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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / AUGUST 18, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 33

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Breaking News - Storage:

DataDirect S2A Provides Wide Range Of Storage Needs

The world's high-performance, high-scalability networked storage leader, DataDirect Networks, is changing the storage paradigm for Rich Media and High Performance Computing (HPC). Powering the world's top computer systems the DataDirect S2A with Serial ATA (SATA) is being embraced by leading organizations to provide a versatile solution to a wide range of storage needs - from archiving to on-line storage.

At a fraction of the cost, DataDirect S2A with SATA drives is offering performance and reliability comparable to Fibre-Channel (FC) disk drive based systems. Maintaining 85% or better of FC performance with sequential data transfers the DataDirect S2A with SATA drives is an ideal storage solution for HPC and rich media organization.

"Our goal was to provide a SATA based system that delivers the same unmatched levels of performance, availability and reliability, data integrity, and scalability that our valued customers learned to expect form us." Said Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks. "By writing extensive firmware and software to enhance SATA reliability, and utilizing DataDirect S2A's unique parallel architecture and virtualization capabilities we provide our customers a robust SATA based networked storage system specifically designed for data and bandwidth intensive computing environments."

"Not only the DataDirect S2A delivers the highest levels of performance but also guaranties that this performance is sustained in the event of disk or even full disk chassis failure." Said Paul Bloch, President of DataDirect Networks. "In addition, the DataDirect S2A provides an extra level of data protection over and above other SATA based solutions by uniquely employing a powerful parity engine that is continuously checking parity in the background as well as checking parity "on the fly" with every read and write.

Providing a system that can answer tomorrow's capacity needs today the DataDirect S2A coupled with SATA disks can easily scale to hundreds of Terabytes behind a single S2A system or Petabytes with several systems deployed as a cluster.

Supporting the ability to mix and mach SATA and FC disks under the same controller, the DataDirect S2A networked storage system provides the versatility to deploy complementary storage types for varying performance requirements under one system.

The DataDirect S2A makes deployment, data movement and management a breeze. Lowering TCO by simplifying administration tasks the DataDirect S2A provides many helpful features such as: FC and SATA consolidation, built-in replication capabilities, advanced virtualization and any-to-any data access, load balancing, and exceptional performance monitoring and optimization tools.

Customers using DataDirect's S2A storage system include: Time Warner Cable, CNN, E! Networks, RTL Television, Telecinqo, Eurosport, BBC, CineGroupe, Star TV, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Sandia National Labs, NCSA, NASA Goddard, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Argonne National Laboratory, US Army Research Lab, NOAA Forecast Systems Lab, and NCAR among others.

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