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Privately held DataDirect Networks, the fifth-largest independent network storage provider, according to Gartner Dataquest, filed a financial report that showed 53 percent growth in 2006, a company spokesperson said Feb. 5.

DataDirect Networks grew in “unprecented” fashion in 2006, delivering 45 percent CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) since 2003, the spokesperson said. As a result, the Los Angeles-based company has moved to a much larger headquarters as well as establishing offices in Japan and China in 2007.

DataDirect Networks is planning to hire 100 additional employees in 2007 across all functional and geographic areas, the spokesperson said.

DataDirect ranks below only EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Network Appliance in network storage market share.

“The continued and ever-increasing market acceptance of our S2A [Silicon Storage Appliance] storage technology from the world’s governments, corporate and academic institutions is a strong testament to our unique vision and our decade-long commitment to providing the best-in-class scalable high-performance and high-capacity storage solutions,” said CEO Alex Bouzari.

Click here to read about DataDirect’s high-density graphics storage system.

The ranking from Gartner mirrors the recognition from the recently published 28th edition of the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest clusters, asserting DataDirect’s leadership position as the largest supplier of high-performance storage to the world’s top cluster sites, with seven of the world’s top 10, 35 of the world’s top 100, and more than 52 percent of the top 100 clusters’ aggregate bandwidth being powered by DataDirect.

The same report, Gartner Dataquest Research’s External Controller-Based Disk Storage, Worldwide 2002-2005 Market Share Report, authored by Roger Cox, also recognized DataDirect as the third-largest independent storage provider for “Block Midrange Enterprise Disk Array Vendor Raw Terabyte Shipped Market Share.”

“We will continue to drive customer-centric innovation while further establishing our technological leadership to develop enabling storage solutions in our market verticals to better serve our customers,” Bouzari said.

“These solutions include high-performance, high-capacity cluster storage, cluster NAS, active archive and nearline storage, petascale and InfiniBand storage, as well as tiered storage and backup and recovery solutions.”

Launched in 1998, DataDirect Networks has an established global presence with R&D and operations in the United States, Europe and Asia.

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