DataDirect Introduced S2A9700 StorageScaler

DataDirect Networks, Inc. introduced the new S2A9700 StorageScaler networked storage system. The system provides digital intermediate companies, broadcasters and post production facilities with the extreme performance and industry-leading flexibility required to achieve their most pressing project deadlines. The company said the new product was introduced after extensive consultations with its international client base, which includes over 400 broadcasters and post production facilities.

For years customers in the rich media industry have struggled to attain an optimum balance of performance and capacity for their real-time and nearline/archive requirements, which often necessitated the purchase of multiple systems and resulted in disparate islands of storage. With the introduction of the S2A9700, DataDirect Networks has resolved this challenge and delivered a platform that respects customers’ sensitivity to price, and eliminates the need to buy multiple storage systems to address both real-time and deep archival requirements. The S2A9700 enables end-users to consolidate their rich media applications onto a single platform, with scalable performance up to 1.2 petabytes, and the flexibility to utilize SAS and SATA disk options within the same enclosure — business-enabling capabilities unavailable on other systems in its class. With up to 73.5 terabytes per square foot, the S2A9700 offers more than twice the storage density of the LSI XBB2, EMC CX3-80 and NetApp FAS6000.

"With truncated shooting schedules becoming increasingly common, the post production process faces tightening constraints on delivery times and content accuracy," said Tom Coughlin, Chairman of the Creative Storage Conference at the 2008 NAB show. "The new S2A9700 streams content at some of the highest sustained data rates in the industry and provides the vast storage capacities required to retain high resolution content for extended periods of time. The product addresses the need for real-time post production processes and nearline working archival storage in one unit without system ‘tuning.’ Products of this sort directly address the needs of media professionals."

S2A9700: Unrivaled Performance and Flexibility
"An ever-increasing challenge for our post production customers is to meet critical dubbing and subtitling deadlines without sacrificing the core integrity of the content," said Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks. "We are addressing our users’ needs with the S2A9700’s ability to run multiple 2K/4K ingest/output streams concurrently with zero frame drops, providing the extreme power and flexibility needed to significantly speed up the post production process and complete projects ahead of schedule."

Powered by 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 S2A9700’s balanced system design delivers Dynamic Throughput for both data reads and writes. Delivering three gigabytes per second of throughput for reads and three gigabytes per second for writes, the S2A9700 is unrivaled in the industry for rich media applications and can be seamlessly upgraded to DataDirect Networks’ flagship S2A9900, providing investment protection for clients.

"DataDirect Networks has developed a solution that is unique in the industry, delivering an impressive sustained, error-free six gigabytes per second read and write capability," said David Vellante, Co-Founder of The Wikibon Project, a collaborative community of leading technology professionals. "Indications from Wikibon members suggest that DataDirect Networks’ SAS and SATA disks can be used to balance storage cost and performance, and with up to 1.2 petabytes in a single system this technology should be on the short list for CTO’s that require very high I/O throughput in technical computing, rich media and high-speed backup applications."

"ESG Lab has seen the Dynamic Throughput architecture in action and can attest to its ability to deliver consistently predictable performance when serving a multitude of large files," said Brian Garrett, Technical Director, Enterprise Strategy Group Lab. "Conventional RAID systems typically suffer from degraded performance when correcting spurious media errors and can’t write as fast as they read — particularly when dealing with large files. Based on ESG Lab’s hands-on experience, DataDirect Networks’ architecture is the first that we’ve seen that can write as fast as it reads — even as it avoids and corrects media errors on the fly. DataDirect Networks has extended their heritage of extreme speed and reliability with the introduction of the S2A9700 which uses the latest SAS and SATA drive technology to deliver cost- effective scalability and predictably excellent performance."

DataDirect Networks, Inc.