At the 2008 NAB Show, DataDirect Networks unveiled the new S2A6620 StorageScaler, an attractively priced midrange storage appliance leveraged from the company’s 8th generation Silicon Storage Architecture™ (S2A™)-an architecture currently in use at more than 400 broadcasters and post production facilities worldwide. The new S2A6620 appliance delivers enterprise-level data services at a midrange price point, representing a new paradigm of economic bandwidth, scalability and availability for this market segment.

"Extreme storage technology is now extremely affordable," said Paul Bloch, President, DataDirect Networks. "What the S2A 6620 is really about is giving mid-sized businesses the power to harness extreme storage functionality once the domain of enterprise customers. Now smaller companies can benefit from the same extreme technologies powering the most demanding, most content-intensive sites on the planet."
The extremely high bandwidth and affordable capacity scalability of the S2A6620 provides a compelling solution for companies faced with the exploding growth of performance-critical digital assets. Broadcast and post production customers can use the S2A6620 to enable rapid animation rendering, media asset management, and both standard definition and high definition editing and archiving In the same system. Other customer segments include corporate department-level and government applications.
Further demonstrating DataDirect Networks’ continued storage technology leadership, the S2A6620 offers greater density, capacity, IOPS performance, redundancy, upgradeability, ease-of-management, data protection features, and more disk drive options than any comparative offering, and at more cost-effective price points. A single S2A6620 delivers more than twice the capacity of the Sun Microsystems’ X4500 “Thumper” product-with 120TB-and features a fully balanced active/active controller architecture while Thumper must make do with yesteryear’s single controller design. The S2A6620 is also the only product in its class to enable an intermix of SAS and SATA drives-providing clients with much greater flexibility than the Fibre Channel-only disk limitations of the EMX CLARiiON CX3-80.
In an accompanying announcement, DataDirect Networks today also unveiled its new S2A9700 StorageScaler system, which delivers the promise of extreme real-time computing and nearline storage in a single platform.
For more information on the S2A 6620, visit www.datadirectnet.com/S2A6620