EARTH SCIENCES

By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief -- Coming off recent Silicon Storage appliance product wins at two of the nation’s premiere computing research labs, Sandia and LLNL, DataDirect Networks is looking strong going into SC2001. To see where the company is, where it’s going, and what’s happening at SC2001, Supercomputing Online spoke with Robert Woolery, VP of corporate development and strategic planning. Supercomputing: Bob, thank you for the interview. How's your show been thus far? WOOLERY: Supercomputing 2001 is a great show for us, and our Silicon Storage Appliances are attracting a lot of attention. We're part of the data movement and management demonstration in the ASCI booth with other leading companies including AT&T, Avici Systems, Brocade, Nishan Systems, Riverstone Networks, SGI, Spirent Communications, Sun and Veritas. And we also have high performance data movement demonstrations going on in our own booth. We value our association with ASCI - where we now have 18 Silicon Storage Appliances in the labs between Sandia and Lawrence Livermore - and we are proud of being a part of their national security work. We are especially pleased regarding our activities in the ASCI booth, using our Silicon Storage Appliances to deliver substantial HPC benefits in the areas of high performance data access - providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) solutions and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology - and cost effective scalability, with support of up to 512 servers and 180 Terabytes of storage with each appliance. As you know, DataDirect has always had a substantial presence in supercomputing facilities throughout the years, and we're seeing a large number of our Silicon Storage Appliance deployed into data centers including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA Forecast Systems Lab, U.S. Army Research Lab and the White Sands Missile Range, among others. And the feedback that we are getting from evaluations in the field is that our key features -- performance, virtualization, scalability, simple deployment and easy management - are really resonating with decision makers out there. As such, it is creating a lot of excitement around our booth. Supercomputing: What are a couple areas of focus (at SC01), what's new and exciting here at this year's show? How about for the year ahead? WOOLERY: We're seeing supercomputing centers dealing with growing data stores, and the need for the centers to consolidated storage. At the same time we're seeing that data is becoming more and more content, with a mix of pure numeric data, images, video and audio being accessed and distributed at the same time. With this move to a more "content-centric" approach to data (and the need for "instant gratification") we and many administrators are seeing an exponential increase in performance demands placed on applications and network infrastructure. I think all these factors are very exciting for the storage networking industry. Combined, these factors mean that there's an increasing importance in storage networks to enable high performance computing applications to meet these new and growing demands. And this is an area where our appliance application acceleration can help. The larger data stores will most certainly involve a mix of storage and network mechanisms which our Silicon Storage Appliance was designed and built specifically to address. Again, an appliance that delivers GB/second performance from Petabytes of storage, all managed from a single system administrator can be very intriguing. All in all, this will be an exciting year ahead. Supercomputing: Please elaborate on ASCI's use, and showcasing of DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliance technology. WOOLERY: Well we have to differentiate between ASCI's use of Silicon Storage Appliances at the show and the implementations of multiple Silicon Storage Appliances at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. As I mentioned before, our Silicon Storage Appliances are in two of the three ASCI labs involved in critical national security work -- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories has a total of 12 Silicon Storage Appliances managing 91TBs and Sandia has purchased six Silicon Storage Appliances with 33 TBs of storage. Feedback has been very positive, with the Silicon Storage Appliance being selected because it exceeded LLNL and Sandia's expectations in terms of performance, scalability and management ease. Furthermore, the Silicon Storage Appliance makes it very easy to maintain, configure, and virtualize large amounts of storage, reducing overall administration time and providing a substantial operational savings. At the show, the goal of ASCI's overall demonstration is to answer the challenge of efficiently sharing and moving hundreds of terabytes of information across networks through standard protocols. The focus is improving the use of available bandwidth for interactive scientific visualization. ASCI is using the Silicon Storage Appliance's performance capabilities behind Veritas' ServPoint appliance software to accelerate virtualized data through the test bed network. While the Silicon Storage Appliance has virtualization and management capabilities, we are interested in the benefits that the Silicon Storage Appliance brings through acceleration of Veritas' storage management capabilities and providing higher performance, cost-effective scalability to the underlying network storage infrastructure. Supercomputing: Where do you see DataDirect being more successful in '02, in the research space with organizations/entities like the ASCI project or in the commercial space? WOOLERY: Both. The Silicon Storage Appliance is proving itself in laboratories, data centers and workgroups every day around the world. The work at Sandia, LLNL as well as a variety of commercial market applications including National Century Financial Enterprise and Thomson Broadcast are examples of how the Silicon Storage Appliance is enabling applications and infrastructure, simply and easily, in real world environments. We are seeing interesting uses of the Silicon Storage Appliance's performance, scalability and management capabilities in both research organizations and commercial enterprises. We'll keep you posted on both. Supercomputing: What do you feel is "next" for the storage networking and supercomputing industries? WOOLERY: What's next? Most certainly it's the ability to cost-effectively scale storage networking while accelerating the applications they support. As we're all aware, one of the major drawbacks with the first generation SANs was the ability to scale your environment simply, easily, quickly and affordably while accelerating data movement. That's an area that we are addressing today and feel it will be increasingly important over the coming years. The other area that we'll see as a next step is the extension of storage networking to the IP network with the convergence of SAN and NAS creating more heterogeneous storage networking environments, leveraging the benefits of both. Supercomputing: Is there anything you'd like to add? WOOLERY: Sure, I believe that now is a great time for supercomputing and storage networking, and we at DataDirect are proud and committed to be a part of supercomputing activities in facilities across the country. ---------- Supercomputing Online wishes to than Bob Woolery for his time and insights. ----------