, VP, Engineering: Mr. Manning has more than 15 years of experience developing products in the storage industry and was the principal designer of the S2A (Silicon Storage Architecture) product line.
- Dave Fellinger, Chief Scientist: Mr. Fellinger has more than 30 years of experience in engineering and has worked in the areas of film systems, ASIC design and development, GaAs semiconductor manufacture, RAID and storage system and video processing devices. He was VP of Engineering for Ultimate Corp., where his products won several awards including an Oscar and an Emmy. He holds patents in optics, motion control, video processing, and pattern recognition.
Company Type: Self described as the “largest privately held storage company”, DDN makes storage arrays and associated software designed for data-intensive environments.
Funding Sources: Self-capitalized
Principle Business Activities: Development and sale of advanced storage systems under the DDN Extreme Storage Platform label. Its products are used in particularly demanding environments to support high-throughput gene sequencing, 2K/4K film editing, 5,000+ camera surveillance, cloud storage, petaflop computing, high-speed backup, petabyte archives, and other very large data, high-speed access applications.
Markets: Fortune 500 Enterprises, Web-based companies, large universities, government and private laboratories.
Differentiation: Very high capacity and very high performance, leading edge storage systems designed for data-intensive environments.
Customers: Sandia National Laboratories, Red Bull, Time Warner Cable, NASA, Warner Brothers, Argonne National Library, AOL, Shutterfly, University of Iowa, Microsoft Xbox Live, Louisiana State University, UCLA Bruins, Sony, University of California Los Angeles, Speed Channel, Maple Leaf Sports + Entertainment, Tgen, E! Entertainment Television, Pacific Title & Art Studio, iArchive, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
History: More than 12 years old, DDN has defined the leading edge of storage capacity and performance and has used that position to drive high growth. Today it is poised to become a major hardware player in the growing big data community.
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