NAVER Selects DDN’s AI Storage for Cutting Edge AI Services

CHATSWORTH, Calif., March 29, 2021 — DDN, a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and multicloud data management solutions, today announced that Korea’s NAVER corporation has selected DDN A3I AI400X systems as its choice of storage solution to enhance numerous AI services and research projects.

NAVER, a leading search engine provider in Korea and creator of the popular LINE messaging service, has expanded its ventures globally from photo and video applications to mobile payment services. NAVER CLOVA is an AI platform integrating speech and image recognition and artificial neural network translation to provide an interactive engine, which first launched in August 2017. It currently supports Korean, Japanese and English and has experienced increased demand in recent years.

NAVER CLOVA selected DDN’s A3I AI400X AI storage systems based on a careful proof-of-concept developed together with the DDN technical team. Having already deployed one of the largest commercially used NVIDIA DGX SuperPODs to scale out research and development within its AI services, its technical team was looking for a robust storage system to deliver the exceptional performance required by large-scale AI models.

DDN’s AI400X scalable storage reference architecture for NVIDIA’s SuperPOD combines simple deployment and management with the powerful scaling advantages of DDN’s EXAScaler Lustre filesystem solution. With this reference architecture, along with a reference architecture for smaller NVIDIA DGXA100 POD solutions, DDN is the only NVIDIA partner with solutions for all sizes of AI projects. In actual application testing, the DDN architecture surpassed competing systems in both read and write performance by a considerable margin.

“The AI workloads that power today’s mobile applications increasingly require data center architectures that allow for massive scaling, which is really the core of DDN’s expertise,” said Alex Shim, country manager for DDN in Korea. “We are excited to work with the NAVER team on building the data center of the future for deep learning and AI technologies.”

“We are excited to collaborate with DDN, which is a leading storage manufacturer in AI processing industry,” commented a representative at NAVER CLOVA. “With DDN’s expertise in AI storage, NAVER will continue to lead AI research and develop products that create value for our users.”

About NAVER

NAVER Corporation is one of Korea’s leading Internet companies and ‘NAVER’ search the nation’s no.1 search engine. Since its inception in 1999, NAVER has created value and innovative services in a wide variety of fields including advertising, e-commerce, digital content, cloud, AI/robotics and fintech, based on deep technical know-how, user understanding and data. NAVER has continued to grow in the global market with services such as LINE, WEBTOON and SNOW. Fueled by the success of these global services, NAVER generated more than KRW 1 trillion (USD 910 million) in overseas revenue over the last 5 years. Innovative services, a diverse set of portfolios and global sales, made NAVER the first Korean Internet company to surpass KRW 2 trillion (USD 1.8 billion) in quarterly sales in 2020.

About DDN

DDN is one of the world’s largest private data storage companies and a leading provider of intelligent technology and infrastructure solutions for Enterprise At Scale, AI and analytics, HPC, government and academia customers. Through its DDN and Tintri divisions the company delivers AI, Data Management software and hardware solutions, and unified analytics frameworks to solve complex business challenges for data-intensive, global organizations. DDN provides its enterprise customers with the most flexible, efficient and reliable data storage solutions for on-premises and multi-cloud environments at any scale. Over the last two decades, DDN has established itself as the data management provider of choice for over 11,000 enterprises, government, and public-sector customers, including many of the world’s leading financial services firms, life science organizations, manufacturing and energy companies, research facilities, and web and cloud service providers.

Source: DDN