New initiative responds to 2025 research revealing that 65 percent of organizations say AI complexity is preventing them from realizing ROI and scaling beyond early pilots.

At the Supercomputing Conference (SC25), DDN, the global leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, announced AI FASTTRACK, a comprehensive initiative to help enterprises move from AI pilots to production with speed, simplicity, and confidence.

“The AI boom has hit an infrastructure wall,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder, DDN. “FASTTRACK is our answer to that reality—a commitment to help every enterprise realize AI value faster. For 25 years, we’ve made data powerful and accessible at scale. Now we’re making AI itself just as achievable.”

The AI Readiness Gap

The study shows that growing complexity, skills shortages, and energy demands are the hidden forces slowing AI progress.

Nearly all organizations face challenges scaling efficiently, but those that unify compute, storage, and data report 3× faster time-to-production and 2× higher ROI than those running fragmented systems.

AI FASTTRACK was created to help organizations accelerate AI and realize its full potential faster—combining validated architectures, expert guidance, and cloud flexibility to turn complexity into progress.

DDN is investing in simplifying enterprise AI—helping organizations move from experimentation to operational impact by accelerating deployment, improving efficiency, and reducing time to measurable results. AI FASTTRACK delivers a proven approach to overcome the infrastructure barriers that limit scale and slow ROI, enabling enterprises to achieve sustained AI productivity across any environment.

FASTTRACK leverages DDN CORE’s proven performance foundation—delivering up to 15× faster checkpointing, 70 percent higher throughput, and 10× lower power and floor-space requirements. The result is measurable acceleration and efficiency from day one.

Built on Proven Architectures, Powered by Partnership

Validated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, AI FASTTRACK provides a guided, production-ready path to AI success.

It brings together three complementary offerings that meet customers where they are on their AI journey — from HPC conversion to turnkey deployment to cloud-first scale. Unlike point-solution storage vendors, DDN delivers an integrated data-intelligence platform proven across training, inference, and analytics — powering the entire AI continuum from lab to cloud.

1. Enterprise AI HyperPOD: Turnkey AI, Ready at Power-On: For organizations ready to scale, DDN Enterprise AI HyperPOD offers a fully validated system built by Supermicro and accelerated by NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference designs.

• Instant Deployment: From unboxing to production in hours.
• Proven Efficiency: Up to 10× throughput gain and 60 percent lower TCO through optimized GPU utilization.
• Accelerated Performance: Up to 22× faster RAG and 18× faster inference via integrated KV caching and token reuse.

“AI-ready storage is no longer optional—it’s foundational to running at scale with data that moves at the speed of compute. Leveraging the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, DDN powers AI factories with the performance, throughput, and scale needed to turn data into intelligence in real time.” —Justin Boitano, vice president, Enterprise AI Products, NVIDIA

2. Transform Your HPC into an AI Powerhouse: For existing DDN EXAScaler^® customers, DDN FASTTRACK turns trusted HPC environments into AI-optimized pipelines in weeks.

• Your HPC, Already AI-Ready: Unlock GPU acceleration and data orchestration without new hardware.
• 3× Faster AI Readiness: DDN experts configure and validate production AI pipelines end-to-end.
• Immediate ROI: Up to 90 percent+ GPU utilization and 2× return on investment within 30 days.

“FASTTRACK helps customers leverage the systems they already trust to reach AI readiness fast,” said Sven Oehme, CTO, DDN.

3. Powered by DDN Cloud Program—cloud.ddn.com: Powered by DDN Cloud delivers cloud-first AI with validated, production-ready environments available through cloud.ddn.com — connecting enterprises directly to leading hyperscalers and AI Cloud Provider partners for rapid access to training and inference at scale.

• Google Cloud Managed Lustre (Training): Built on DDN EXAScaler for distributed training with 15× faster checkpointing and up to 70 percent higher throughput.
• DDN Infinia on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Marketplace: Infinia S3 performance scales near-linear with the scale-out OCI server node counts.
• NVIDIA Cloud Partners: Deploy across top NVIDIA Cloud Partners, including CoreWeave, Nebius, Scaleway, and others, leveraging AIDP-validated architectures and instant pipeline spin-up through cloud.ddn.com.

“By combining the scale of Google Cloud and the performance of DDN storage, customers can train and iterate faster than ever before,” said Sameet Agarwal, VP of Engineering, Google Cloud.

“Managed Lustre fully saturates our GPUs, while accelerating our deepfake detection model training by 6x than other storage solutions,” said Zohaib Ahmed, CEO, Resemble AI.

“Managed Lustre enables us to scale AI model training for AFEELA Intelligent Drive by 3x compared to other Google Cloud solutions,” said Motoi Kataoka, Senior Manager, AI & Data Analytics Platform, Sony Honda Mobility Inc.

Accelerating AI for Everyone

AI FASTTRACK is more than a program—it’s a strategy to make AI achievable for every enterprise. It extends DDN’s 25-year heritage of innovation and partnership across research, enterprise, and cloud ecosystems.

“Enterprises are discovering that scaling AI isn’t a compute problem — it’s an integration problem,” added Oehme. “FASTTRACK brings the expertise, platforms, and partners together so our customers can focus on results.”

Visit DDN Booth #1527 at SC25 to see AI FASTTRACK in action or learn more at ddn.com.

About DDN

DDN is a 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. Follow DDN: LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.

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