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Silicon Graphics, the world's leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage, and YottaYotta, the High Performance NetStorage Company, announced an agreement that will enable SGI Professional Services to resell and support the YottaYotta NetStorager System. Together the companies will offer a single shared file system that allows multiple users-spread across the globe-to experience transparent and secure access to shared data. With the ability to intelligently share data across thousands of miles, the SGI and YottaYotta solution enables multi-site data collaboration, information sharing, and high availability to globally distributed organizations. When deployed, the YottaYotta NetStorager System and the SGI(r) InfiniteStorage Shared File system CXFS(tm) provide shared data access across multiple distributed data centers at near local performance rates. For example, SGI and YottaYotta have demonstrated a CXFS cluster reading and writing to a shared file across 2,900 miles at approximately 700 megabytes per second. "The teaming of SGI and YottaYotta enables our customers to extend the benefits of SGI InfiniteStorage solutions across significant geographic regions, while avoiding the negative effects of WAN latency on local application performance," said Bob Pette, director, Professional Services for North America, SGI. "We're eager to engage our key customers that will benefit from our distributed system approach." The traditional model for data sharing over distance is to use file servers to copy files from storage at one site, to storage at another site. This proves to be a wasteful use of storage resources and might better be labeled as data duplication than data sharing. The new solution offered by SGI and YottaYotta is the world's first instance of a shared file system implemented in conjunction with a distributed block system. The end-user experience is fundamentally different from the traditional file sharing model. Rather than having to log on to a remote server and download files, the user sees local access to remote files as though they were sitting on his or her local hard drive. The end result is that multiple users, spread across wide regions, all experience transparent yet secure access to shared data. "Together SGI and YottaYotta break the data duplication paradigm by offering one global file system that allows multiple users to access a shared data image, regardless of geography," said Jack Kurtz, Vice President, Business Development, YottaYotta. "The result is an optimization of network resources and a significant reduction in storage management overhead. We look forward to building a successful partnership with the SGI team."