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DDN joins NetApp and VAST Data at Dutch neocloud Nebul Dutch neocloud Nebul is using DDN’s Infinia OS for KV caching work, but it's not its only storage offering. Nebul, a neocloud or AI CSP, based in Leiden, Holland, was founded in 2022 by CEO and data center specialist Arnold Juffer. It offers a full-stack and sovereign cloud with provisioning of CPUs, DPUs, GPUs, and APUs, with 1-click deployment, managed Kubernetes, managed databases, and Nvidia Hopper (H100/H200) and Blackwell (B200 and later) GPUs. These are hosted in energy-efficient European data centers and can scale from single GPUs to large clusters (hundreds to over 1,000 nodes in some descriptions). Nebul raised approximately €20 million ($22.4 million) in mid-2024 to expand its sovereign AI cloud and data centers across Europe, support hiring, and meet growing demand from enterprises and governments. Infinia is DDN’s object-based OS, and a companion to its traditional Lustre parallel filesystem software. DDN co-founder and CEO Alex Bouzari said: “Every time a GPU rebuilds context it has already processed, it is spending cycles repeating work, By making that context available across Nebul’s GPU fleet, Infinia helps deliver faster inference and more productive use of GPU capacity while keeping data within the sovereign environment.” We’re told DDN Infinia extends Nebul’s data controls to the KV cache used during inference. Tenant, subtenant and dataset scope remain attached to the stored context, while cache capacity can be managed without interrupting inference. Juffer said: “With DDN Infinia, we can reuse model context across our GPU infrastructure instead of spending valuable GPU cycles recomputing it. That makes inference faster and more efficient while keeping the complete AI workload within the sovereign environment.” KV cache testing covered workloads ranging from short prompts to large-token contexts under concurrent demand. Nebul measured results on its own platforms, with the same eight GPUs, model and workloads on both sides. Some of the results: - Nearly 10x faster time to first token with DDN Infinia than Nebul’s own cache on CPU and memory. - Up to 5x faster token responses than alternative offerings. - 2.5x more input tokens per second from the same GPUs. - Nearly 60 percent lower cost per million input tokens, by reloading context instead of recomputing it. However, Infinia is not Nebul’s only storage OS, it being promiscuous in a storage sense, and listing NetApp’s ONTAP, DDN ExaScaler and VAST Data as specific storage options, now joined by Infinia. An April 2025 VAST success story said “Nebul is anchored by a multi-petabyte VAST Data Platform Cluster, which provides the basis of performance and scalability needed to support their clients’ rapidly growing AI workloads.” Nebul's CRO Bam Gobets, now at Regatta Data, said: “We’ve carefully selected VAST Data for our cloud platform and data management backend. VAST Data allows us to provide the best performance needed for properly saturating GPUs, and seamlessly scaling customer solutions for model training, production inference, and all stages of data processing across the AI pipeline.” Juffer added: “The modern architecture of VAST was essential to us. We understand the market will end up where VAST is going.” Apparently not. NetApp said in a September 2025 Nebul customer story that Nebul offered GenAI services like private GPT, agentic AI, private inference APIs, and RAG – supported we understand by NetApp AFF A90 storage arrays running ONTAP. Its “DataOps Toolkit, multi-protocol functionality, and especially the S3/NFS duality provides extreme value to Nebul’s business processes as well as the flexibility and data pipeline integration Nebul can offer its end customers.” A video by NetApp praises Nebul as well. A final point; Nebul is positioning Infinia as data lake storage. Bootnote The name Nebul come from nebula, meaning a cloud or mist as well as a bright cloud of stars in astronomy.
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