DataDirect Networks, IBM, San Diego Supercomputer Center and Brocade Together Process a Billion Files in Hours not Days

Business Wire, Nov 13, 2007

CHATSWORTH, Calif. -- DataDirect Networks Inc., a leading provider of scalable storage systems for performance and capacity-driven applications, today announced that in partnership with IBM, San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and Brocade, the company has processed one billion files in lightning speed using a single instance of IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) and DataDirect Networks' S2A9550 Storage System.

The Billion File Demonstration demonstrates that:

* GPFS efficiently processes metadata, allowing over a billion files to be scanned, and candidates for migration can be identified and moved to HPSS tape, multiple times a day.

* DataDirect Networks' S2A9550 Storage System delivers consistent performance over 2.2GB/s through GPFS, enabling incredibly high data scan rates for information lifecycle management.

* GHI1, a new interface from HPSS2, uses the ILM3 policy manager to move data from GPFS to HPSS tape.

Benchmark Methodology

To prepare for the test, IBM assembled a GPFS cluster at San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) using seventeen, eight-way cluster members. DataDirect Networks' provided a high performance S2A9550 storage appliance that enables GPFS to rapidly scan over a billion files. ILM policies then determine which to keep on the high-performance DataDirect Networks S2A9550 Tier 1 storage array and which to migrate to tape. The ability of the S2A9550 to consistently deliver over 2.2GB/s of sustained throughput to GPFS is a key enabler for the demonstration.

"This demonstration brings together IBM's best-in-class GPFS and HPSS offerings, now working as a single hierarchical storage system of disk and tape," said Bob Coyne, co-founder and lead industry architect of HPSS and industry chair of the HPSS Collaboration. "The equipment, consultation and support provided by DataDirect Networks have been central to making this proof of concept demonstration possible, and we look forward to working with them as we pursue the next order of magnitude in file hierarchical storage."

GPFS provides concurrent access at lightning speed to multiple disk drives and storage devices, fulfilling a key requirement of powerful business intelligence and scientific computing applications that analyze vast quantities of often unstructured information, which may include video, audio, books, transactions, reports and presentations.

The HPSS is a flexible, performance-oriented mass storage system that is developed to address the high performance computing (HPC) hierarchical storage needs of multiple U. S. Department of Energy programs and to make this technology available to the HPC community. HPSS, which is funded by IBM and the HPC community, is the result of a fifteen-year collaboration between IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. HPSS is licensed to other users and supported by IBM under an agreement between IBM and the United States Department of Energy.

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 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, while its SATAssure technology enables the use of high capacity, inexpensive SATA disk drives with enterprise-class data protection, availability, and performance. DataDirect Networks' S2A offers broad infrastructure support powering compute clusters from IBM, Dell, HP, Cray, SGI, Bull and others. IBM markets S2A9550 Storage Systems as the DCS9550 in their product line.

DataDirect Networks' explosive growth and acceptance in the HPC community is driven by its unrivaled Silicon Storage Architecture (S2A) technology. Today, DataDirect Networks unveiled the S2A9900 StorageScaler, the company's eighth-generation S2A appliance and storage system that scales performance and capacity to new heights by delivering sustained bandwidth of up to 6GB/s per appliance and enabling storage systems to scale beyond 250GB/s in total throughput between host computers and the disk drives. This level of performance is eight times that of competitive technology and allows companies to put their data to work at a moment's notice.

1= GPFS-HPSS Interface

2= High Performance Storage System

3= Information Lifecycle Management

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. www.datadirectnet.com