EARTH SCIENCES

Frost & Sullivan Award Validates DDN Scalable, Cost/Energy Efficient Video Streaming Storage Technology & Deployment Experience

For its part in addressing the need for scalable, affordable and reliable storage for digital camera surveillance, DataDirect Networks (DDN) today announced it has been recognized as the 2009 Winner for the North American Physical Security Network Storage Product Innovation of the Year Award from Frost & Sullivan, a leading technology analyst & consulting company. In the award, DDN was recognized for its innovative solutions and 300% revenue growth in 2008-2009 in the field of network storage for large-scale video and IP camera surveillance technology.

After reviewing the competitive landscape, Frost & Sullivan selected DDN’s GridScaler S2A9900 video archive technology, which provides high-performance scalable video storage which is scalable to 100’s of GB/s and petabytes of storage in a single, simply-managed file system volume. Further, Frost & Sullivan recognized a rapid increase in customer adoption of DDN storage technology in this market segment – as DDN products present a combination of capabilities which are key to the rapidly growing physical security marketplace. Combining storage and file system scalability with storage density, energy savings and cost-efficient capacity - DDN systems have been uniquely engineered for high-resolution surveillance video archiving.

As the security industry continues to adopt higher-definition video capture technology and extended video retention periods, video archive storage managers are challenged with a radical increase in data storage requirements. The resulting effect has been an overwhelming demand for scalable storage technologies which are far more scalable than even recently developed storage technology targeted at solving SD camera storage challenges. DDN has developed innovative capabilities to address the specific needs of the physical security market by delivering larger, more cost & energy efficient building blocks which are used to build scale-out video archives.

-- Leading Performance: DDN technology enables single camera servers to read and write over 1GB/s each – delivering more line-speed performance than NAS or iSCSI technology and capable of handling even the largest network video recorder (NVR) server loads. Leveraging the same technology used to power many of the world’s fastest supercomputers – camera surveillance storage can be scaled far beyond conventional NAS or iSCSI systems to achieve over 100 GB/s.

-- Exceptional Capacity: DDN technology is scalable from 10TB – 10PB in a single namespace. Video surveillance customers benefit from a simplicity of growth when expanding IP camera instances or lengthening camera data retention periods.

-- Energy & Space Efficiency: With high-density packaging which is capable of housing up to 1200 terabytes of data in a single data center rack coupled with DDN’s D-MAID technology which enables hard drive spin-down, DDN solutions lead the industry in power efficiency, saving customers over $100K’s per petabyte and require as little as 4.2kW per petabyte deployed.

-- Reliability: End-to-end storage integrity and quality of service is critical to ensuring zero camera frame loss and long-term video archive SATA data integrity. To achieve this, DDN systems intelligently avoid drive rebuild performance penalties which are common in traditional storage as well as provide robust data integrity checks during each read & write event with zero performance loss.

"Frost & Sullivan undertakes extensive industry research and analysis before deciding upon its Best Practice awards. The demonstrated adoption of DDN’s innovative technology in the physical security marketplace comes as no surprise as camera archives today are approaching the petabyte range," said George Paul, Security Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "We are pleased to announce DataDirect Network’s award for 2009 Physical Security Network Storage Product Innovation of the Year and expect to see further adoption of DDN’s scale-out video archive technology as customers deploy higher and higher resolution IP cameras."

More information on DDN’s storage technology for IP Surveillance, visit www.ddn.com/surveillance.