DataDirect Networks, the world’s largest privately held storage company, is riding the information explosion with high-performance arrays for large-scale IT environments, ever popular among enterprises. The vendor revealed today that it has added 122 new customers over the last 12 months for a total of more than 1,100, about 600 of which are in the entertainment industry. One of the most recent additions in this category is Starz, which managed to reduce its data center footprint by half using the DDN GridScaler parallel file system.

Other notable client wins from the past year include Suzuki, the University of Bonn and Los Alamos National Laboratories, a leader in the field of quantum networking. Overall, DDN claims to have sold a massive 500 petabytes of storage capacity to date, quite the feat for a company that was self-funded during its first 13 years of business.

In an interview on theCUBE at last year’s Strata Conference, DDN chief marketing officer Jeff Denworth credited growing demand for the kind of massively scalable storage solutions his firm sells to the rise of Big Data and web scale computing, two trends that are expected to accelerate in 2014 and beyond. That claim is supported by the 31 percent sequential increase in bookings DDN reported for the second half of 2013, a figure that underscores the industry-wide transition from legacy systems to modern architectures that can cost-effecively keep up with fast evolving user requirements.

“That convergence of HPC and analytics or web-scale content delivery and processing is actually happening at DDN,” Denworth told hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. “We’re seeing a ton of really, really exciting projects where you’re talking about the petabyte club, I would say that anymore our customers are starting to talk in terms of exabytes, so we’re closing fractional exabyte orders today.”