DDN shared groundbreaking innovations involving Google Cloud Managed Lustre, unveiled at Google Cloud Next 2026. Built on DDN's proven Lustre expertise, EXAScaler, and delivered in collaboration with Google Cloud, these advancements redefine what's possible for AI training, inference, and high-performance computing (HPC) in the cloud.
Google Cloud Managed Lustre scales to 10 terabytes per second throughput.
New shared KV-cache capability improves inference throughput by 75%.
Mean time to first token reduced by over 40% compared to host memory alone.
Single dynamic hot and cold tier eliminates performance cliffs and SKU sprawl.
Sony Honda Mobility achieved 3x scaling for AI model training with Managed Lustre.
Supports LLM training, inference, RAG, financial modeling, and life sciences workloads.
Google Cloud Managed Lustre provides a POSIX-compliant, parallel file system that delivers high throughput and low latency. With performance scaling to 10 terabytes per second, Google Cloud Managed Lustre delivers improved throughput, elasticity, and cost efficiency—enabling enterprises to run the world's most demanding AI and HPC workloads. The launch underscores DDN's vision to power the full AI lifecycle—from training and fine-tuning to inference and large-scale simulation—through a unified, high-performance data platform. Customers across industries including AI, financial services, robotics, autonomous systems, and advanced research are rapidly adopting the platform to power large-scale LLM training, fine-tuning, and checkpointing; high-throughput AI inference, RAG, and KV-cache acceleration; financial modeling, life sciences and HPC workloads; and machine vision, multimodal AI, and physical simulations.
A key innovation unveiled at Google Cloud Next is the use of Managed Lustre as a shared KV-cache for AI inference, dramatically improving performance and economics. By leveraging Lustre's ultra-low latency and high aggregate throughput, customers can avoid redundant computation and scale inference across clusters with virtually unlimited shared cache capacity. In benchmark testing, this approach delivered improved total inference throughput by 75% and reduced the mean time to first token by greater than 40% compared to using KV Cache in host memory alone. The result is faster, more responsive AI applications and significantly lower cost of inference at scale.
New capabilities announced at Google Cloud Next also include a single, dynamic hot and cold tier, designed to deliver high performance for hot data with dramatically improved economics—eliminating the complexity, performance cliffs, and SKU sprawl common in competing tiered storage solutions. For the offering, DDN combines long-standing Lustre expertise and extreme-scale data systems with Google Cloud's elastic infrastructure, innovations in compute and Hyperdisk, global reach, and access to cutting-edge accelerators, including TPUs.
As Motoi Kataoka, Senior Manager, AI & Data Analytics Platform at Sony Honda Mobility Inc., stated: "Managed Lustre enables us to scale AI model training for AFEELA Intelligent Drive by 3x compared to other Google Cloud solutions."
Conclusion
As Alex Bouzari, CEO at DDN, stated: "This is not just a product milestone—it's a market-shaping moment. We are delivering one of the fastest-growing, highest-performance managed Lustre services in the industry, purpose-built for the realities of modern AI at scale. This announcement reinforces DDN's leadership in AI data platforms and our shared commitment to helping customers innovate faster, at lower cost, and with greater confidence." Kirill Tropin, Group Product Manager at Google Cloud, added: "This is what happens when deep infrastructure expertise meets cloud-scale innovation. Our partnership with DDN enables customers to run their most demanding AI workloads with the performance, scale, and simplicity they need—today and into the future."
About DDN
DDN is the world's leading AI and data intelligence company, powering the world's most demanding AI workloads by keeping GPUs fed, efficient, and productive—at massive scale—so organizations can train, checkpoint, and infer faster with less footprint and power while achieving tremendous ROI from their AI investments. From hyperscalers and next-gen cloud builders to enterprises, governments, and research institutions, DDN delivers proven data intelligence at exabyte scale across hundreds of thousands of GPUs—so customers can deploy AI with confidence, accelerate time-to-value, and realize outsized returns.
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