DataDirect
Networks revealed Sept. 8 that it has doubled the capacity and power efficiency
and lowered the footprint of its signature S2A storage systems to handle
petabyte-level storage for heavy-duty enterprise workloads.
With its new flagship S2A9900 array, the Chatsworth, Calif.-based company
announced support for 2TB enterprise and low-power SATA hard drives from
companies such as Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital and others that are
beginning to move into production use. The new arrays are enabled by
cooler-running quad-core processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
DataDirect's new S2A9900, in tandem with the company's StorageScaler 6000
enclosure, can now deploy large virtualized pools of SATA storage of up to 2.4
petabytes of disk capacity per storage system, Jeff Denworth, DataDirect's
director of marketing, told eWEEK.
"This is an extension to all the arrays we've previously announced,"
Denworth said. "But more than that, it's kind of an establishment of a new
standard, we believe, for what we'll call large storage pools or large storage
array products.
"We're now leading the pack in terms of storage density, drive management,
SATA error-avoidance and power efficiency for storage that can be used across
the data center for a number of different applications."
DDN's StorageScaler enclosure is the first
to market to hold 60 drives in only 4U of rack space, Denworth said. Users
can get up to 600 drives in one rack—or up to 1.2PB in one rack, he said.
DDN's enterprise SATA storage infrastructure
features "self-healing storage intelligence," Denworth said.
"In our context, self-healing means a number of routines that we go
through to make sure your data's always good," Denworth said. "The
first aspect of this is routine brief parity error checking and correction in
real time. We check to make sure that the data is protected not only on the
drive, but in the buffer and all the way to the application as it goes out of
the storage system."
The StorageScaler 6000, a basic building block of the company's product line,
is used across all DDN storage product
lines: the S2A9900, S2A9700, S2A6620 and newly announced SFA10000
and WOS products, Denworth said.
As for power efficiency, Denworth said, "our drive packaging uses only
about one-fourth of the components of competing technologies of the same size—2U
to 3U, from 12- to 16-drive enclosures. That means we have one-fourth the
amount of power supplies, one-fourth the amount of fans, one-fourth the amount
of I/O modules per rack than our competitors.
"So our normal power draw is extremely energy-efficient," Denworth
said.
DDN uses dynamic-MAID (massive array of
independent disks) architecture to spin down disks and enter a power-saving
mode based on user-specified parameters, Denworth said.
For more information and pricing, go here.
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