DataDirect Networks Announces 8th Generation S2A Storage System

By DE Editors

DataDirect Networks Inc. (Reno, NV) unveiled its 8th generation Silicon Storage Architecture (S2A) appliance and storage system. The S2A9900 StorageScaler scales performance and capacity to new heights, delivering sustained bandwidth of up to 6GBps per appliance and enabling storage systems that will scale beyond 250GBps in total throughput between host computers and the disk drives.

This level of performance is eight times that of competitive technology and allows companies to put their data to work at a moment’s notice.

The first 17 S2A9900 StorageScaler systems have been purchased by Argonne National Laboratory for its Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. The systems, attached to an IBM Blue Gene/P computer, will be outfitted with 8,160 terabyte SATA disk drives (over 8 petabytes of storage) and are managed by the S2A9900’s real-time DirectRAID 6 and SATAssure data protection algorithms.

The performance of the S2A9900 StorageScaler opens new windows for scientific discovery, allowing more complex and detailed computer simulations to be run. These simulations can require in excess of 300 terabytes of storage space for a single iteration, and their checkpoint operations (where the computer pauses calculations in order to write system restore data to disks to protect the run in the event of an application crash) can consume over 100GBps of storage system bandwidth.

The S2A9900 StorageScaler is the first storage system to support 8Gbps Fibre Channel, says the release, as well as 20Gbps Infiniband DDR host connections, enabling users to achieve their bandwidth goals using fewer network connections. In conjunction with the introduction of the S2A9900, DataDirect Networks also introduced its new StorageScaler 6000 drive enclosure system.

For details, go to DataDirect Networks.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.