Technology Challenge:
Sandia National Laboratories needed a storage networking solution that easily handles large datasets at very high I/O rates for critical national security use. Sandia is developing a large, scalable disk-storage facility to handle the output from large multi-teraflop scientific computers.

Solution:
Six Silicon Storage Appliances and 33 Terabytes

Benefits:
Easy to deploy Silicon Storage Appliances bring "performance and management benefits that were very compelling."

Silicon Storage Appliances bring application acceleration with substantial performance and scalability benefits, with each appliance supplying an aggregate bandwidth of 800 megabytes/sec. and support up to 512 servers and 180 Terabytes of storage.

Silicon Storage Appliances provide the ability to deploy massive clusters for visualization to achieve substantial performance gains over earlier, more expensive technologies.

Sandia National Laboratories Selects Six Silicon Storage Appliances Selected For Critical National Security Use

Silicon Storage Appliances Acquired to Accelerate Visualization and Rendering Work

Sandia National Laboratories, part of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Tri-Lab program (along with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory), is a research and development facility with ongoing projects in national security, energy and environmental technologies. Sandia is developing a large, scalable disk-storage facility to handle the output from large multi-teraflop scientific computers.

To meet increasing high performance, high availability demands needed in their projects, Sandia National Laboratories turned to DataDirect Networks and Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate visualization and rendering work resulting from the complex supercomputing applications that simulate, analyze and predict performance of nuclear weapons.

"The ability to easily handle very large datasets at very high I/O rates is of paramount importance to this storage facility, and was a key consideration in our selection of DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliances," said Milton Clauser, project manager, Sandia National Laboratories.

DataDirect Networks has created the highly scalable, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and lower total ownership costs for commercial and scientific organizations.

"After considerable testing on a range of storage systems, the Silicon Storage Appliances brought performance and management benefits that were very compelling," continued Clauser.

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 supercomputing centers like Sandia. Use of Silicon Storage Appliances allows Sandia to deploy massive clusters for visualization to achieve substantial performance gains over earlier, more expensive technologies.

When final results were in, Sandia acquired six Silicon Storage Appliances for production use with existing computer systems and for development of new data services for future, even larger computer systems.

"After considerable testing on a range of storage systems, the Silicon Storage Appliances brought performance and management benefits that were very compelling."

As a company that is intensely committed to the supercomputing community's efforts to supply the breakthroughs to enhance the country's ability to react and respond to the challenges ahead, DataDirect Networks is proud to play a role in America's high performance data centers.

"Easy-to-deploy Silicon Storage Appliances are proving themselves in laboratories, data centers and workgroups every day around the world," said Brad Winett, vice president product marketing, DataDirect Networks. "The work at Sandia National Laboratories is another example of how the Silicon Storage Appliance is enabling applications and infrastructure, simply and easily, in real world environments."

DataDirect Networks' Technology Advantage
DataDirect Networks' technology allows business to accelerate their applications, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) 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 and dramatically lower their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows management of up to 100 Terabytes by a single system administrator, reducing TCO by a factor of 10.

What is a Silicon Storage Appliance?
As the recognized leader in storage networking appliance technology, with over 500TB of virtualized storage in use around the world, DataDirect Networks' and their Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy, simple and trouble-free to accelerate and manage applications, dramatically reducing TCO and increasing ROI.

Based on feedback gained from CTOs, CIOs and CEOs, DataDirect Networks created Silicon Storage Appliance technology to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and to lower operating costs.

Technically superior to competitors in the field, Silicon Storage Appliances provide a substantially different and far more advanced approach to data access for data center use than NAS or pre-appliance SAN solutions. Using silicon-based parallelism and intelligence in a much simpler architecture allows DataDirect customers to dramatically increase manageability, performance and reduce I/O bottlenecks that exist in pre-appliance SAN technology.

Silicon Storage Appliances can be installed in a matter of hours, is supported on all major server platforms, and offers far more performance capacity (from hundreds of Gigabytes to 180 Terabytes per appliance) than first generation SANs with the same footprint.

Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, NASA, 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.

Application notes, whitepapers and customer stories are available at http://www.datadirectnet.com.