DataDirect Networks’ S2A9550 Sets the Bar for Performance & Resiliency

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) to Issue Report Proving DataDirect Networks’ S2A Appliances are the Fastest and Most Consistent Storage Systems on the Planet

Reno, Nev., November 12, 2007 – DataDirect Networks Inc., a leading provider of scalable storage systems for performance and capacity-driven applications, today is announcing that ESG Lab ranks the company’s S2A9550 appliance among the fastest systems they have tested. The report, titled “ESG Lab Validation Report, DataDirect Networks S2A9550 Storage Appliance, Capacity Optimized Speed and Reliability,” can be preordered from: http://www.datadirectnet.com/S2A9550_ESG_Report/

The tests prove a number of DataDirect Networks’ performance claims including that their S2A9550 storage system supports:

•    Nearly one petabyte of capacity on only two floor tiles
•    Near-linear performance scalability for large block sequential read, write and mixed workloads
•    Nearly equivalent RAID 6 performance in writes as well as reads
•    RAID-6 performance with two parity drives that is equivalent to single parity RAID
•    Zero performance degradation after one or more drives have failed
•    Drive journaling as a way to avoid lengthy rebuilds after intermittent errors
•    The ability to find and fix drive errors including phantom bit flips and addressing errors (through the S2A’s SATAssure technology)
•    The ability to transparently survive an appliance failure through (Active/Active configuration)
•    Real-time Fast Data parity calculation for hiding the effects of an intermittently slow drive
•    Native Infiniband connections between an HPC server cluster and storage

“Our initial tests confirm that DataDirect Networks’ hardware-accelerated S2A architecture provides excellent and consistent levels of throughput during reads, writes and mixed workloads - even as errors are happening,” said Brian L. Garrett, Technical Director, ESG Lab. “We also witnessed some excellent recoverability and resiliency features that give standard, off-the-shelf SATA drives enterprise-class performance and data integrity.”

DataDirect Networks’ S2A9550 employs the company’s award-winning Silicon Storage Architecture technology and is the industry's highest performing and densest storage solution. The system enables the creation of differentiated high performance, high capacity NAS and SAN storage, parallel and shared file system storage, primary and nearline storage and virtual tape library storage solutions and incorporates enterprise-class data protection such as on-the-fly parity checking of all read I/Os and hardware RAID 6. The S2A9550's pioneering hardware-based DirectRAID engine protects data in the event of a double disk failure in the same redundancy group, without adversely affecting data availability or system performance.

Garrett added, “ESG Lab found that a single S2A9550 storage system consisting of an active/active S2A9550 appliance and 960 SATA disk drives sitting on only two data center floor tiles delivers deep scalability and extreme performance and reliability levels typically associated with a whole row of enterprise-class disk arrays.”

When asked who would most benefit from this type of performance, Garrett said, “We believe that the extremely high bandwidth and affordable capacity scalability of the S2A9550 provides the perfect solution for organizations faced with the exploding growth of performance-critical digital assets. From the bulk storage needs of backup to disk and archiving applications, to the extreme scalability demanded by high performance computing environments and online content providers, the S2A9550 provides extreme speed and reliability using the latest in SATA drive technology.”

ESG senior analyst Tony Asaro concurred with Garrett. “With the added bonus of being extremely space and power efficient, the potential uses for this technology are mind boggling - a huge pool of shared storage for a virtualized pool of servers, a platform for editing the latest Hollywood hit, as a fast scratch pool for massively clustered server farms, or a giant repository for scientific data recording.” 
 
Testing Methodology
Bandwidth intensive performance testing was performed using read, write and mixed workloads running on commonly available servers. Errors and timeouts that can occur with SATA drives were injected. Active/active failover was tested using a native multi-path driver. RAID-6 and single parity RAID performance was compared. Regardless of the workloads tested, the errors injected or the number of parity drives used for data protection, the throughput was remarkably close to the same during all tests.

 “The ESG Lab validation provides excellent proof points of the S2A9550’s capabilities to our customers,” said Alex Bouzari, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of DataDirect Networks. “We have always believed that storage should power a company's ability to innovate and should never be the bottleneck in our customers’ businesses. We believe that storage must be real time and dynamic, deliver consistent performance regardless of drive errors or failures, and reduce administrative burden by automatically dealing with situations that previously required administrator attention. .”

Today, DataDirect Networks is also announcing the S2A9900 StorageScaler, the company’s eighth-generation S2A system, which delivers sustained bandwidth of up to 6GB/s per appliance and enables storage systems to scale to beyond 250GB/s in total throughput to the disk drives. The S2A9900 delivers eight times the performance of competing technologies.

New features built into the S2A9900 StorageScaler include support for 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 20Gbps Infiniband DDR host connections. The system leverages the latest serial attached SCSI (SAS) protocol to communicate to the drives it manages, providing a future-proof roadmap to the latest disk drive technologies, speeds and capacities. With enhancements to DirectRAID and SATAssure, customers have full system bandwidth in both reads and writes, providing the utmost in data protection. In addition, the system's performance is not impacted by single or multiple drive failures, enabling very high quality service and performance predictability. And the new Sleep Mode allows the S2A to ‘spin down’ drives when they are not actively accessed based on user-definable policies. Sleep Mode reduces the operational costs of storage by saving power and cooling requirements while still maintaining near-instant accessibility to data.

The newest S2A StorageScaler system will be demonstrated at the DataDirect Networks booth (booth #1437) at SuperComputing 2007 and will additionally be on display in the booths of Mellanox (Booth #127), Voltaire (Booth #1137), Sun/CFS (Booth #514) and Dell (Booth #1816). Systems will be available for delivery in March 2008.

About DataDirect Networks
DataDirect Networks is the leading provider of scalable storage systems for performance and capacity driven applications. DataDirect’s S2A (Silicon Storage Appliance) architecture enables modern applications such as video streaming, content delivery, modeling and simulation, backup and archiving, cluster and supercomputing, and real-time collaborative workflows that are driving the explosive demand for storage performance and capacity. DataDirect’s S2A technology and solutions solve today’s most challenging storage requirements, including providing shared, high-speed access to a common pool of data, minimizing data center footprints and storage costs for massive archives, reducing simulation computational times, and capturing and serving massive amounts of digital content.

Media Contact:
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Alex Sayyah
DataDirect Networks Inc.
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