EARTH SCIENCES
DataDirect's S2A Delivers More than Half the Storage Performance to the Top 100
With the 27th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, DataDirect Networks continues to advance its leadership role as the largest supplier of high performance storage to more than half of the world's top 100 supercomputing sites, shipping more than 10 petabytes year-to-date, and enabling 5 out of the top 6 fastest computers in the world. In 2006 alone, DataDirect Networks, has achieved unprecedented growth of more than 100% in the storage capacity shipped to high performance computing sites within the government, academia and corporate supercomputing markets. Its successes have included the deployment of more than one petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of storage to several of the world's fastest supercomputers, including IBM's Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and Bull's NovaScale SMP servers at "Tera10", the number one supercomputer in Europe.
"In today's budget conscious economy, organizations that can provide compute intensive infrastructure solutions that continually push the edge of performance while reducing complexity and cost are critical to the success of the high performance and cluster computing communities," said Greg Schulz, founder and sr. analyst of the StorageIO group and author of "Resilient Storage Networks". "The StorageIO group sees the development of highly available and massively scalable storage solutions to match the ever increasing power of petaflop supercomputers and evolving commercial environments as key to enabling ultra large bandwidth and cluster applications."
DataDirect Networks' stellar growth is driven by its industry leading Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) technology, a 6th generation RAID storage networking system, which delivers 360 peak teraFLOP/s with 1 raw petabyte of SATA storage. The system supports Fibre Channel-4 and InfiniBand host connectivity simultaneously, Fibre Channel or SATA disks and works with a wide range of shared and parallel file systems, delivering up to 3 GB/s of sustained ultra-high performance, while providing up to 480 TB of non-disruptive storage in a two rack system -- offering the highest performance and most dense solution with the smallest footprint in the industry. Further, the S2A provides enterprise-class data protection and reliability with multiple levels of redundancy, incorporating on-the-fly parity checking of all read I/Os and Hardware RAID 6 with no loss of performance across a broad range of computational, visualization, and nearline environments. DataDirect Networks' S2A offers broad infrastructure support powering compute clusters from IBM, Dell, HP, Cray, SGI, Bull and others.
"The overwhelming and ever-increasing market acceptance of our S2A storage technology from the world's top supercomputing sites validates our decade long commitment to providing the best-in-class scalable storage solution for high performance computing environments," added Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks. "We will continue to drive innovation while further establishing our technological leadership by working closely with OEMs, systems integrators and advisors to develop enabling solutions for file systems, clusters and networking infrastructures to better serve our customers in the supercomputing and high performance computing community."
DataDirect Networks' S2A family of products are in production in supercomputing sites around the world powering over 257,000 processors in major installations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories, PCS, NCSA, NOAA, NASA Ames, NERSC, SDSC, LNXI, ORNL, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, Dresden TUD, and many others.