LOS ANGELES, Nov. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- DataDirect Networks announced today the first fully integrated Unified InfiniBand Solutions designed to enable the ease of installation, management, support and scale of InfiniBand clusters.

The DataDirect Unified InfiniBand Solution integrates DataDirect's S2A Cluster Storage Solutions with native InfiniBand storage to Cisco's SFS 7000 Series InfiniBand Server Switches and Host Channel Adapters, making it easy to access the cost effective benefits of InfiniBand cluster computing.

DataDirect S2A Cluster Storage Solutions are designed to enable ease of installation, scalability, and management of InfiniBand clusters to optimize computational resources, I/O utilization, file system access and fabric bandwidth for cost effective cluster computing. Combined with the Cisco SFS 7000 Series InfiniBand Server Switches and Host Channel Adapters, this solution will help to accelerate the rapid adoption of InfiniBand fabrics and support the next generation of cluster computing.

"The fact that you can purchase a turnkey InfiniBand solution like you do for other fabrics is innovative and extremely valuable," said Greg Schultz, founder and senior analyst, StorageIO Group, and author of the book Resilient Storage Networks. "I think it will be a strong enabling tool for customers to really adopt this technology and put it in place now."

"Cisco sees a growing need for low latency, high throughput storage systems across InfiniBand and Fibre Channel fabrics, including storage systems from DataDirect Networks," said Krish Ramakrishnan, vice president and general manager, Server Virtualization Business Unit at Cisco. "High performance storage systems coupled with high performance computing fabrics significantly accelerate application performance."

Cluster computing, collaborative computing and high performance computing are rapidly being adopted by enterprise companies, research institutes, and universities as an alternative to supercomputers to handle projects requiring millions of simultaneously running calculations. Examples of high performance compute-intensive enterprise applications include: financial data analysis, data mining, market data analysis, computational chemistry, database tiers, and computational fluid dynamics. DataDirect Networks S2A Storage Solutions support some of the world's largest InfiniBand server clusters, and have been deployed in hundreds of server clusters, including both research and commercial environments in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

"With Cisco supporting and DataDirect offering an integrated InfiniBand storage and fabric solution framework, customers can take advantage of this unified approach and intelligence to enable reliable, high performance, low latency compute clusters which can scale to thousands of nodes and can deliver tangible benefits to their productivity today," noted Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks. "Our goal is to support integrated solutions for compute and network intensive applications, making it easy for a customer to introduce a unified fabric architecture that will improve their efficiency in operating large computer centers by reducing complexity in both deployment and management."

About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks is recognized leader in high performance, high capacity network storage solutions. Focused on driving customer-centric innovation, DataDirect Networks has created the Silicon Storage Appliance as the essential building block for high performance computing, oil and gas, internet-based services and rich media storage solutions. DataDirect Networks' award winning Silicon Storage Appliance enables the creation of differentiated high performance, high capacity NAS and SAN storage, parallel and shared file system storage, primary and nearline storage, and virtual tape library storage solutions. Each solution offers unsurpassed performance, high availability, cost effective scalability and simplified management delivering the industry's best price-per-performance and best per-capacity-per-square foot solutions.

Launched in 1998 and headquartered in California, DataDirect Networks has an established global presence with research and development, and operations in the United States, Europe and Asia. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at +1-800-TERABYTE (837-2298) or info@datadirectnet.com.

DataDirect Networks and Silicon Storage Appliance are trademarks of DataDirect Networks, Inc. All other names are property of their respective owners.

Media Contacts: Curtis Chan Alex Sayyah Chan & Associates, Inc. DataDirect Networks Inc. Tel: (714) 447-4993 Tel: (818) 700-4039 cj_chan@chanandassoc.comasayyah@datadirectnet.com

CONTACT: Curtis Chan of Chan & Associates, +1-714-447-4993,
cj_chan@chanandassoc.com, for DataDirect Networks, Inc.; or Alex Sayyah of
DataDirect Networks, Inc., +1-818-700-4039, asayyah@datadirectnet.com

Web site: http://www.datadirectnet.com/

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