DataDirect Networks, a provider of storage networking appliances, announced that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has selected seven DataDirect Silicon Storage Appliances for use in developing and evaluating storage networking solutions for terascale, data-intensive applications.
NCSA said it will be using the Silicon Storage Appliances, managing 58.5 Terabyte storage network, to create a foundational testbed where applications and technologies teams will be able to evaluate its ability to move and store large data files to understand the challenges involved with building massive, networked data storage systems.
“After thorough testing of solutions from leading vendors, DataDirect’s Silicon Storage Appliances proved to be the storage networking solution that met our requirements for cost-effective scalability, simple configuration, ease of management and rapid deployment,” Dan Reed, director of NCSA said. “Deploying the Silicon Storage Appliances is our first step toward creating a petascale storage system that will support the needs of terascale computing systems and distributed computational Grids.”
According to the company, the hardware and software of distributed Grids will include ultra high-speed storage networks, high-resolution visualization environments, massive scientific data archives, collaborative scientific tools, and toolkits for grid computing. Scientists and industry researchers across the country will be able to tap into this infrastructure to solve scientific and engineering problems.