Crosswalk, a provider of high-performance technologies that enable scalable and resilient collaborative computing, today announced the launch of the iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System. iGrid is a vendor agnostic grid technology that enables any application to access any authorized storage resource, any iGrid node to access any and all file systems, and all users to concurrently access any data they need for collaborative projects. "High-performance technical computing centers generally manage very large data sets and file systems with requirements for data to be accessible to multiple systems both within the data center and between geographically dispersed centers. In a recent IDC survey, user organizations cited more universal interoperability, parallel file systems and greater speed as the most sought after improvements to their storage environments," said Christopher Willard, IDC research vice president for Technical Computing Systems. "Crosswalk is working to address these requirements with its iGrid system, which is designed to help provide a single system view of storage resources and to support applications accessing multiple storage resources." iGrid leverages legacy investments, breathing new life into archaic architectures by establishing virtual links between existing storage resources and application servers. As a result, iGrid enables seamless data sharing across what were previously isolated applications and data silos, fostering multi-party collaboration and workflow concurrency. iGrid also creates a single system view of the storage environment that dramatically simplifies management of computational grids and supports non-disruptive, unlimited scalability. Equally important, the technology delivers complete resiliency with no single point of failure -- and without the need to purchase duplicate resources, a requirement for more conventional storage technologies. "We developed iGrid to meet the high-performance storage demands of computational grids and clusters in environments where productivity, results and time-to-completion are all being adversely impacted by existing inflexible storage architectures that are silo-based," said Jack McDonnell, Crosswalk's founder and CEO. "Instead, iGrid is truly adaptable, enabling users to add storage capacity whenever it's needed, and to make each and every storage volume available to each and every application server and end-user. The bottom line here is that iGrid empowers collaborative project team members to focus on their work, not storage work-arounds."