DDN, a company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) and data intelligence solutions, has announced its AI FASTTRACK initiative at the Supercomputing Conference 2025. This initiative is designed to help organizations move from AI pilot projects to full production environments by offering validated architectures, expert support, and cloud integration for simplified, accelerated scaling of enterprise AI workloads. According to DDN, it developed AI FASTTRACK in response to a 2025 industry study showing that 65 percent of organizations cite AI complexity as a key obstacle for return on investment (ROI) and broader deployment.
AI FASTTRACK is built on DDN CORE, the company’s data platform, which claims to offer up to 15× faster checkpointing, 70 percent higher throughput, and 10× lower power and floor-space requirements when compared with legacy solutions. The initiative features partnerships with companies such as NVIDIA, Supermicro, and hyperscale cloud providers to deliver end-to-end infrastructure for rapid AI adoption across data centers and cloud-based environments.
Specifically, AI FASTTRACK offers three main solutions:
- Enterprise AI HyperPOD: A turnkey, NVIDIA-accelerated platform for data centers ready to scale. DDN says it enables hours-to-production deployment, up to 10× throughput improvements, and 60 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by optimizing GPU utilization. The platform is validated using the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, with reported performance gains of up to 22× faster Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and 18× faster inference through features like integrated KV caching and token reuse.
- HPC-to-AI conversion: Existing DDN EXAScaler customers can upgrade their high performance computing (HPC) clusters to AI-ready environments without hardware replacement. DDN notes that its FASTTRACK team can implement GPU acceleration and data orchestration, enabling customers to achieve 3× faster AI readiness and up to 90 percent GPU utilization with claimed double ROI within 30 days.
- Powered by DDN Cloud: Cloud-first deployments are available via cloud.ddn.com with production-ready environments on hyperscale public clouds. Key offerings include Google Cloud Managed Lustre, which DDN reports delivers 15× faster checkpointing and up to 70 percent higher throughput for distributed training, and DDN Infinia on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Marketplace, featuring near-linear S3 performance scaling with OCI server node expansion. Integration is also available with NVIDIA Cloud Partners such as CoreWeave, Nebius, and Scaleway.
The following verbatim quotes from industry partners and customers specify technical benefits:
- “AI-ready storage is no longer optional—it’s foundational to running at scale with data that moves at the speed of compute,” said Justin Boitano, vice president, Enterprise AI Products, NVIDIA. “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.”
- “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 and Data Analytics Platform, Sony Honda Mobility.
AI FASTTRACK targets data centers and enterprise IT organizations seeking faster, more efficient ways to operationalize AI workloads, with integration from edge deployments to large-scale cloud environments.
Source: DDN
