DataDirect Introduces Entry-Level Storage System

Building upon its established position as the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, content-intensive environments in the world — including the largest photo and video sharing services, social networking applications developers and online gaming sites — DataDirect Networks, Inc. announced a new entry-level integrated storage appliance that enables the company to reach a significantly broader set of clients, and positions it for its next stage of growth.

At the 2008 NAB Show, DataDirect Networks unveiled the new S2A6620 StorageScaler, an attractively priced midrange storage appliance that leverages 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.

Commenting on today’s announcement, Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "In the current and most dramatic shift in commercial computing, every company is evolving to becoming a media- centric organization. Whether it’s delivering video or other rich media content to customers, prospects, or employees, no commercial enterprise will be immune from these requirements. DataDirect Networks sits in a prime position to help these companies — from the biggest down to the smallest — to enter this new Web 2.0 reality with products that offer performance and scale for this class of data that traditional implementations can only dream about."

"Extreme storage technology is now extremely affordable," said Paul Bloch, President, DataDirect Networks. "What the S2A6620 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 scalable capacity of the S2A6620 provides a compelling, affordable 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.

"The explosion in digital content isn’t just an issue for media conglomerates and large communications companies. Medium and even small businesses in content-intensive industries face the challenge of cost- effectively storing and managing petabytes of information in the coming years," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems Research at IDC. "Products like DataDirect Network’s S2A6620 provide scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solutions for mid-sized companies that are dealing with massive information creation and retention needs."

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 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.

"The marketplace increasingly wants reasonably priced storage performance," said John Webster, Principal IT Advisor, Illuminata. "Faster fabric connections like 8 gigabit Fibre Channel alone will not be enough. What’s needed are new architectural approaches that maximize application performance and storage scalability — such as DataDirect Networks’ S2A6620."

"DataDirect Networks’ S2A6620 delivers unrivaled performance compared to typical midrange storage subsystems, which has been sorely lacking until now," said Thomas Trainer, President and Founder, Analytico, Inc., an IT analysis firm. "Finally, small high performance businesses now have choices like the bigger shops have had for years."

In an accompanying announcement, DataDirect Networks today also unveiled its new S2A9700 StorageScaler system, which delivers the promise of extreme real-time performance and nearline storage in a single platform.

DataDirect Networks, Inc.