Dr. Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to present at DataDirect’s Japan Technical Seminar — "Storage Systems for Petaflop Clusters": DataDirect Networks announced today that the company has opened a fully-owned subsidiary in Japan, DataDirect Networks Japan. The subsidiary will provide sales, marketing, training and technical support to its OEM customers and partners in Japan, and together with DataDirect’s Chinese subsidiary, will also support the expansion of the company across Asia. "DataDirect Networks, with the help of our Asian partners, has been an established icon in the Asia Pacific media and entertainment market for over a decade and enjoys a large installed base in Japan," said Paul Bloch, president of DataDirect Networks. "Japan is also a leading market for high-performance computing and we are now seeing a massive shift toward scalar-based, clustered architectures — an area where DataDirect’s Silicon Storage Appliance storage solutions are the preeminent choice for large compute cluster applications. We feel the timing is perfect to establish a local presence in Japan to better support our customers and partners, and to capitalize on this growing opportunity for high performance, high capacity storage solutions in the APAC markets. Additionally, we will make an official announcement of our new Japan subsidiary at a premiere event that we are hosting for the high performance computing community on December 7th." DataDirect Networks’ Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) is used by many top tier Japanese television stations, media and internet companies, as well as leading universities and manufacturing companies in Japan, including the University of Tokyo and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) near Kanazawa.