EARTH SCIENCES

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY -- DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, will be presenting 2Gb appliance-based SAN solutions and showcasing their Silicon Storage Appliances to attendees of the International Supercomputing Conference 2002 from June 19-22 at the Heidelberg Convention Center. Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy for the scientific community to deploy and scale high performance storage area network infrastructures in a cost-effective, modular approach to support supercomputing uses including the construction of terascale and distributed computational grids. "Silicon Storage Appliances allow supercomputing facilities to deploy highly scalable, easy-to-manage storage networking infrastructures that deliver the performance/price mix that researchers demand today," Robert Woolery, vice president, DataDirect Networks, said. "The ability to use an easy-to-deploy appliance in a modular approach to bring scalability, manageability and application acceleration to 2Gb infrastructures can provide compelling, competitive and cost-effective benefits to the scientific community." Silicon Storage Appliances bring researchers a way to accelerate application productivity, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) solutions and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology. The acceleration of data to applications and users -- simply and easily -- allows DataDirect Networks' customers to consolidate and share their storage; Silicon Storage Appliances also bring management advantages to IT professionals tasked with implementing 24/7/365 storage networking foundations. 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 S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to scientific and commercial supercomputing centers. By using DataDirect's S2A 6000 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. The S2A 3000, based on enterprise-class S2A 6000 technology, brings a simple to deploy, easy to manage and affordable storage network appliance that supplies an aggregate bandwidth up to 400 megabytes per second (depending on requirements) to workgroups typically consisting of one to eight Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI compute nodes. The S2A 3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500 GB to 7 Terabytes. What Researchers Say About Silicon Storage Appliances "After thorough testing of solutions from leading vendors, DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances proved to be the storage networking solution that met our requirements for cost-effective scalability, simple configuration, ease of management and rapid deployment," Dan Reed, director of NCSA said. "Deploying the Silicon Storage Appliances is our first step toward creating a petascale storage system that will support the needs of terascale computing systems and distributed computational grids." "The Silicon Storage Appliance exceeds our performance expectations because they were scalable and easily managed," Kim Cupps, group leader, Data Storage Group, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said. "The Silicon Storage Appliance is easy to maintain and configure which should reduce administration time and provide operational savings." "The principal reasons that we've selected Silicon Storage Appliances for our imaging and analysis needs were the combination of application acceleration and reliability brought about by each appliance," Scott Sinno, MODIS UNIX administrator, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said. "We continue to use Silicon Storage Appliances for the simple configuration and detailed onboard diagnostics that make it very easy to tune and easy to manage our environment." "We have acquired six Silicon Storage Appliances for production use with existing computer systems and for development of new data services for future, even larger computer systems," Milton Clauser, project manager, Sandia National Laboratories, said. "The ability to easily handle very large datasets at very high I/O rates is of paramount importance to this storage facility, and was a key consideration in our selection of DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliances. After considerable testing on a range of storage systems, the Silicon Storage Appliances brought performance and management benefits that were very compelling."