DataDirect Networks' S2A9550 Sets the Bar for Performance & Resiliency

Business Wire,  Nov 12, 2007  

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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. -- 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."