GAMING

LOS ANGELES -- DataDirect Networks, provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announces the S2A8000, the company's newest flagship Silicon Storage Appliance that makes it easy for the scientific, supercomputing and broadcast communities to deploy and scale 2 Gigabit per second Fibre Channel storage area network infrastructures. The S2A8000 joins the S2A3000 and S2A6000 Silicon Storage Appliances that allow deployment of extremely high- performance, easy-to-manage, highly scalable 24/7/365 storage networking foundations that bring appliance-driven networks up and operational in hours, rather than days or weeks. Designed for the high bandwidth and capacity requirements associated with visualization, research and government computing applications, and shared-workflow broadcast and professional video applications, the 2U high (3.5 inch) S2A8000 "Singlet" Silicon Storage Appliance features four Fibre Channel ports for front end connectivity to servers and workstations and ten ports for connectivity to storage devices, delivering an aggregate peak bandwidth of 1.6 Gigabytes per second through the resulting storage area network. With its modular design, two S2A8000s can be "coupled" together forming data access redundancy while maintaining fully pipelined, parallel bandwidth to the same disk storage. The resulting S2A8000 "Couplet" creates a single-system image appliance that doubles the performance of a "Singlet"; with true sustained host throughput to disk exceeding 1 Gigabyte per second in both reads and writes. Accelerating application storage three to six times faster than current SAN solutions, and more than 10 times faster than standard NAS solutions, the S2A8000 allows a single system administrator to easily support up to 512 servers and 180 Terabytes of storage capacity per appliance. As the performance powerhouse for supercomputing, scientific and broadcast-centric storage networks, the highly scalable S2A8000 Silicon Storage Appliance delivers the following metrics to research centers and digital broadcast and video facilities worldwide: -- 7.2 Gigabytes per second internal bandwidth -- Scalable port bandwidth with sustained 190 Megabytes per second per port -- Simultaneous read and write port performance exceeding 375 Megabytes per second per port -- No performance penalty in writes versus reads -- No performance penalty in degraded mode or rebuild operation -- PowerLUN(TM) capability provides 1 Gigabyte per second+ of bandwidth to individual LUNs without host striping -- Built-in Solid-State-Disk capability with "LUN-in-Cache" feature The Silicon Storage Appliance architecture ensures high data availability and uptime along with application acceleration, providing optimal performance regardless of system condition, reducing and eliminating multiple points of failure and providing increased availability through reduced complexity. The S2A8000 also serves as a storage consolidation and management appliance that is optimized to meet the demanding requirements of growing storage environments, and can be used in a modular fashion to support supercomputing uses including the construction of terascale and distributed computational grids, and high-throughput broadcast environments such as news and direct-to- air systems. "Silicon Storage Appliances allow supercomputing and high-end broadcast facilities to deploy highly scalable, easy-to-manage storage networking infrastructures that deliver the performance/price mix that researchers and video professionals demand today," Brad Winett, vice president business development, DataDirect Networks, said. "In addition to being the first storage device to obliterate the 1 Gigabyte per second sustained throughput barrier in real-life applications, the S2A8000 maintains and expands the same usability and manageability benefits introduced with the initial Silicon Storage Appliance two years ago. The ability to use an easy-to-deploy appliance in a modular approach to bring scalability, manageability and application acceleration to 2 Gigabit per second storage infrastructures can provide compelling, competitive and cost-effective benefits to the scientific community." S2A8000 Joins S2A6000, S2A3000 in Expanding Appliance Product Line DataDirect's S2A8000 joins a growing family of Silicon Storage Appliances that serve the needs of enterprise and workgroup applications in a wide range of government, broadcasting and scientific uses. 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 S2A6000 Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to scientific and commercial supercomputing centers. By using DataDirect's S2A6000 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 S2A3000, based on enterprise-class S2A6000 technology, brings a simple to deploy, easy-to-manage and affordable storage network appliance that supplies an aggregate bandwidth up to 800 Megabytes per second (depending on application) to workgroups typically consisting of one to twenty-four Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI compute nodes. The S2A3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500 GB to 14 Terabytes.