DataDirect currently competes with Sun Microsystems in the storage market, which offers its StorageTek 5800 or Honeycomb product for large digital content storage.
According to DataDirect, the performance of its new system is eight times that of competitive technology. The new features of S2A9900 include support for 8Gbps fiber channel and 20Gbps Infiniband double data rate (DDR) host connections.
The system uses the serial attached SCSI (SAS) protocol to communicate with the managed drives. The enhancements to DirectRAID and SATAssure provide data protection by offering complete bandwidth in both reads and writes. It offers sleep mode that allows S2A to ‘spin down’ drives when they are not actively accessed based on user-definable policies. This mode reduces the operational costs by saving power and cooling requirements while still maintaining accessibility to data.
The first seventeen S2A9900 StorageScaler systems have been purchased by Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory for its Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. DataDirect said that the systems will be attached to an IBM Blue Gene/P computer along with 8,160 terabyte SATA disk drives and would be managed by the DirectRAID 6 and SATAssure.
Together, Blue Gene/P and the S2A9900 StorageScaler array can carry out a remarkable 445 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), said Ray Bair, director at Argonne Leadership Computing.
Along with the introduction of the S2A9900, the company has also introduced a StorageScaler 6000 drive enclosure system. The company claims that this enclosure houses 60 SAS and SATA disk drives, enabling a single S2A9900 appliance to manage up to 1.2 Petabytes (1,200 Terabytes) of data in two data center racks.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
