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DataDirect Networks Inc. hopes to stake a claim downstream next week with the launch of its first departmental and workgroup device, the S2A 3000 Silicon Server Appliance.
The product, which accelerates, manages and virtualizes disparate storage equipment, will fit in a 1U rack, functions on just one board, uses 10 ASICs and has 10 ports, said Bob Woolery, vice president for corporate development and strategic planning at the Chatsworth, Calif., company.
“The knock on [storage-area networks] for that marketplace was that they are expensive and hard to install,” Woolery said. “We miniaturized it.”
But the products smallness doesnt sacrifice scale, he said. “We designed a link as well as clustering software, so you can create a couplet with this. They both connect to the same set of drives.”
For an average user starting at 500GB, the product costs $39,000, or $49,995 for a 1-terabyte system, though it scales to 7 terabytes, he said.
In the next few months, there will be point releases of the S2A 3000, according to Woolery. Those will likely include support for specific storage vendors hardware and software.
Initially, the product is targeted to manage JBOD–the industry-standard term for “just a bunch of disks”–but over time DataDirect may strike interoperability deals with larger-scale vendors offerings, like those from EMC Corp.