Deal is First Between the Two Companies to Supply Appliance-Based SAN Technology for Linux NetworX Supercomputing Systems
LOS ANGELES – August 6, 2002 – DataDirect Networks, the leading provider of the world’s highest performance storage networking appliances, has announced that Linux NetworX will be using a Silicon Storage Appliance as part of their new Linux-based supercomputer to be deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. DataDirect’s S2A 6000 will manage the terabytes of metadata resulting from the 962 node Evolocity ™ clustered supercomputer.
Lawrence Livermore has selected Linux NetworX, a recognized leader in the Linux clustering industry, to design, integrate and deliver what will be the most powerful Linux supercomputer by Fall 2002, and when delivered, the Intel-based cluster is expected to be one of the five fastest supercomputers in the world. DataDirect has strong track record supporting Lawrence Livermore supercomputing programs, with fifteen S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliances currently in mission-critical production environments at the facility.
“In creating a 962 node supercomputing system that involves a variety of top tier hardware, software and integration, management issues become extremely important in development and after deployment,” Clark Roundy, vice president of marketing, Linux NetworX, said. “DataDirect’s Silicon Storage Appliance brings us an enterprise-class high performance SAN solution for file system metadata management.”
“Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy for the IT professionals to deploy and scale open system, high performance storage area network infrastructures in a cost-effective, modular approach,” Brad Winett, vice president, business development, DataDirect Networks, said. “DataDirect’s groundbreaking storage networking technology helps enable the Linux NetworX Evolocity cluster to provide high-performance computing organizations faster results with lower total cost of ownership than competing supercomputing systems, and we see a tremendous opportunity for our two technologies to serve researchers in this market.”
Bringing a simple and straightforward approach to supporting supercomputing uses in visualization, simulation and research, Silicon Storage Appliances provide high performance computing centers a way to accelerate application productivity, 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 and share their storage; Silicon Storage Appliances also bring management advantages to IT professionals tasked with implementing 24/7/365 storage networking foundations.
With the ability to supply an aggregate bandwidth of 800 megabytes per second and support up to 512 servers and 180 Terabytes of storage, the S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to scientific and commercial supercomputing centers. By using DataDirect’s S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliances in a modular fashion to cluster nodes and create larger computational grids, IT professionals can begin to create highly scalable, easy-to manage terascale supercomputing systems for a wide range of scientific, industrial and government supercomputing applications.
Based on DataDirect Networks’ proven Silicon Storage Appliance technology, S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliances supply an aggregate bandwidth up to 800 megabytes per second to workgroups typically consisting of one to twenty-four Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, Macintosh and SGI compute nodes. The S2A 3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500 GB to 14 Terabytes.
Customers using DataDirect’s Silicon Storage Appliances include Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, NASA, NCSA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA Forecast Systems Lab, U.S. Army Research Lab, White Sands Missile Range, National Century Financial Enterprises, Time Warner Cable, E! Networks, CineGroupe, RTL Television, CardioNow, Loudeye, Star TV, Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS Software, Seagate, Emulex and QLogic, among others.
About DataDirect Networks, Inc.
DataDirect Networks is the leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent storage networking appliances. Serving IT professionals in the government, defense, life sciences, broadcasting, digital production and oil and gas industries, DataDirect Networks’ Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy, simple and trouble-free to accelerate and manage applications, dramatically reducing TCO and increasing ROI. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at (818) 700-7600 or visit www.datadirectnet.com.
