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DataDirect S2A8500 Powers World's Highest Sustained NAS Performance of Over 2.5 GB/S Obtained By Bull With a Single Novascale Server

Posted on: Monday, 8 November 2004, 09:00 CST

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Exceeding 2.5 Gigabytes per second of sustained bandwidth for end to end file services, Bull has broken the world record for single-system SAN/NAS performance using DataDirect Networks' S2A8500 and a NovaScale(R) NAS gateway.

The SAN/NAS storage system combined two of DataDirect's state of the art S2A8500 block-level storage appliances tightly coupled with the NovaScale server and the Lustre(R) object-based global parallel file system.

The multi-processing parallelism of the S2A8500 architecture, with 28 fibre-channel ports individually powered by dedicated processors, enabled very high bandwidth aggregation, and eliminated the contention and bottlenecks between the storage-based block level layer, the server processing layer and the file system. This open and incredibly scalable approach paves the way for the next generation of supercomputing.

"The ability to effortlessly combine SAN and NAS provided by our S2A storage appliances is helping our customers achieve an order-of-magnitude performance gain in their scalable file server NAS applications for high-performance computing," said Dave Fellinger, CTO of DataDirect Networks. "We are pleased that the combination of our S2A storage appliance with the open-architecture Bull NovaScale servers running Linux, and the Lustre parallel file system result in a balanced, reliable and robust SAN/NAS system architecture that will enable our customers to build systems undreamed of only a few years ago," he added.

"Bull has chosen DataDirect S2A appliances and the Lustre file system as its high end storage solution for clustered file systems. With Lustre and S2A storage appliances powering our Bull NovaScale(R) servers, we can offer customers both the computing power and the I/O bandwidth required for most of the HPC applications," said Jean-Frangois Lavignon, Bull HPC manager.

"This achievement confirms that Lustre is the file system of choice for extreme High Performance Computing. We optimize Lustre's performance features on Bull NovaScale(R) servers to achieve this unbelievable throughput, and Bull's customers will benefit from this close collaboration," said Peter Braam, President and CTO of Cluster File Systems.

DataDirect Networks' Fibre Channel and SATA S2A are the world's highest performance storage systems, as well as the world's most cost efficient solutions for High Performance Computing and Rich Media applications. The S2A architecture is capable of delivering up to 1.5 GBytes/sec of raw sustained throughput in reads or writes from a single target via advanced disk and host parallelism, and hundreds of Gigabytes per second of aggregate performance in a computer cluster implementation.

In use in three of the five top clusters, and eight of the top twenty as listed in the Top500(TM) Supercomputer Sites, DataDirect has major installations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, NCSA, NOAA, NASA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and many others.

About DataDirect Networks, Inc.

DataDirect Networks is the world's leading provider of networked storage and clusters for HPC and Rich Media. Providing SAN, SAN/NAS convergence, and cluster solutions for Government, Research Labs, Defense, Life sciences, Broadcasting, Digital Production, Oil and Gas industries. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at (818) 700-7600 or visit http://www.datadirectnet.com/.

About Bull

Bull designs and develops servers and software for an open environment, integrating the most advanced technologies. In this respect, Bull's range of NovaScale servers combines the openness of standards with the robustness of mainframes. It brings to its customers its expertise and know-how to help them in the transformation of their information systems and to optimise their IT infrastructure and their applications. Bull is particularly present in the public sector, banking, finance, telecommunication, utilities and manufacturing sectors. Capitalising on its wide experience, the Group has a thorough understanding of the business and specific processes of these sectors, thus enabling it to efficiently advise and to accompany its customers. Its distribution network spreads to over 100 countries world-wide.

About Cluster File Systems, Inc.

Cluster File Systems, Inc. (CFS) has quickly established itself as the recognized leader in high-performance, scalable cluster file system technology. Extensive experience, innovative insights, and proven engineering have enabled CFS to dramatically surpass the scalability limits of modern computing. The company's premier Lustre(TM) cluster file system currently powers clusters with thousands of nodes and hundreds of terabytes of data, delivering groundbreaking parallel I/O and metadata throughput on some of the world's largest Linux-based supercomputers. CFS provides Lustre technical support, training, and engineering services, and is actively working with storage and cluster vendors to develop the next generation of intelligent storage devices. The Lustre file system for Linux is Open Source software developed and maintained by CFS.

Lustre is a trademark of Cluster File Systems, Inc.

Top500 is a trademark of Top500.org.

Contact: Brad Winett

Vice President of Business Development

Tel: (818) 700-7620

bwinett@datadirectnet.com

DataDirect Networks, Inc.

CONTACT: Brad Winett, Vice President of Business Development ofDataDirect Networks, Inc., +1-818-700-7620, bwinett@datadirectnet.com

Web site: http://www.datadirectnet.com/

Source: PRNewswire

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