NASA Goddard Uses Silicon Storage Appliances To Easily Manage 130 Terabyte Network -- DataDirect Networks' Appliances Bring Substantial Application Acceleration, TCO Benefits for Imaging, Analysis Activities
Story Filed: Monday, April 15, 2002 9:02 AM EST
LOS ANGELES, Apr 15, 2002 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- DataDirect Networks, the leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announced that NASA Goddard has achieved new system management efficiencies with their existing Silicon Storage Appliance implementation. The division has deployed four of DataDirect Networks' S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliances to distribute and accelerate satellite imaging and data analysis information; using Silicon Storage Appliances, NASA Goddard can now manage 130TB with minimal system administrator oversight. The ability to easily manage the high performance, high capacity system by using a fraction of traditional system administrator resources brings substantial Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and productivity gains for NASA.
"The principal reasons that we've selected Silicon Storage Appliances for our imaging and analysis needs were the combination of application acceleration and reliability brought about by each appliance," Scott Sinno, MODIS UNIX Administrator, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said. "We continue to use Silicon Storage Appliances for the simple configuration and detailed onboard diagnostics that make it very easy to tune and easy to manage our environment."
Tasked with analysis and distribution of satellite imaging data to develop a detailed understanding of Earth and global climate change, the Terrestrial Information Systems Branch needed a dependable, highly scalable solution that could keep pace with data and application requirements of the project.
As a storage networking company that creates highly scalable, simple to deploy and easy-to-manage solutions for business and government, DataDirect has always excelled in the demanding imaging, simulation and visualization environments required by governmental agencies. With this reputation firmly in place, and superior testing results from an evaluation unit, NASA Goddard bought their first Silicon Storage Appliance and then returned to buy a second, third, fourth and fifth appliance to meet expansion requirements in the group.
Imaging Key to Understanding Global Change
Orbiting 438 miles above the Earth is EOS-Terra, the billion dollar flagship spacecraft of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS). Aboard Terra is a state-of-the-art sensor for studying interactions among the Earth's atmosphere, land and oceans, the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS.) Each day, MODIS takes the pulse of planet Earth, watching atmosphere, oceanic and terrestrial changes, and relays this information to ground stations in the United States.
Data from MODIS is transmitted to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center where it is processed to create global data products. The global products are used by scientists to study long-term global change and in applications like forest fire monitoring. At Goddard, the information is moved from disk and tape into a mixed data center environment comprised of Linux and SGI Origin servers, DataDirect Silicon Storage Appliances and storage, with four Silicon Storage Appliances managing an overall storage environment of 130 usable terabytes of data. Performance of the DataDirect-enabled systems is key, with 1.5 TB of data moving through the network and out to servers and workgroups each day. In addition to MODIS support, there is a fifth Silicon Storage Appliance with 7TB of storage that functions at the heart of a Goddard-wide SAN testbed.
Silicon Storage Appliances Bring TCO, Productivity Benefits
DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows business to accelerate their applications, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology. The acceleration of data to applications and users -- simply and easily -- allows DataDirect Networks' customers to consolidate their storage and increase productivity; management gains brought about by the Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows a 10x lower Total Cost of Ownership.
DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance product line is targeted at medium and large corporations for departmental, enterprise data center and carrier-class applications. DataDirect first released its data center platform in June 2000 and has subsequently sold systems to a wide range of clients needing to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and lower operating costs.
Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, NCSA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA Forecast Systems Lab, U.S. Army Research Lab, White Sands Missile Range, National Century Financial Enterprises, CineGroupe, Loudeye, Star TV, Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS, Seagate, Emulex and QLogic, among others. |
