LOS ANGELES. CA -- DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories has selected the company's Silicon Storage Appliances to use in critical national security work. Livermore has purchased five additional Silicon Storage Appliances and 25 additional Terabytes (TBs) of storage to use in conjunction with the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) at the national lab. The selection of DataDirect storage networking appliances brings a total of 12 Silicon Storage Appliances managing 91TBs at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory supercomputing facility. ASCI provides modeling and simulation capability for the DOE/National Nuclear Security Administration's Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship activities at the three Defense Programs laboratories (Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore). Advanced computations and three-dimensional modeling and simulation are developed to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear arsenal in the absence of full-scale nuclear testing. "The Silicon Storage Appliance exceeds our performance expectations because they are scalable and easily managed," Kim Cupps, Group Leader, Data Storage Group, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said. "The Silicon Storage Appliance is easy to maintain and configure which should reduce administration time and provide operational savings." The selection of Silicon Storage Appliances by Lawrence Livermore closely follows an announcement that Sandia National Laboratories had selected six Silicon Storage Appliances (November 5, 2001). With the Livermore selection, Silicon Storage Appliances are now operational in two of the three ASCI Defense Program laboratories. "Substantial performance and scalability benefits, combined with the simplicities of deployment and management make the Silicon Storage Appliance a very compelling proposition to government, scientific and commercial high performance computing environments," Brad Winett, vice president product marketing, DataDirect Networks, said. "In these economic times, businesses are even more keenly attuned to technology - like the Silicon Storage Appliance - that can help companies work faster, smarter and easier, increasing return on investment." DataDirect Networks has created highly scalable, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and establish an intelligent platform for deploying application-specific storage solutions. 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 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, 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, QLogic and Brocade, among others. For more information visit www.datadirectnet.com