EARTH SCIENCES

LOS ANGELES - DataDirect Networks will be demonstrating the world's fastest storage controller at SC2002/Baltimore from November 18 to 21. DataDirect's S2A8000 Silicon Storage Appliance is a new storage controller device that has been created to allow the deployment of extremely high-performance, easy-to-manage, and highly scalable 24/7/365 storage networking foundations that bring appliance-driven networks 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. "The high performance computing (HPC) networking landscape is going through radical changes, and our customers are increasingly asking for turnkey solutions which combine block level storage and file system attributes, and 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." 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 area 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 1 Gigabyte per second. The native performance and unique parallel data access capabilities of the S2A8000 helps realize true application performance three to six times faster than current SAN solutions, and more than 10 times faster than standard NAS solutions, and allows a single system administrator to easily support up to 512 servers and 180 Terabytes of storage capacity with a single appliance. As the performance powerhouse for supercomputing storage networks, the highly scalable S2A8000 Silicon Storage Appliance provides: * 7.2 Gigabytes per second internal bandwidth * Scalable port bandwidth with sustained 190 Megabytes per second per port * Simultaneous read and write port performance exceeding 375 Megabytes per second per port * No performance penalty in writes versus reads * No performance penalty in degraded mode or rebuild operation * PowerLUN" capability provides 1 Gigabyte per second+ of bandwidth to individual LUNs without host striping * Built-in Solid-State-Disk capability with LUN-in-Cache feature In addition to the S2A8000-enabled storage network that will be demonstrated in DataDirect's booth, Silicon Storage Appliance-enabled SANs and SAN/NAS convergence systems will also be exhibited in other booths on the SC2002 floor including the Department of Energy/Sandia National Laboratories, ABBA, Quadrics and LinuxNetworX. S2A8000 is Newest Member of DataDirect's Expanding Appliance Product Line DataDirect's S2A8000 joins a growing family of Silicon Storage Appliances that serve the needs of enterprise and workgroup applications in a wide range of government and scientific uses. Other Silicon Storage Appliances include: * S2A6000 Silicon Storage Appliance: With the ability to supply an aggregate bandwidth of 800 Megabytes per second and support up to 512 servers and 180 Terabytes of storage, the S2A6000 Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to scientific and commercial supercomputing centers. By using DataDirect's S2A6000 Silicon Storage Appliances in a modular fashion to cluster nodes and create larger computational grids, IT professionals can begin to create highly scalable, easy-to manage terascale supercomputing systems for a wide range of scientific, industrial and government supercomputing applications. * S2A3000 Silicon Storage Appliance: The S2A3000, based on enterprise-class S2A6000 technology, brings a simple to deploy, easy-to-manage and affordable storage network appliance that supplies an aggregate bandwidth up to 800 Megabytes per second (depending on application) to workgroups typically consisting of one to twenty-four Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI compute nodes. The S2A3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500 GB to 14 Terabytes.