DDN Open Storage Appliance SFA10000E, utilizing storage fusion architecture, integrates leading HPC file systems within the storage platform to reduce costs and simplify deployment

PORTLAND, Ore., Nov. 16 -- SC09 -- DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN), the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, highest performance computing environments in the world today, announced that users can now reduce infrastructure and scale out complexity with a new file-system hosting feature enabled by DDN's Storage Fusion Architecture. With the first product to feature this capability, the SFA10000E Open Storage Appliance, users will now be able to host and serve scale-out file systems natively from the industry's leading transactional bandwidth storage system. These scale-out storage building blocks are designed to eliminate the need for external storage switching and file system gateways, radically reducing the cost and complexity of parallel file storage deployments.

The Open Appliance offerings from DDN will include both the DDN ExaScaler platform, featuring the Lustre File System, and the DDN GridScaler platform, featuring IBM's General Parallel File System. These parallel file systems will be offered with either InfiniBand or 10Gb Ethernet LAN connectivity options to deliver over 5GB/s of performance per SFA10000E Open Appliance Building Block. These high-availability Building Blocks can be scaled within a clustered storage environment to achieve industry-leading levels of performance beyond 200GB/s.

"Designed for the petaFLOP/s computing era, the DDN SFA10000E is an ideal product to serve as a foundation for the launch of our Open Storage Appliance program. It is precision engineered for scale out HPC environments requiring the highest levels of data intensive computing performance," explains Jeff Denworth, vice president of marketing at DDN. "By embedding these popular HPC file systems natively into this scale-out platform, we achieve a dramatic reduction in storage cluster components, I/O latency and most importantly -- new levels of cost savings and management efficiency for our customers."

Announced in June of 2009 -- the DDN Storage Fusion Architecture has been designed from the ground-up to serve the evolving needs of massively scalable multicore environments. The first SFA product, the SFA10000, delivers a revolutionary combination of transactional and streaming performance -- 10 GB/s of read and write bandwidth and over one million IOPS. Also designed for large data pools and leading storage density, the SFA10000 can manage up to 2.4 petabytes of storage in only two datacenter floor tiles. DDN has engineered advanced flexibility and data integrity features to service the needs of dynamic HPC centers by combining functionalities such as high-speed mirrored storage cache, support for multiple RAID levels and SSD, SAS and SATA disk drives for storage tiering, intelligent cache optimization, SATAssure data protection and InfiniBand and Fibre Channel host port options.

With over 250 petabytes installed worldwide, DDN Extreme Storage solutions are simplifying storage deployments at HPC centers all over the world. According to the June 2009 TOP500 rankings, DDN systems deliver more aggregate bandwidth to the world's Top500 supercomputers than all other storage providers to the TOP500 combined. The world's leading HPC centers depend on DDN technology day-in and day-out to support their research & science missions -- including eight of the world's Top10 HPC systems, 28 of the Top50 and 48 of the Top100 world's fastest supercomputers.

Open Appliance configurations will be generally available from DDN in Q1 of 2010. For more information, visit www.ddn.com/sfa.

About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks, Inc. is the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, content-intensive environments in the world -- including the largest online gaming and music sites, social networking applications developers, photo and video sharing services, high performance computing environments, and more than 450 broadcast and post-production facilities around the globe. Having sold over 250 petabytes of Extreme Storage systems worldwide, the company's storage technology delivers massive throughput, scalable capacity, consistency, efficiency and data integrity for today's extremely competitive and evolving markets. Founded in 1998, DataDirect Networks serves customers through its global partnerships with Dell, IBM, Sony and other industry leaders; and through its offices in Europe, India, Asia Pacific, Japan and throughout the US. For more information, go to www.ddn.com or call +1-800-TERABYTE (837-2298).

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Source: DataDirect Networks