DataDirect Networks  is convinced that current technology will not be able to keep up with Moore’s law in the coming years, so it set out to develop its own. The company is putting aside $100 million for the development of storage and software capable of supporting Exascale machines – an ambitious undertaking to say the least.

DDN’s products can be found in two thirds of the top 100 supercomputers today, but even the most powerful of these deployments can deliver but fraction of the quintillion computer operations per second that label a true Exascale system. This threshold is only expected to be reached in 2018 at the very best, and DDN has every intention of making the most out of this $100 million head start.

DataDirect co-founder and CEO Alex Bouzari said in a statement:

“Significant investment is required to allow researchers to address challenges such as the design of new materials needed for better electric car batteries, the improvement of multi-physics models for more accurate severe weather modeling, and the development of high-resolution cosmological simulations to help understand dark matter and the universe around us.”

DDN has a lengthy lists of objectives it hopes to accomplish in five years’ time. These include increasing scalability by a thousand-fold, delivering terabyte per second performance and incorporate native pre- and post-processing capabilities into the storage layer.  Boosting efficiency is another goal: the vendor is looking to reduce storage footprint by as much as 75 percent.

DataDirect seems bent on assuring its share of tomorrow’s big data market as early as possible, but it’s also focusing on gaining a lead over the competition today. Last month it unveiled the newest release of WOS, its enterprise-grade file system. The latest version features improved data protection and networking, as well as other enhancements.