Features - Storage Innovations:

DataDirect UNVEILS HIGH PERFORMANCE FC-4, INFINIBAND CONTROLLER

DataDirect Networks is unveiling its flagship S2A9500 storage system, delivering sustained aggregate bandwidth of 3.2 GBps and a broad range of host and disk side options, making it one of the industry's most advanced and most versatile storage controller.

The S2A9500, DataDirect's sixth generation networked storage system, was designed specifically to provide optimal block level and file system performance for highly scalable, open system computing environments. Its creation was made possible thanks to the support and extensive feedback from leading scientists at some of the world's most advanced computing centers, and more than 100 man-years of design work from DataDirect's research and development team.

DataDirect's S2A9500 is built around a lightning fast cache-centric design with 11.2 GBps of internal bandwidth, supported by a parallel and fully redundant host and disk side architecture, with complete separation of command and data paths, and on the fly read and write RAID parity calculation. Offering a choice of FC-4 and Infiniband host connections as well as SATA, Fibre Channel, and SAS disk drive options, the S2A9500's design is ideally suited for computing environments where system level speed and reliability are just as important as scalability and heterogeneous support.

The S2A9500's host side is capable of delivering an incredible 3.2 GBps of sustained bandwidth through up to eight high bandwidth FC-4 or Infiniband ports. This modular front end design enables customers to build their computer clusters and server farms with their protocol of choice, mixing and matching FC-4 and Infiniband as needed, thereby achieving ultimate flexibility and efficiency in their networks.

On the disk side, the S2A9500 boasts the broadest back end in the industry, and its highly parallel back end architecture supports over one thousand data drives and hundreds of TB of usable data, in a variety of flavors, from high performance fibre channel, to cost efficient SATA and highly versatile SAS disk drives, in single drive capacities initially ranging from 73GB to 300GB.

Taking into account the mission critical nature of many of today's demanding computing environments, the S2A9500 comes with many high reliability features, including full redundancy and dual pathing on the disk side and host side, RAID protection for cache and disks, and the world's first true dual redundancy disk architecture which allows for double disk failures in the same redundancy group without adversely affecting data availability or system bandwidth.

"Our S2A9500 goes even further in providing world class scalability in bandwidth and capacity, while delivering significantly higher reliability and modularity," said Alex Bouzari, DataDirect's CEO and co-founder. "With plug and play FC-4 and Infiniband host connections, support of a broad range of CPUs and interconnect technologies, and the ability to connect SATA, FC and SAS disk farms from a few terabytes to several PB, the S2A9500 greatly simplifies our customers' clusters and compute environments and gives them the best ROI possible," he added.