DataDirect Reaches 1.2PB Per Rack Milestone

DataDirect Networks has revealed 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 California-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 AMD.

DataDirect’s new S2A9900, in tandem with the company’s StorageScaler 6000 enclosure, can now deploy large virtualised 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 added.

As for power efficiency, he 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.