EARTH SCIENCES

LOS ANGELES, CA -- DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, will be showcasing their enterprise-class S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance to attendees of the Tenth NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies and the Nineteenth IEEE Symposium on Mass Storage Systems at the University of Maryland in College Park from April 16-18, 2002. Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy for the scientific community to deploy and scale high performance storage area network infrastructures in a modular approach to support terascale and distributed computational grids. 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. Supplying an aggregate bandwidth of 800 megabytes per second to Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI platforms, each Silicon Storage Appliance supports up to 512 servers and 180 terabytes of storage. Customers currently using Silicon Storage Appliances in supercomputing applications include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. As distributed grids become more and more prevalent, there are certain foundational requirements for scalability, reliability, performance and manageability. DataDirect's storage network appliance technology was designed specifically to enable these larger, extended infrastructures. Grids harness and use distributed computers, data storage systems, networks, and other resources as if they were a single massive system to create a "virtual supercomputer," far larger the individual hardware components. Clusters of smaller computers (nodes) can be connected through highly scalable storage networking infrastructures to provide access to hundreds of terabytes of networked storage to deliver the computing power needed for the higher levels of research and discovery. 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 begin to create highly scalable, easy-to manage terascale supercomputing systems for a wide range of scientific, industrial and government supercomputing applications. "Terascale systems and distributed grids promise to enable scientific discovery by giving scientists a new, collaborative way to work - and through these systems, teraflops of data that are being collected can be analyzed in ways to allow new insights and knowledge," Robert Woolery, vice president corporate development, DataDirect Networks, said. "The ability to use an easy to deploy appliance in a modular approach to bring scalability, manageability and application acceleration can provide compelling, competitive and cost-effective benefits to the scientific community." The annual NASA Goddard/IEEE conference provides a forum for discussion of issues relevant to the management and distribution of large volumes of data, and gives attendees a storage-centric glimpse into the future from an engineering view highlighting the expected evolution of data storage technologies over the next three to five years. In addition to showcasing the S2A 6000 to event attendees, DataDirect will also discuss the acceleration of data through storage networking fabrics using appliances, mitigating performance and scalability limitations due to storage networking fabric congestion in a conference session on April 17 at 4 p.m. For more information visit www.datadirectnet.com