EARTH SCIENCES

LOS ANGELES, DataDirect Networks announced that their intelligent Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) storage network controllers will be enabling best-of-breed SAN solutions in the Matrox Video Products Group booth (SL631) at NAB 2003. DataDirect's S2A controller's deliver compelling application productivity, cost-effective scalability and simplified management benefits to real-time broadcasting, non-linear editing and post production applications, and Matrox will be using S2A technology as the foundation of their new NewsFlow demonstration at NAB 2003. Matrox NewsFlow is designed to deliver an improved workflow that can be achieved in a digital newsroom environment. In the NAB2003 NewsFlow demonstration, the various stations acquire raw feeds directly to disk, allowing real-time editing, graphics, titles, and animation creation through the same stations, with the content going directly to playout and straight to air. Matrox based their selection of DataDirect's S2A storage appliances on the proven track record in broadcasting environments, ease of deployment, scalability, and sheer performance of S2A technology. "Using DataDirect's S2A controller technology to deliver the SAN infrastructure for NewsFlow enables maximum productivity and efficiency," said Spiro Plagakis, vice president, sales/marketing, Matrox Video Products Group. "DataDirect's S2A-driven storage networking approach makes SAN setup, scaling and management easy, and the performance brought about by S2A-enabled solutions is very compelling for broadcasters." DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliances are a family of intelligent storage controllers which provide servers, workstation clusters and standalone computers with easy, scalable and high bandwidth access to shared data. With built-in hardware RAID, a massive cache, storage and LUN virtualization, parallel Fibre Channel port technology and support for up to hundreds of terabytes of storage, DataDirect's S2As provide cost-effective and reliable support for the high bandwidth and large storage requirements of demanding broadcasting and rich media networks. "Intelligent S2A storage network controllers are providing broadcast and professional media companies with a mature and robust SAN infrastructure to create flexible and cost-effective solutions worldwide," Paul Bloch, president, DataDirect Networks, said. "Matrox NewsFlow offers a one stop shop solution for tapeless news environments, using best of breed components." Performance is Three Times Faster than SANs, Over Ten Times Faster than NAS Solutions For broadcasters and creative professionals needing high stream count, rock solid audio and video streams, storage and host scalability, and simplified management, DataDirect Networks' S2A intelligent storage network controller technology sets new standards in application acceleration and plug and play simplicity. Delivering up to 130 Terabytes of content to over 500 workstations per S2A controller, DataDirect's controllers simultaneously support a multitude of ingest, NLE, CG, playout and browse stations. DataDirect's "format independence" guarantees scaling of capacity and streams from highly-compressed all the way to HD and beyond. The S2A8000 storage controller, DataDirect's flagship product, is the ideal product for high performance, high capacity enterprise-class storage networking requirements of broadcasters and video professionals. The S2A8000 offers 8 full duplex FC-2 Fibre Channel host connections, 20 FC drive loops to storage, built-in hardware RAID, full redundancy, an internal bandwidth of 7.2 GB/sec., up to 10 GB of cache, storage virtualization and parallel port technology, and up to 130 TB of storage. Providing the highest levels of sustained performance with scalability and ease of management, the S2A8000 breaks down the barriers to creating large- scale yet manageable storage infrastructures (SAN and SAN/NAS convergence solutions) and is optimized for the high-bandwidth and capacity requirements of broadcasting, professional video, streaming, and rich media. Delivering up to 1.3 GB/sec. of sustained write bandwidth, the S2A8000 can supply over 120 concurrent streams of 50Mbit/sec. MPEG2@ML content, 50 HDCAM streams or 5 uncompressed HD streams per S2A8000 controller. The S2A3000 storage network controllers bring scalability and affordability to workgroup and departmental broadcast and professional video applications. Based on proven S2A technology, and available in "singlet" and "couplet" implementations, the 1U high S2A3000 allows an easy-to-manage SAN to be up in running in hours to serve station and production needs. The easy-to-install, easy-to-scale S2A3000 offers 8 full duplex FC Fibre Channel host connections, 12 FC drive loops to storage, built-in hardware RAID, full redundancy, an internal bandwidth of 4 GB/sec., up to 6 GB of cache, storage virtualization and parallel port technology, and scales up to 14 TB of storage. The S2A3000 supports Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI compute nodes. Customers using DataDirect's S2A storage controllers include the E! Networks, Time Warner Cable, RTL Television, British Broadcasting Company, CineGroupe, Star TV, Loudeye, NASA, NCSA, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, National Century Financial Enterprises, Sandia National Laboratories, CardioNow, and Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS Software, Seagate, Emulex, and QLogic, among others.