DataDirect Networks will unveil its new S2A9550 Storage System at SIGGRAPH 2006, the 33rd annual international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, in Booth 2620 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The S2A9550 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.
"The S2A9550 provides creative personnel with an open architected storage system that allows for independent and simultaneous access to native HD, 2K (2048×1080) and 4K (4096×2160) high resolution content as well as hundreds of SD streams – all in real-time," explains Paul Bloch, President of DataDirect Networks. Delivering up to 3 GB/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. "The S2A9550 delivers the industry's best price per performance solution and can easily scale to handle the bandwidth and capacity intensive needs of high performance, high capacity network storage applications requiring full bandwidth HD, 2K and 4K rates, significantly improving project workflow from ingest to digital post-production."

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.

"We've designed the S2A9550 to conquer the performance, availability, scalability and management challenges associated with parallel or shared file systems and storage, while providing the highest levels of Quality of Service for consistent, predictable data delivery to real-time application environments," continued Bloch. "The S2A9550 can scale as fast and large the application demands, enabling true real-time collaboration that empowers production teams with multiple digital processes to accomplish more in less time with added time to explore greater creative potential." (www.datadirectnet.com)

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 3 GB/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.