S2A9900 StorageScaler has eight times the performance of competing storage systems at 6GB/s per appliance, increases system capacity and density and enables ‘in-box’ storage tiering: DataDirect Networks has unveiled its 8th generation Silicon Storage Architecture (S2A) appliance and storage system. The S2A9900 StorageScaler scales performance and capacity to new heights, delivering sustained bandwidth of up to 6GB/s per appliance and enabling storage systems that will scale beyond 250GB/s in total throughput between host computers and the disk drives. This level of performance is eight times that of competitive technology and allows companies to put their data to work at a moment's notice. The first seventeen S2A9900 StorageScaler systems have been purchased by Argonne National Laboratory for its Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. The systems, attached to an IBM Blue Gene/P computer, will be outfitted with 8,160 terabyte SATA disk drives (over 8 petabytes of storage) and are managed by the S2A9900’s real-time DirectRAID 6 and SATAssure data protection algorithms. “High performance data management is essential for leadership computing,” said Ray Bair, Director of Argonne Leadership Computing. “Together, Blue Gene/P and the S2A9900 StorageScaler array can carry out a remarkable 445 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops). We are extremely pleased to provide this level of performance for scientific computing.” The performance of the S2A9900 StrorageScaler opens new windows for scientific discovery, allowing more complex and detailed computer simulations to be run. These simulations can require in excess of 300 terabytes of storage space for a single iteration, and their checkpoint operations (where the computer pauses calculations in order to write system restore data to disks to protect the run in the event of an application crash) can consume over 100GB/second of storage system bandwidth. 8X the Performance - Simply and Reliably The S2A9900 StorageScaler introduces several groundbreaking capabilities. It is the first storage system to support 8Gbps Fibre Channel as well as 20Gbps Infiniband DDR host connections, enabling users to achieve their bandwidth goals using fewer network connections. The system also leverages the latest serial attached SCSI (SAS) protocol to communicate to the drives it manages, providing a future-proof roadmap to the latest disk drive technologies, speeds and capacities. S2A9900 StorageScaler systems extend DataDirect Networks’ DirectRAID and SATAssure technology to new levels. With RAID 6 enabled, customers can still achieve and maintain full system bandwidth in both reads and writes, providing the utmost in data protection. Furthermore, the system's performance is not impacted by single or multiple drive failures, enabling very high quality of service and performance predictability. The S2A9900 also includes DataDirect Network’s next-generation SATAssure technology. Dubbed SATAssure Plus, the software enhancement features a new Sleep Mode that allows the S2A to ‘spin down’ drives based on user-definable policies when they are not actively accessed. Sleep Mode reduces the operational costs of storage by saving power and cooling requirements while still maintaining near-instant accessibility to data. S2A9900 StorageScaler systems configured with large capacity SATA drives are ideal for disk-to-disk backup targets, disk-based active archives or for tape replacement strategies. Additionally, SATAssure Plus can completely power cycle individual drives. This feature, when combined with S2A drive rebuild journaling, enables the system to self-diagnose drive problems and take corrective action without user intervention, reducing the number of drives that must be replaced and subsequent lengthy rebuild times. "The 9900’s ability to manage 1.2PB of capacity and achieve 6GB/sec with no degraded mode is unheard of in this industry,” said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "DataDirect is setting itself apart from other storage vendors with this level of capacity and performance. Not only does the 9900 make the ‘store everything’ business model feasible, but when combined with the ability to spin down drives for power savings, it makes tape replacement more attractive as well.” New StorageScaler 6000 Drive Enclosure System In conjunction with the introduction of the S2A9900, DataDirect Networks also introduced its new StorageScaler 6000 drive enclosure system. The StorageScaler 6000 houses sixty SAS and/or SATA disk drives in a compact 4U footprint, enabling a single S2A9900 appliance to manage up to 1.2 Petabytes (1,200 Terabytes) of data in only two data center racks. The StorageScaler 6000 allows SAS and SATA drives to be mixed in the same unit in any combination, enabling organizations to assign data to the right types of drives, whether they are high-performance, low-latency enterprise-class SAS drives, or high-capacity, inexpensive SATA drives. The S2A9900 enables data migration between SAS and SATA disk drives using dedicated internal bandwidth, allowing hierarchical storage management and information lifecycle management without affecting host system performance. “It’s extremely exciting to see for the demand for storage systems requiring scalable performance and capacity grow beyond a niche and into an underserved market that’s actually growing faster than the overall storage market,” said Paul Bloch, President and co-founder of DataDirect Networks. “With the launch of our groundbreaking S2A9900 StorageScaler, we are positioned to lead the market for open, scalable storage solutions that solve storage scaling challenges.” “Our S2A9900 StorageScaler was created specifically to excel in many types of environments and therefore is well-suited to meet the current and future demands of a growing number of applications including high performance computing, Internet content creation and distribution, massive online archiving of information and high-speed disk-based backup,” added Alex Bouzari, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of DataDirect Networks. The S2A9900 StorageScaler system will be demonstrated at the DataDirect Networks booth (booth #1437) at SuperComputing 2007, and will additionally be on display in the booths of Mellanox (Booth #127), Voltaire (Booth #1137), Sun/CFS (Booth #514) and Dell (Booth #1816). Systems will be available for delivery in March 2008.