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DDN offers help to 'stranded' Seagate ClusterStor customers

Heard about this, Cray?

DDN says it will provide support to stranded ClusterStor customers following Seagate’s product line shutdown - only they are not stranded.

Seagate announced it was closing its ClusterStor product line last week, with Cray buying the HPC array product business and taking on the support obligations.

DDN co-founder and CEO Alex Bouzari said: "It is a sad day when an industry built on long-term commitments is left in disarray." DDN, on the other hand, "is the opposite of a short-term whim, or accounting experiments that some large conglomerates engage in, ignoring the devastation that will hit their customers after they walk away abruptly from their failed experiment."

Paul Bloch, DDN President and co-founder, said: “We are offering, starting immediately, a full range of very advantageous storage upgrade and file system support programs to our stranded friends following this announcement. DDN will craft the ideal mix of Spectrum Scale (GPFS), Lustre, disk, SSD, burst buffer, block, file and object storage systems to meet and exceed all HPC customer requirements, present and future."

DDN isn’t providing any details though. Interested ClusterStor customers should ask for them via email, it asked.

As a reminder Seagate and Cray said Cray would:

  • Take on more than 100 employees and contractors in R&D, customer support and channel support,
  • Support and enhance the ClusterStor product line,
  • Support ClusterStor customers,
  • Assume certain ClusterStor support obligations,
  • Receive assistance from Seagate to provide support on existing service contracts.

That doesn’t sound much like stranding customers.

We've asked Cray and Seagate what they think about the generous offer.

Seagate told us: "Seagate has entered a partnership with Cray in which that company will take on all of Seagate’s HPC systems’ customer relationship and support activities, as well as HPC system engineering functions. Seagate will continue to serve Cray, and the HPC market in general, with our hard drives, SSDs and other data storage products. Seagate will also continue to be actively involved with collaborative research programs in the HPC community."

A Cray spokesman commented: “Our good friends at DDN must have missed our press release, in which we clearly stated our intentions to enhance and support the ClusterStor product line AND the ClusterStor customer base going forward. We are very excited about our expanded partnership with Seagate, and are thrilled to see the positive customer response to the transition of the ClusterStor product line to Cray.” ®

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