EARTH SCIENCES

LOS ANGELES, CA -- DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announces the debut of a Silicon Storage Appliance to serve the needs of departmental-level computing and workgroup applications, setting new standards in application acceleration and simplicity. DataDirect Networks has based their S2A 3000 line on the company's proven Silicon Storage Appliance technology, creating a solution that offers the leading features of their enterprise-class appliances in a more compact form factor with an exceptionally attractive price point. The S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance is a simple to deploy, easy to manage and affordable storage network appliance that allows small to mid-size businesses to achieve application performance gains, cost-effective scalability and simplified management. Silicon Storage Appliance users have seen productivity and workflow increases of 600 percent from the underlying appliance technology, which brings compelling return on investment benefits for business. Selecting the S2A 3000 solutions for departmental use also offers companies an easy and clean migration path to DataDirect's enterprise-class Silicon Storage Appliance solutions as application and environment needs grow. "To date, integration, management and deployment challenges have resulted in block level storage networking environments being tightly concentrated in the Fortune 500 data center," Paul Mansky, director of Enterprise Storage, CIBC World Markets, said. "With the S2A's appliance-based approach, you can now move higher-level functions into appliances, providing plug-and-play, highly integrated, targeted solutions that interoperate. As customers grow, appliances can be aggregated, offering IT managers a straightforward migration path. The ability to deliver this level of capability with simplicity of management and application productivity to departmental and workgroups brings SANs to the broader mass IT market." DataDirect Networks has created the flexible Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and lower total costs of ownership. Each S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance supplies an aggregate bandwidth from 100 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 500GB to 7 Terabytes. Deploying a departmental SAN using the S2A 3000 is virtually plug and play, with users easily connecting servers and workstations into one side of the 1U high appliance and commodity-priced JBOD disks into the other side. System configuration and network virtualization is done in a quick, three-step process. Scaling of the storage network and activation of additional software modules (that are included in the S2A 3000) can be quickly and non-disruptively activated with a software key. "DataDirect's S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance realizes the promise of storage area networks by bringing an affordable, easy to manage, plug and play appliance to small and mid-sized businesses," Brad Winett, vice president product marketing, DataDirect Networks, said. "In an era where business is faced with the challenge of doing more with less investment, the S2A 3000 empowers workgroups and enterprises with higher levels of productivity and scalability while offering the best price-performance choice in the market." "The digital content creation (DCC) business has been craving for a great, easy to integrate SAN solution where deployment and management have more to do with standard engineering practices than black magic. Now, with DataDirect's S2A 3000, there is a light at the end of the tunnel," Yvan Ouellet, co-founder, LOR-TECH International, said. "The Silicon Storage Appliance S2A 3000 provides a mature enterprise-class appliance in a configuration which exceptionally meets the bandwidth hungry, as well as easy to deploy and manage requirements, of high-level DCC workgroups. The application acceleration enabled by Silicon Storage Appliances is the first thing people notice in a new deployment -- which makes it a winner from the studio floor to the front office." "With DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance we found a simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage solution that allows us to substantially increase our company's productivity," Jack Schumann, owner, Schumann Printers, Inc., said. "Installing DataDirect's enterprise-class S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance was a very wise and compelling decision for our company, and we are very interested in the benefits that DataDirect's new S2A 3000 departmental appliance can provide." Pricing S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance solutions (appliance plus storage) start from $39,000 (with 500 GB storage) and $49,995 (with 1 TB storage). For more information visit www.datadirectnet.com