LOS ANGELES, CA -- DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announced today that Sandia National Laboratories has purchased six Silicon Storage Appliances to meet increasing high performance, high availability demands at the facility. Sandia is developing a large, scalable disk-storage facility to handle the output from large multi-teraflop scientific computers. Sandia National Laboratories, part of the 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. "We have 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," Milton Clauser, project manager, Sandia National Laboratories, said. With this selection, Sandia now has six DataDirect Silicon Storage Appliances and 33 Terabytes of storage to accelerate visualization and rendering work resulting from the complex supercomputing applications that simulate, analyze and predict performance of nuclear weapons to assure safety and reliability. "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," Clauser continued. "After considerable testing on a range of storage systems, the Silicon Storage Appliances brought performance and management benefits that were very compelling." DataDirect Networks has created 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. 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. "We are intensely committed to the supercomputing community's efforts to supply the breakthroughs needed to enhance the country's ability to react and respond to the challenges ahead," Brad Winett, vice president product marketing, DataDirect Networks, said. "Easy-to-deploy Silicon Storage Appliances are proving themselves in laboratories, data centers and workgroups every day around the world. 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." For more information visit www.datadirectnet.com