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Spinnaker Networks Provides Storage Power for Brain Cell and Systems Research at the Salk Institute

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 8, 2003--Spinnaker Networks(TM), the leading supplier of next generation, distributed storage systems, today announced that its SpinServer(TM) network attached storage (NAS) solution has been deployed at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to aid in brain cell and systems research in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. SpinServer's industry leading, single server and cluster performance coupled with complete functionality, including a global namespace, NFS, CIFS, server failover, and open support for industry leading storage subsystems, made Spinnaker the best choice for Salk.

A two-terabyte, two-head Spinnaker SpinServer 3300 solution provides high-speed storage for scientists conducting brain cell and systems research at the San Diego-based Salk Institute. The Spinnaker system delivers the speed and capacity needed for research applications, which include functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, 3D modeling and simulation of sub-cellular architecture and physiology, educational animations, and high-speed data acquisition for direct tissue-sample experimentation.

The Spinnaker solution offers all of the traditional NAS functionality of the lab's prior fileserver, but improves on performance, scalability and file management.

"We put Spinnaker's system through extensive tests and found that it performed extremely well," said Lee Campbell, Ph.D., Scientific Systems Analyst and Bioinformatics Specialist at the Salk Institute. "And it did so with a simpler, streamlined architecture. In this case, simple does not in any way mean limited functionality. The Spinnaker solution, in fact, offers more features that will help us do our work. Spinnaker engineers got it right the first time."

According to Campbell, simplified storage management is a key benefit of the SpinServer solution. He says that researchers can focus their attention on lab work rather than administrative tasks such as trying to break up large files or to reconfigure file systems to support new experiments.

"It was important for the Salk Institute to find a storage solution that delivers speed, capacity and performance to support the complex scientific experimentation performed at its Computational Neurobiology Laboratory," said Jeff Hornung, Spinnaker Networks' Vice President of Marketing. "The SpinServer not only exceeded these requirements but also brought with it seamless scalability, simplified storage management and around-the-clock availability. For enterprise computing environments needing top-of-the-line file server storage, Spinnaker's SpinServer is hard to beat."

In addition to its service in the lab's brain cell and systems research, the SpinServer supports 120 Salk researchers running upwards of 30 applications, including simulation and modeling programs, as well as full suites of CorelDRAW(R), Adobe(R) Illustrator(R) and Photoshop(R), Microsoft Office, DVD authoring software, compilers and more. SpinServer supports these researchers 24x7.

Using Spinnaker SpinCluster(TM) to integrate multiple servers and the Spinnaker SpinFS(TM) global distributed file system to create a single file system across those servers, Salk researchers plan to seamlessly input and access data from a variety of locations.

About Spinnaker Networks

Spinnaker Networks develops next generation network attached storage (NAS) solutions for enterprises that have demanding requirements for scalability, performance and ease of management both locally in the data center and across geographically distributed sites. Spinnaker Networks is a privately held company founded in 1999 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For more information, visit www.spinnakernet.com.

Spinnaker Networks, SpinServer, SpinFS, SpinHA, SpinStor, SpinMirror, SpinMove and SpinManager are trademarks of Spinnaker Networks, LLC. All other product names referenced in this document may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies and are hereby acknowledged.

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