DDN Infinia is Easy to Deploy, Manage and Scale from Edge to Data Center to any Cloud
Today we draw back the curtains on DDN Infinia – a next generation storage platform built to accelerate and simplify workflows for the data management demands of today and tomorrow. DDN Infinia brings a new approach to data management, with native multi-tenancy, cross-protocol support, and cloud flexibility to solve the challenges that come with managing data in today’s world.
And with our experience of delivering high-performance solutions for AI and Deep Learning systems, DDN Infinia has been developed from the ground up, as a true software-defined storage system that is easy to manage, scalable, secure, and efficient for enterprise applications and AI data workflows.
In order to find out what’s behind DDN Infinia, I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. James Coomer, DDN’s Senior VP of Products, and hear firsthand about his vision for the future of AI data management at scale:
Where is DDN today?
DDN is a leading global provider of data storage and data management solutions at scale – we accelerate AI and High Performance Computing workflows and applications in data centers, private and public clouds, and at the edge.
Thanks to our technology, our 11,000 customers are able to achieve significant efficiencies in their GPU and CPU compute farms, and greatly reduce their data center power consumption and footprint.
Utilizing highly optimized flash technology and AI-enabled software, our products power some of the largest and most demanding customers in the world, in fields such as autonomous driving, AI chatbots, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, energy, government, public sector and research institutions, as well as generative AI and data analytics applications.
What new challenges and industry trends are our customers facing?
Our era is being reshaped by Accelerated Computing and AI. It is a technological revolution whose importance for mankind is profound. Just as Gutenberg’s printing press, Edison’s light bulb, the personal computer, internet and smartphones redefined society and our day to day lives, we are now going through another tidal wave of changes driven by technology.
For Accelerated Computing and AI to deliver its true promise, a paradigm shift in data availability, efficiency and power consumption at scale needs to become a reality. Data and information, whether in images, video or text needs to be readily available and interpreted everywhere, all the time, instantaneously and for everyone. Huge efficiencies must come into play in the cloud, in data centers, and the edges of networks.
Think about it across industries and use cases, and where there is a need for Accelerated Computing:
- It is at the heart of financial services and autonomous driving
- It brings utility to intelligent devices and consumer services
- It lowers costs and improves accuracy for personalized health
- It creates dynamic & personalized experiences in gaming
- And the list goes on and on and on, it permeates all aspects of our connected society
Accelerated computing requires huge efficiencies across the whole stack from AI Models and Services to the AI Platform Software Stacks and to the AI Clouds, Supercomputers and Data centers.
At DDN, we come from two decades of successfully creating and bringing to market the data management, data movement and storage at scale technologies which power many of the largest computer and data centers in the world. 
With DDN Infinia, we are bringing to market a new data paradigm designed specifically to address the requirements of enterprises, research facilities, academia and Government agencies, as they relate to Accelerated Computing and AI.
What is DDN Infinia?
DDN Infinia is an Optimized Data Platform which accelerates Generative AI, LLMs and Big Data at any scale on-premises and in the cloud, with an extremely power efficient footprint and very high levels of security.
It is a revolutionary software-based development which leverages two decades of DDN engineering work and thousands of man years of file system, data management, data orchestration, AI-based optimization algorithms, all coming together to usher in the era of Accelerated Computing and Generative AI.
With DDN Infinia we are bringing to market a set of capabilities which genuinely delivers multi-tenancy at scale, is truly software-defined and puts no constraints on the underlying hardware. If you have an environment with GPUs or CPUs, a network, and workflows which require performance acceleration, power efficiency and security at any scale, whether in the cloud, on premise, at the edge or at the core, then you need to look no further than DDN Infinia.
What makes DDN Infinia unique?
One of the core things is that it is both high performance and software-defined, containerized and fast. Software-defined and highly scalable. It’s these contrasting pairs which are really what makes it powerful and unique.
The idea of software-defined storage has been around for a while – software that you install on standard servers without specialist components, with promises of performance, flexibility and control. But after you install it, you find it’s actually not fast at all, and that it’s inefficient, wasting energy, and always a compromise between features and performance.
So DDN Infinia can run in the cloud. It can run on-premises. It can run in containerized form at the edge. And we’ve got full flexibility to advance our server designs and take advantage of the best, fastest technology or the most cost effective technology, whatever is important. But if you do that today with other software, you’re always going to take a hit on performance or on some of the key features. With DDN Infinia, we’re doing it with a no compromise approach.
And then think about multi-tenancy: people aren’t really doing it right today. In fact, there’s only one way to do it right, and that’s to think about it from the first day that you start writing software.
You’ll find with other storage systems out there today, multi-tenancy means to dedicate resources in your storage system to a particular tenant, we don’t do that at all. DDN Infinia has a completely software-based key space which we can subdivide logically across all our tenants and subtenants.
That gives you a genuine cloud-like service provisioning across tenants and subtenants, managing quality of service, segregating data securely – and doing all this with very high efficiency, and without chopping a system up and reducing performance and increasing complexity.
So what does this mean for our customers?
For our customers, fundamentally it’s all about cost – and those cost savings arise from multiple places.
We vastly reduce complexity at scale, and that means you can evolve your entire AI process to develop models much more simply without the complex interaction of multiple databases and files and object stores, limited scalability and complex security management. We take away all the bureaucracy and overhead behind administrating AI, and we augment AI with access to new models and new ways of doing things. We make that all much, much simpler, so it accelerates you to market, accelerates new AI models to market, and it means that you stay in control of your models, and retain full governance over your data.
How can we try out DDN Infinia?
That’s very straightforward, you can go to DDN.com, and you’ll see a link to our new DDN Infinia product pages, where you can discover technical briefs, explainers, and we’ll have some little demonstrators and videos on our website too. Contact us, and our team of storage experts will give you a call to set up a demo and help you learn all about DDN Infinia, and a new, simpler way to manage your AI and data workflows.
With thanks to James Coomer and Alex Bouzari
