EARTH SCIENCES

DataDirect Networks Inc., a leading provider of scalable storage systems for performance and capacity-driven applications, today announced that the company’s 8th generation Silicon Storage Architecture (S2A) appliance and storage system will continue to take CFS/SUN’s Lustre scaling to new heights, enabling cluster I/O to several hundred gigabytes per second. DataDirect Networks manufactures the fastest, highest capacity, most scalable Lustre-based storage systems on the planet. Lustre, taken from the words “Linux” and “cluster,” is a distributed file system used for large scale cluster computing. The file system, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in October 2007, was designed to scale to tens of thousands of nodes that are attached to petabytes of storage. The main advantage of the file system is that it does not compromise a storage system’s speed or security. DataDirect Networks’ S2A storage appliance is an ideal fit for Lustre deployments because it offers high performance and consistency of performance that allows the Lustre file system to scale. It also enables Lustre to access data in a parallel fashion, a key benefit to scaling file system performance and simplifying the overall storage network. S2A storage appliances provide the industry's highest performing and densest storage solutions. The systems enable the creation of differentiated high performance, high capacity NAS and SAN storage, parallel and shared file system storage, primary and nearline storage and virtual tape library storage solutions. It also incorporates enterprise-class data protection such as on-the-fly parity checking of all read I/Os and hardware RAID 6. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of DataDirect Networks’ largest customers, employs Lustre on Blue Gene/L, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Because of Lustre’s extreme flexibility, deployments of the technology are commonly found in applications related to science, finance, rich media, oil and gas and manufacturing. "Scalable file system performance is extremely important across a wide range of HPC clusters, not only for large installations such as LLNL but also for entry level commercial users," said Peter Braam, vice president, Lustre, Sun Microsystems. "The Lustre file system is the most widely used open and scalable cluster file system in the market and when combined with DataDirect Networks' S2A storage systems, provides very scalable I/O solutions. We're pleased to deepen our relationship with DDN to include our Lustre file system in solutions packaged for the HPC market." New features built into the latest S2A appliance include support for 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 20Gbps Infiniband DDR host connections. The system leverages the latest serial attached SCSI (SAS) protocol to communicate to the drives it manages, providing a future-proof roadmap to the latest disk drive technologies, speeds and capacities. With enhancements to DirectRAID and SATAssure, customers have full system bandwidth in both reads and writes, providing the utmost in data protection. In addition, the system's performance is not impacted by single or multiple drive failures, enabling very high quality service and performance predictability. And the new Sleep Mode allows the S2A to ‘spin down’ drives when they are not actively accessed based on user-definable policies. Sleep Mode reduces the operational costs of storage by saving power and cooling requirements while still maintaining near-instant accessibility to data. The newest S2A StorageScaler system will be demonstrated at the DataDirect Networks booth (booth #1437) at SuperComputing 2007 and will additionally be on display in the booths of Mellanox (Booth #127), Voltaire (Booth #1137), Sun/CFS (Booth #514) and Dell (Booth #1816). Systems will be available for delivery in March 2008.