DataDirect's "Couplet" meets demands of supercomputing, HD broadcast applications - Top Technology Showcase - DataDirect Networks' S2A8000

Computer Technology Review, Nov, 2002 by Nick Schultz

DataDirect Networks has announced the S2A8000, its latest flagship Silicon Storage Appliance for the scientific, supercomputing, and broadcast communities to deploy and scale 2Gbps Fibre Channel storage area network infrastructures. The S2A8000 joins the S2A3000 and S2A6000 Silicon Storage Appliances that allow deployment of high-performance, highly scalable 24x7 storage-networking foundations.

Built for the high-bandwidth and capacity requirements associated with visualization, research, and government computing applications, and shared-workflow broadcast and professional video applications, the 2U-high (3.5-inch) S2A8000 "Singlet" Silicon Storage Appliance features four Fibre Channel ports for front end connectivity to servers and workstations and 10 ports for connectivity to storage devices, delivering an aggregate peak bandwidth of 1.6GB/sec through the resulting storage area network. With its modular design, two S2A8000s can be coupled together forming data access redundancy while maintaining fully pipelined, parallel bandwidth to the same disk storage. The resulting S2A8000 "Couplet" creates a single-system image appliance that doubles the performance of a "Singlet;" with true sustained host throughput to disk exceeding 1GB/sec in both reads and writes.

The S2A8000 allows a single system administrator to support up to 512 servers and 180TB of storage capacity per appliance. The highly scalable S2A8000 Silicon Storage Appliance delivers the following metrics to research centers and digital broadcast and video facilities:

* 7.2GB/sec internal bandwidth.

* Scalable port bandwidth with sustained 190MB/sec per port.

* Simultaneous read and write port performance exceeding 375MB/sec per port.

* No performance pen-alty in writes versus reads.

* No performance penalty in degraded mode or rebuild operation.

* PowerLUN capability providing 1GB/sec of bandwidth to individual LUNs without host striping.

* Built-in , Solid-State-Disk capability with LUN-in-Cache feature.

The S2A8000 also serves as a storage consolidation and management appliance that is optimized to meet the demanding requirements of growing storage environments, and can be used in a modular fashion to support supercomputing uses including the construction of terascale and distributed computational grids, and high-throughput broadcast environments such as news and direct-to-air systems.

www.datadirect.com