STORAGE

LOS ANGELES, CA -- In the competitive world of deploying high performance storage networking technology, Patuxent Technology Partners (PTP) stands ahead of the pack with customers in government, DOD/intelligence and commercial markets. And when PTP needs to deploy a scalable storage infrastructure for these demanding enterprise-level applications they turn to DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliances to serve at the center of the solution. As one of the leading products in PTP's technology portfolio, Silicon Storage Appliances deliver substantial scalability, management and application acceleration gains for customers with high performance storage networking needs.simply and easily. "Silicon Storage Appliances provide us with the high performance storage networking framework which is among the best of any storage networking solutions that exist today," Ken Bacci, president, Patuxent Technology Partners, said. "In an era where storage networks are complex and difficult to deploy, optimize and manage, Silicon Storage Appliances make storage networks simple to deploy and easy to manage while maintaining application acceleration. This capability allows us to differentiate ourselves from other government integrators, and is a very powerful tool for our portfolio." DataDirect Networks, the leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, released their Silicon Storage Appliance product line in June 2000. PTP has worked with Silicon Storage Appliances since early 2000, serving as one of the original beta locations for the product. 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 establish an intelligent platform for deploying application-specific storage solutions. Integrators like PTP are choosing Silicon Storage Appliances for their clients as a dependable, simple, and easy open-systems solution that delivers a high value-add for customer and integrator. Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows businesses to accelerate their applications, 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 their storage; the Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows management of up to 100 Terabytes by a single system administrator, providing 10x lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). "The ability to create a robust, open-systems storage network solution with a device that is easily configured and can be simply managed by our clients is very powerful," Hoot Thompson, chief technology officer, Patuxent Technology Partners, continued. "DataDirect, with their Silicon Storage Appliances, brings us enabling, interoperable technology that provides performance, and scalability for our customers." Silicon Storage Appliance installation is easy, using plug-and-play simplicity to create a storage networking solution that delivers substantial TCO benefits for their customers. Integrators have the ability to pre-configure and analyze the storage network prior to deployment by using onboard management tools embedded at the ASIC level in the Silicon Storage Appliance. Additional analysis of the entire network can also be done on-site with Silicon Storage Appliance management tools, and any optimization needed can be accomplished quickly and easily. Furthermore, all Silicon Storage Appliances have the unique "Pay as you Grow" scalability feature, a SAN scalability model that provides incrementally higher levels of performance, capacity, caching and connectivity on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. The "Pay as you Grow" software needed to cope with future workloads is installed in each appliance today, with the user paying for only that portion of the configuration actually placed into service. The "Pay as you Grow" feature enables a cost-effective growth path to the largest storage networking appliance configurations. "The ability to create a differentiated solution - simply and easily - is a tremendous advantage for channel partners," Mark McLane, vice president worldwide sales, DataDirect Networks, said. "With the Silicon Storage Appliance's 'Pay-as-you-Grow' capability, channel partners can provide additional value-add to their customers as their needs evolve." With each Silicon Storage 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 creates performance and scalability benefits for customers. These benefits also allow integrators the flexibility to create an open systems environment that can scale with customer needs in a simple and evolutionary way. Customers and Partnerships Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include NASA, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 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. For more information visit www.datadirectnet.com