Top Of The News - Storage:

DataDirect Announces Guide For High Performance SANs

Advanced Three Dimensional Modeling and Simulation," a new engineeringfocused, "hands on" implementation guide that details how supercomputing facilities can gain increased productivity and lower operating costs by using Silicon Storage Appliances to create high performance, massively scalable IT storage network infrastructures.

Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy for the government, industrial and scientific communities to deploy and scale high performance storage area network infrastructures in a cost-effective, modular approach. Silicon Storage Appliances bring a simple and straightforward approach to supporting supercomputing uses in visualization, simulation and research, including the construction of terascale and distributed computational grids.

"In today's research environment, high performance computing centers need to get more out of their IT investments in terms of increased application performance, massive scalability and easy management," Robert Woolery, vice president, DataDirect Networks, said. "Silicon Storage Appliance-enabled infrastructures deliver the performance, scalability and management benefits in a modular, cost-effective manner required for today's and tomorrow's supercomputing facilities, bringing a compelling high performance storage networking solution to IT professionals."

Silicon Storage Appliances bring high performance computing centers a way to accelerate application productivity, 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 and share their storage; Silicon Storage Appliances also bring management advantages to IT professionals tasked with implementing 24/7/365 storage networking foundations.

With the ability to supply an aggregate bandwidth of 800 megabytes per second and support up to 512 servers and 180 Terabytes of storage, the S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to scientific and commercial supercomputing centers. By using DataDirect's S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliances in a modular fashion to cluster nodes and create larger computational grids, IT professionals can begin to create highly scalable, easy-to manage terascale supercomputing systems for a wide range of scientific, industrial and government supercomputing applications.

The S2A 3000, based on enterprise-class S2A 6000 technology, brings a simple to deploy, easy to manage and affordable storage network appliance that supplies an aggregate bandwidth up to 400 megabytes per second (depending on requirements) to workgroups typically consisting of one to eight Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI compute nodes. The S2A 3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500 GB to 7 Terabytes.

Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, NASA, NCSA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA Forecast Systems Lab, U.S. Army Research Lab, White Sands Missile Range, National Century Financial Enterprises, Time Warner Cable, E! Networks, CineGroupe, RTL Television, CardioNow, Loudeye, Star TV, Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS Software, Seagate, Emulex and QLogic, among others.

About DataDirect Networks Inc

DataDirect Networks is a leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent storage networking appliances. Serving IT professionals in the government, defense, life sciences, broadcasting, digital production and oil and gas industries, DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy, simple and trouble-free to accelerate and manage applications, dramatically reducing TCO and increasing ROI. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at 818-700-7600 or visit www.datadirectnet.com.

The white paper is available from DataDirect's Web site at: www.datadirectnet.com/contact/hpcwhitepaper.html.