STORAGE

LOS ANGELES - DataDirect Networks, provider of high performance storage networking appliances, has announced the qualification of the company's Silicon Storage Appliances with MidStream Technology's IP 2000 Series of Video Servers. Combining the two purpose-built appliances allows cable operators and video service providers to easily deliver more than 450 simultaneous DVD-quality streams, gain increased productivity and lower operating costs using a centralized, flexible and easy-to-scale delivery infrastructure with an extremely efficient footprint. Testing results for the IP 2000/Silicon Storage Appliance solution demonstrated predictable, sustainable performance across each configuration with no degradation, delivering the highest levels of overall throughput and reliability. The combined solution easily delivers the highest level of DVD-quality streams with the smallest footprint in the market. "As video service providers and cable operators are investigating and rolling out next generation products and services over the next 24 months, the ability to deploy cost-effective solutions that achieve superior performance is quickly becoming the key to staying competitive," said Edward Huguez, president and CEO, MidStream Technologies. "DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances provide us a highly scalable, flexible and dependable SAN backbone that complements the strengths of our IP2000 Series of Video Servers, and we look forward to our continuing work with DataDirect to create best-of-breed solutions for providers and cable operators through this period of expansion and beyond." "Purpose-built appliances, such as our line of Silicon Storage Appliances and MidStream's IP 2000, can bring a wide range of benefits - including increased productivity and workflow efficiencies along with substantial cost reductions - to content-based delivery infrastructures," said Brad Winett, vice president, business development, DataDirect Networks. "MidStream brings a compelling mix of flexibility, performance, and efficient footprint to the video server market -- very similar attributes that our Silicon Storage Appliances bring to the SAN arena -- and we are extremely interested in working with MidStream to offer their customers an easy to manage, easy to scale storage networking infrastructure that can grow as the VoD market continues to expand." MidStream, a developer of highly advanced, broadcast class video servers for the telco and cable Video-on-Demand (VoD) markets, is the first company to design and develop broadcast quality VoD servers to empower cable operators and video service providers to deploy scalable, affordable and diverse VoD services, such as SVoD and network supported personal video recorders (PVR) functionality over their existing infrastructure. > Silicon Storage Appliances Bring Simplicity, Productivity and > Performance DataDirect Networks has created highly scalable, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and lower operating costs. Using a Silicon Storage Appliance-based infrastructure to create the storage area network allows broadcasting professionals to overcome the many limitations of first generation storage networks, with the plug and play appliance bringing application productivity through acceleration, cost-effective scalability and simplicity with high QoS. Silicon Storage Appliances bring parallelism and superior virtualization benefits to content creators and provides unmatched advantages to the production environment. For broadcasters and creative professionals needing high stream count, rock solid audio and video performance, storage and host scalability, and simplified management, DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology sets new standards in application acceleration and plug and play simplicity. DataDirect's enterprise-class S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance directly supports up to 512 workstations and 180 Terabytes of storage, simultaneously supporting a multitude of ingest, NLE, CG, playout and browse stations. With each appliance's ability to supply over 6000 hours of 50Mbit/sec MPEG2@ML content to 90 concurrent streams, and the ability to support thousands of concurrent broadband streams, the Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to broadcasting and production environments. DataDirect's "format independence" guarantees scaling of capacity and streams from highly compressed broadband all the way to HD and beyond. The S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance, based on DataDirect's proven S2A 6000 appliance technology, brings a simple to deploy, easy to manage and affordable storage network appliance that allows departments and workgroups to achieve application performance gains, cost-effective scalability and simplified management. Each S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance supplies an aggregate bandwidth up to 800 megabytes per second to Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI workgroups. The S2A 3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500GB to 14 Terabytes. Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include the E! Networks, Time Warner Cable, RTL Television, British Broadcasting Company, CineGroupe, Star TV, Loudeye, NASA, NCSA, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, National Century Financial Enterprises, Sandia National Laboratories, CardioNow, and Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS Software, Seagate, Emulex, and QLogic, among others.