DIANE is a CERN IT/API project to study the requirements and prototype a middleware distributed environment for parallel data analysis for LHC. The main goal of DIANE is to provide LHC experiments with application-oriented component-based framework for parallel data analysis. DIANE is targeted to handle mainly parallel ntuple analysis and parallel detector simulation but is not a priori technically limited to any specific application, and thus may be used in a wider context. DIANE is independent from any particular data analysis software and is explicitly designed in such a way that analysis-specific parts are covered as a separate component. This fits well with the LCG project architecture and makes the future LCG application components very easy to use in the context of DIANE. The baseline architecture of DIANE uses CORBA 2.3 and CCM, an industry standard for distributed computing and component technology. DIANE uses several GRID components for low-level services such as environment replication, security, load balancing and the like. From a top-down perspective, a cluster of machines running DIANE is the GRID computing element and may be accessed via GRID-enabled web portals and directly via the GRID API. DIANE may also be used directly in interactive analysis tools and may be embedded in a python environment.