DDN®, the world’s leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, today announced that it has secured the #1 position against its competitors on the IO500 benchmark—the industry’s gold standard for real-world storage performance in AI and HPC.

If You Rely on GPUs, AI Workloads, or HPC Simulations, You Need the Best Technology to Achieve the Best Outcome.

Whether your mission is curing diseases, protecting financial markets, or transforming entire industries with generative AI, your outcomes hinge entirely on Data Center and Cloud infrastructure performance. The latest IO500 benchmark confirms what top innovators already know: DDN isn’t just leading the pack—we’ve left it behind entirely.

IO500 Proves It: DDN Leads and Delivers 3x to 11x More Value Than Other Data Platform Technologies

IO500 isn't just another benchmark—it’s the gold standard for assessing real-world storage performance in AI and HPC environments. It plays a critical role in helping organizations determine which technologies to deploy and which vendors to trust. Unlike synthetic benchmarks that simulate hypothetical conditions, IO500 tests systems under real-world pressures—mixed workloads, complex I/O patterns, metadata-intensive operations, and concurrent tasks—exactly the kinds of challenges AI and HPC infrastructures face every day. The result? Clear, credible insights into how your infrastructure will perform when performance matters most.

“AI is transforming every industry, and the organizations leading that transformation are the ones that understand infrastructure performance is not optional — it’s mission-critical,” said Alex Bouzari, Co-Founder and CEO of DDN. “Being ranked #1 on the IO500 benchmark is more than a technical achievement — it’s proof that our customers can count on DDN to deliver the speed, scale, and reliability needed to turn data into competitive advantage. DDN is not just ahead. We have left the competition behind.”

In the critical 10-node production category—where real-world AI workloads operate under intense pressure and where the majority of customer use cases live—DDN isn’t just ahead of the competition; it’s setting a new industry standard. This leadership translates directly into tangible value for organizations: accelerating innovation, enabling the creation of superior products and services, and expanding the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and HPC.

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The information means that with DDN, your data center, GPU, CPU, AI, HPC infrastructure will deliver up to 11x more AI training sessions, simulations, and analytics runs per day compared to Weka or VAST. Simply put, you get a lot more done faster, save millions of dollars, while significantly accelerating your business outcomes.

Why This Matters for Your AI and HPC Workloads

AI and HPC cannot tolerate slowdowns—every minute of wasted compute time drains both budget and innovation momentum. Topping the IO500 rankings proves DDN delivers exceptional end-to-end performance that translates into real business benefits:

• Finance: A global hedge fund accelerated algorithm development 3x, reducing backtest time and cutting infrastructure costs significantly.
• Genomics: Researchers at TGen reduced genomics pipeline analysis from 12 hours to under 2, enabling faster, more cost-effective medical breakthroughs.
• Supercomputing: Leaders like CINECA, Helmholtz Munich, and Bitdeer AI maximize GPU efficiency and throughput with DDN, achieving higher utilization and lower TCO.

Built for AI and HPC—From the Ground Up

DDN delivers unmatched real-world performance thanks to its purpose-built architecture:

• Blistering Bandwidth at Scale: Multi-terabyte throughput proven in systems like NVIDIA’s Selene and CINECA.
• Unmatched Metadata Performance: Handles billions of files, small I/O, and concurrency without compromise.
• Native Parallelism for AI: True parallel file access with no shim layers or rewrites.
• Pipeline-Aware Caching: Eliminates latency and idle GPU cycles.
• Enterprise Resilience: Trusted by NVIDIA, HPE, Dell, Lenovo, and national defense agencies worldwide.

Why Competitors Can’t Keep Up

• Weka requires manual tuning and fails under real-world concurrency.
• VAST underperforms on write-heavy and metadata-intensive workloads.
• Hammerspace lacks relevant deployments and trials in IO500 benchmarks.

Your AI is Only as Good as Your Infrastructure

In AI and HPC, every second of compute time matters. Bottlenecks don't just slow you down—they delay discovery, reduce ROI, and waste GPU resources. DDN’s #1 result in the IO500 is not just a benchmark—it’s proof that DDN customers are leading the future.

Explore the full IO500 results: https://io500.org.

Read our latest blog: AI and HPC Workloads Demand Highest Performance Data – DDN is the Undisputed Leader on IO500.

About DDN

DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, empowering organizations to maximize the value of their data with end-to-end HPC and AI-focused solutions. Its customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyperscalers to cutting-edge research centers, all leveraging DDN’s proven data intelligence platform for scalable, secure, and high-performance AI deployments that drive 10x returns.

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"Being ranked #1 on the IO500 benchmark is more than a technical achievement — it’s proof that our customers can count on DDN to deliver the speed, scale, and reliability needed to turn data into competitive advantage," said Bouzari.