DataDirect Networks Showcases Its S2A9550 at IBC - the Industry's Highest Performance Most Dense Storage System

DataDirect Networks Showcases Its S2A9550 at IBC - the Industry's Highest Performance Most Dense Storage System

S2A9550 Empowers High Performance Graphics, Animation, HD Post Production and Digital Intermediate Workflows With Up to 3GB/s and 560TB in a Single Storage System

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, Sept. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- DataDirect Networks, Inc. will showcase its new S2A9550 Storage System at IBC 2006 in Stand 7.238 at the Amsterdam RAI from September 8th - 12th in the Netherlands. The S2A9550, the industry's highest performance and most dense storage system, empowers content creators, animators and editors with the ability to perform true real-time post production collaboration in HD post production, CGI, animation and digital intermediate service applications.

"We chose IBC for our European introduction of the S2A9550 because it represents Europe's premier exhibition to launch innovative technologies into the EMEA region for broadcast and post production," notes Paul Bloch, president of DataDirect Networks. "The S2A9550 empowers rich media users with an open architected storage system that can easily scale to handle the bandwidth and capacity intensive needs of full bandwidth SD/HD, 2K and 4K rates, significantly improving project workflow from ingest to digital post production to distribution."

The DataDirect S2A9550 allows for independent and simultaneous access to native HD, 2K (2048x1080) and 4K (4096x2160) high resolution content as well as hundreds of SD streams -- all in real-time. Delivering up to 3GB/s, with enhanced and automated data protection, and 560TB in a single storage system, this 7th generation product provides optimal block level and file system performance for highly scalable, open system computing environments. Adds Bloch, "The S2A9550's high performance, capacity and reliability coupled with its easy-to-install, -use and -support architecture is ideal for network and facility infrastructures that require maximum up-time and improved workflows."

The S2A9550 storage platform is based on DataDirect's industry proven Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) technology which fully integrates a parallel, non-blocking architecture with SAN functionality in one simple, easy to use, easy to scale intelligent device. The S2A's unique open architecture and consolidated functionality removes the complexity, congestion, latency and contention of generic RAID systems, and with its hardware based RAID 6 and double parity protection capability, can maintain peak sustained performance, even in the event of drive rebuilds or multiple drive failures. This optimal block level and file system performance design supports a broad range of NAS and SAN solutions powering some of the video, graphics and animation industry's most notable suppliers including Autodesk, IBM, Dell, Sony SGI, Thomson, Matrox and others.

DataDirect will also be supplying its S2A9550 storage systems to Matrox Video, Stand 7.128, to help empower the company's full range of editing solutions for Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro. The S2A9550s will be integrated into a SAN, supplying storage to four Matrox Axio(TM) realtime multi-format HD/SD editing and finishing systems, with two streaming compressed HD footage and two streaming compressed and uncompressed HD footage. With up to 3GB/s of throughput on tap, the S2A9550 will easily meet the 100MB/s sustained bandwidth needed for each of the four systems. The fully integrated Axio systems with their comprehensive realtime feature set and versatile codec technology, will demonstrate realtime editing and finishing in P2 720P @ 25fps, HDV 1080i @ 25fps, HDV 1080i @ 25fps and DV.

"The S2A technology addresses the performance, availability, scalability, and management challenges associated with parallel or shared file systems and storage in today's broadcast and facility datacenter, while providing the highest levels of Quality of Service for consistent, predictable data delivery to real-time workflows," concludes Bloch.

DataDirect Networks S2A9550 Highlights:

Real-time Sustained Performance -- Up to five times faster than generic SAN RAID systems, the disk-based S2A9550 delivers sustained real-time performance of up to 3GB/s.

Maximum Flexibility, Massively Scalable -- The S2A9550 is purpose built to offer maximum flexibility and scalability -- providing storage flexibility with support for up to 1,120 Fibre Channel (FC) and SATA disk drives. With its modular design, the S2A9550 can support the mixing and matching of FC-4 (4Gb/s) and InfiniBand-4X (10Gb/s) front end server connectivity.

Enterprise Class Protection and Availability -- The S2A9550 incorporates enterprise-class data protection like on-the-fly parity checking of all read I/Os, and hardware RAID 6. The S2A9550's pioneering hardware RAID 6 controller protects data in the event of a double disk failure in the same redundancy group, without adversely affecting data availability or system performance.

Easy to Install, Manage and Support -- The S2A9550 offers a rich set of management tools that make it easy-to-install, scale and manage a high performance, high capacity storage system. Its consolidated functionality includes block level "real-time any-to-any virtualization" for very easy deployment and ongoing system management of very large storage pools.

About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks is the world's leading provider of high performance, high capacity network storage solutions. Focused on driving customer-centric innovation, DataDirect Networks has created the Silicon Storage Appliance as the essential building block for High Performance Computing, Internet-based Services and Rich Media storage solutions. DataDirect Networks' award winning Silicon Storage Appliance 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. Each solution offers unsurpassed performance, high availability, cost effective scalability and simplified management delivering the industry's best price per performance and best per capacity per square foot solutions.

Launched in 1998 and headquartered in California, DataDirect Networks has an established global presence with research and development, and operations in the United States, Europe and Asia. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at (818) 700-7600 or visit www.datadirectnet.com.

DataDirect Networks and Silicon Storage Appliance are trademarks of DataDirect Networks, Inc. All other names are property of their respective owners.

Source: DataDirect Networks, Inc.

CONTACT: Curtis Chan of CHAN & ASSOCIATES, INC., +1-714-447-4993,
cj_chan@chanandassoc.com, for DataDirect Networks, Inc.; or Alex Sayyah of
DataDirect Networks, Inc., +1-818-700-7600, asayyah@datadirectnet.com

Web site: http://www.datadirectnet.com/

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