LOS ANGELES, CA -- DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announced that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has selected seven Silicon Storage Appliances for use in developing and evaluating storage networking solutions for terascale, data-intensive applications. NCSA will be using the Silicon Storage Appliances, managing 58.5 Terabyte storage network, to create a foundational testbed where applications and technologies teams will be able to evaluate its ability to move and store large data files to understand the challenges involved with building massive, networked data storage systems. "After thorough testing of solutions from leading vendors, DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances proved to be the storage networking solution that met our requirements for cost-effective scalability, simple configuration, ease of management and rapid deployment," Dan Reed, director of NCSA said. "Deploying the Silicon Storage Appliances is our first step toward creating a petascale storage system that will support the needs of terascale computing systems and distributed computational Grids." The hardware and software of distributed Grids will include ultra high-speed storage networks, high-resolution visualization environments, massive scientific data archives, collaborative scientific tools, and toolkits for grid computing. Scientists and industry researchers across the country will be able to tap into this infrastructure to solve scientific and engineering problems. "The Grid and terascale computing system will bring unheralded power to scientists, engineers and industrial researchers allowing them to study a wide range of issues from biotechnology and medicine to astrophysics, real-time weather forecasting and engineering," Robert Woolery, vice president corporate development, DataDirect Networks, said. "Using Silicon Storage Appliances as a research tool could help these developing computational infrastructures deliver massive computational power, simply and easily, at a fraction of the cost." DataDirect Networks has created highly scalable, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and to lower operating costs. With each appliance's ability to supply an aggregate bandwidth of 800 megabytes per second and support up to 512 servers and 180 terabytes of storage, the Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to scientific and commercial supercomputing centers. DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows the scientific community and businesses to accelerate their applications, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) solutions and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology. The acceleration of data to applications and users -- simply and easily -- allows DataDirect Networks' customers to consolidate their storage; the Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows management of up to 100 Terabytes by a single system administrator, providing 10x lower Total Cost of Ownership. Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include NASA, Sandia National Laboratories, The National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA Forecast Systems Lab, U.S. Army Research Lab, White Sands Missile Range, National Century Financial Enterprises, Loudeye, Star TV, Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS, Seagate, Emulex and QLogic, among others. For more information visit www.datadirectnet.com or www.ncsa.uiuc.edu