EARTH SCIENCES

DataDirect Networks S2A9550 Delivers Solutions to Address Growing Storage Challenges in Oil and Gas Exploration: Further increasing its performance, capacity and innovation lead in network storage, DataDirect Networks will showcase its highest performing and most dense storage solutions, the S2A9550 Cluster Solutions and S2A9550 Archive Solution, at this year's SEG (Society of Exploration Geophysicists) International Exposition and 76th Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, from October 1st to the 4th in booth 2719. The S2A9550 Cluster Solutions are specifically designed for high performance or high capacity cluster applications for seismic analysis and processing. Delivering up to up to 100 GB/s and petabytes of storage in a single storage solution, this 7th generation solution provides optimal cluster NAS performance for highly scalable, open system computing environments. The S2A9550 Archive Solution is a combination of its industry leading, Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) and a volume metric efficient 48 SATA drive package. With its hardware RAID 6 and parity checking of all read I/Os, the S2A9550 allows seismic applications to implement a reliable online or nearline active archive that can scale up to 720 TB in a two rack solution -- up to 5 times more dense and scaleable than other comparable disk based storage systems. Oil and gas exploration is one of the most compute and data intensive businesses on the planet. Advancements in data gathering technologies, analysis algorithms, 2D, 3D and 4D geological and seismic modeling have resulted in a proliferation of data, with raw seismic data sets upwards of several terabytes. Accessing and managing historical data archives adds additional time and expense in this global competitive environment where time is money. "S2A9550 storage solutions provide an extremely high performance and massively scalable storage platform to consolidate energy applications and data, affording continuous and timely information access that is vital to the energy exploration process," said Paul Bloch, president of DataDirect Networks. The S2A9550 storage platform is based on DataDirect's industry proven S2A technology which fully integrates a parallel, non-blocking architecture with SAN functionality in one simple, easy-to-use intelligent device. The S2A delivers high performance, highly reliable storage solutions that are easy-to-install, easy-to-scale and easy-to-manage. The S2A's unique architecture and consolidated functionality removes the complexity, congestion, latency and contention of generic RAID systems delivering very high performance with dramatically lower total-cost-of-ownership and improved return-on-IT-investments. This optimal block level and file system performance design supports a broad range of NAS and SAN solutions powering compute clusters from IBM, Dell, HP, Cray, SGI, Bull and others. Unique to the S2A9550 is its innovative hardware RAID 6 and double parity protection for enhanced data availability without impacting solution performance. DataDirect Networks S2A9550 Highlights: Real-time Sustained Performance -- Up to five times faster than cluster solutions based on generic SAN RAID systems, the S2A9550 Cluster Solutions can scale up to 100Gbytes/second while supporting petabytes of storage. The S2A9550 Cluster Solutions are open system based supporting Lustre, CXFS, StorNext, GPFS, PolyServe and other cluster file systems. Each S2A9550 Cluster Solution is fully integrated and supported by 7 generations of DataDirect deployment experience. Massive Scalability with Deep Density -- The S2A9550 Archive Solution is purpose built to offer maximum scalability and density providing support for up to 960 SATA disk drives in two racks. With the S2A9550 technology, the S2A9550 Archive Solution can support online and nearline active archives delivering a disk-based solution with excellent throughput performance at or near the price of tape storage. Enterprise Class Protection and Availability -- All S2A9550 solutions incorporate enterprise-class data protection including on-the-fly parity checking of all read I/Os, and hardware RAID 6. The S2A9550's pioneering hardware RAID 6 controller protects data in the event of a double disk failure in the same redundancy group, without adversely affecting data availability or system performance. Easy to Install, Manage and Support -- S2A9550 solutions offer a rich set of management tools that make it easy-to-install, scale and manage a high performance, high capacity storage solution. Its consolidated functionality includes block level "real-time any-to-any virtualization" for very easy deployment and ongoing system management of very large storage pools. "By conquering the performance, availability, scalability and management challenges in deploying cluster NAS architectures with parallel or shared file systems and deep archive storage, the S2A9550 can scale as fast and large as needed while providing consistent, predictable data delivery to real-life energy application -- a must-have in oil and gas exploration where delays in analysis can mean delays in discovery," concluded Bloch.