Korean Search Engine Provider Naver Selects DDN Storage for AI Services

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CHATSWORTH, Calif., March 29, 2021 — DDN, the artificial intelligence (AI) and multicloud data management company, 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, Korea’s leading search engine provider 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 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.”