EARTH SCIENCES

LOS ANGELES -- DataDirect Networks ill be showcasing its S2A8000, the world's fastest storage controller at the twentieth IEEE/eleventh NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems & Technologies from April 8 to 10 in San Diego. DataDirect's powerful S2A8000 is a storage network controller device that has been created to allow the deployment of extremely high-performance, and highly scalable 24/7/365 storage networking foundations that bring easy-to- manage storage pools up and operational in hours, rather than days or weeks. With DataDirect's S2A8000 storage controller technology, scientific, visualization and computation-intensive sites have an easy way to deploy a wide range of highly scalable, performance-intensive storage networking solutions which are very cost-effective. With 20 Teraflop-class architectures currently under development, the S2A8000 is fueling some of the world's most demanding computational sites. Designed for the high bandwidth and capacity requirements associated with scientific computation, visualization, research and other high-performance computing applications, the 2 x 2U high (7 inch) S2A8000 "Couplet" Silicon Storage Appliance features 28 Fibre Channel ports for connectivity to servers, workstations and storage devices and boasts an internal bandwidth of 7.2 Gigabytes per second through the resulting storage network. With its modular design, S2A8000 Couplets provide data access redundancy while maintaining fully pipelined, parallel bandwidth to the same disk storage. The S2A8000 Couplet creates a single-system image appliance that doubles the performance of a "Singlet"; with true sustained host throughput to disk exceeding well over 1 Gigabyte per second. The S2A8000 delivers scalable port bandwidth with sustained 190 Megabytes per second per port in specific environments, and provides full duplex operation on a per port basis. Using the S2A8000 there is no performance penalty in writes versus reads, and no performance penalty in degraded mode or during rebuild operation. The versatile S2A8000 is also being used as the foundation of the new SwiftCluster clustering framework, a technological breakthrough which combines the S2A8000 parallel block level storage controller, its scalable serial PCI I/O node interface, Direct Memory Access optimized protocol layer, all tying into a highly efficient parallel file system to create a blueprint for the future of clustering. With SwiftCluster, customers will be able to build very efficient computer clusters scaling to tens of teraflops, while benefiting from Object Based Disk (OBD) file system technology. "High performance computing (HPC) users are increasingly asking us for turnkey solutions that cost-effectively deliver up to hundreds of Gigabytes per second of bandwidth, and Petabytes of storage," Alex Bouzari, chief executive officer, DataDirect Networks, said. "With the S2A8000 storage controller, we can deliver this level of bandwidth and scalability today, at unbeatable price/performance ratios, using technology that has been proven in some of the toughest production environments on the planet."