EARTH SCIENCES

BOSTON, MA -- DataDirect Networks, the leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, will be demonstrating their enterprise-class S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance to life science professionals at BioITWorld 2002 on March 13 and 14. DataDirect's S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance-based infrastructures enable the life science industry to increase Return on Investment (ROI), speed time-to-market of new drugs, accelerate applications for maximized R&D productivity, and share storage resources for the highest levels of research collaboration. Silicon Storage Appliance technology brings bioscience professionals involved in the entire discovery and development process a way to accelerate their applications, 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. These benefits include the ability to manage up to 100 Terabytes with a single IT administrator (bringing 10x lower Total Costs of Ownership); dynamic re-configuration of storage quickly, simply and non-disruptively; and the elimination of backup windows. "The enabling characteristics of Silicon Storage Appliances - application acceleration, simple and non-disruptive scaling and easy storage network management - present a very compelling solution for life science professionals seeking infrastructures to increase productivity, collaboration and workflow," Robert Woolery, vice president corporate development, DataDirect Networks, said. "Easy-to-deploy Silicon Storage Appliances have proven themselves in laboratories, data centers and workgroups in mission-critical production environments every day around the world, and the benefits they deliver to these high performance computing facilities bring a competitive technology and cost-centric edge." DataDirect also sees parallels between their existing customer base (which includes NCSA, NASA and Sandia National Laboratories) and the needs of researchers in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic and government markets to create scalable, easy to manage storage network foundations. In addition to being used in individual research facilities, Silicon Storage Appliances can also aid in the deployment of large, terascale computing systems and distributed computational Grids for life science research. 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 by scientific and medical instruments can be analyzed in ways to allow new insights and knowledge. "Grids and terascale computing systems are empowering scientists and researchers to study a wide range of issues in the life sciences arena -- from biotechnology and human genomics to drug interactions and proteomics," said Dan Tanner, senior analyst, storage and storage management, Aberdeen Group. "Silicon Storage Appliances have helped these developing computational infrastructures deliver stored information to the massive computational power they're using, simply, easily, and affordably." Advanced Technology Brings Management, Scalability Benefits DataDirect Networks has created highly scalable, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and to lower operating costs. DataDirect's enterprise-class S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance supplies an aggregate bandwidth of 800 megabytes per second and supports up to 512 servers and 180 terabytes of storage, bringing performance and scalability benefits to scientific and commercial supercomputing centers. The company's S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliances are currently being used in production environments for government, scientific and Grid computing applications by NASA, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and NCSA among many others. The recently announced S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance, based on DataDirect's proven S2A 6000 appliance technology, brings a simple to deploy, easy to manage and affordable storage network appliance that allows departments and workgroups to achieve application performance gains, cost-effective scalability and simplified management. Each S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance supplies an aggregate bandwidth from 100 to 400 megabytes per second to Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI workgroups. The S2A 3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500GB to 7 Terabytes. For more information visit www.datadirectnet.com