The S2A9500, DataDirect’s 6th generation RAID storage networking system, was designed specifically to provide optimal block level and file system performance for highly scalable, open system computing environments, and surpasses all storage performance records with sustained read and write performance of over 3 Gigabytes/second.

Its highly modular architecture offers up to eight plug and play FC-4 and Infiniband host side connections, optimized for use with a broad range of file systems, CPUs and interconnect technologies. The S2A9500 supports over one thousand SATA and Fibre-Channel disk drives through its twenty high speed disk-side ports.

The S2A9500’s creation is the result of the support and extensive feedback from leading scientists at some of the world’s most advanced computing centers, and more than 100 man-years of design work from DataDirect’s research and development team.

PARALLEL AND NON BLOCKING INTERNAL ARCHITECTURE

DataDirect’s S2A9500 is built around a lightning fast cache-centric design with 11.2 Gigabytes/second of internal bandwidth, supported by a parallel and fully redundant host and disk side architecture, with complete separation of command and data paths implementing on the fly read and write RAID parity calculation. Offering a choice of FC-4 and Infiniband host connections as well as SATA and Fibre Channel disk drive options, the S2A9500’s design is ideally suited for computing environments where system level speed and reliability are just as important as scalability and heterogeneous support.

EXTENSIVE DATA PROTECTION AND REDUNDANCY FEATURES

Taking into account the mission critical nature of many of today’s demanding computing environments, the S2A9500 comes with many high reliability features, including full redundancy and dual pathing on the disk side and host side, RAID protection for cache and disks, and the world’s first true dual redundancy disk architecture which allows for double disk failures in the same redundancy group without adversely affecting data availability or system bandwidth.

The system features a breakthrough modular design that allows for unprecedented choice in host connectivity and selection of disk type.

The Silicon Storage Appliance Difference

Building a high-performance networked storage environment using commodity storage devices results in complex, hard to manage and scale system architectures. Only Silicon Storage Appliances drive out the complexity of such environments via their staggering performance, huge scalability, advanced multiprocessing parallelism and rich feature set and management tools.

Performance - The S2A9500 is several times faster in sustained performance than any non-DataDirect storage device. Its 3 Gigabytes/second+ sustained performance from disk media in reads or writes is unprecedented, and the Silicon Storage Appliance’s unique ability to source all of its performance through truly parallel host accesses from even a single target (LUN) truly puts it in a class by itself. This architectural parallelism and raw performance enables and enhances all high-performance shared file system environments. The S2A9500 reduces or completely eliminates host-based software striping, providing concurrent and redundant parallel access while increasing reliability, resiliency and robustness.

Modularity - The S2A9500 is the world’s first storage controller with complete modularity in both host-side and disk-side connectivity with dedicated processors at all ports in addition to the custom in-band Parallel Parity Processing Engine (P3E). Initial host interface offerings include 4 Gigabit/second Fibre-Channel and 10 Gigabit / second Infiniband (SCSI RDMA protocol), and Fibre-Channel/SATA disk controller modules.

Scalability - The S2A9500 can scale in capacity to 1120 disk drives, providing hundreds of terabytes of virtualized capacity from a single, easily managed storage system. As a platform for storage consolidation, particularly when utilizing a shared file system, hierarchical storage system or information lifecycle management solution the S2A9500 is unmatched.

Robustness – Far more than commodity RAID systems, the S2A9500 supports features unavailable in other systems to ensure uninterrupted uptime with managed Quality of Service and deterministic latencies. Single or dual parity drive raid group modes, full disk chassis redundancy, and completely separate controller chassis’ options ensure that there are no single points of failure – even passive backplanes can be “configured out” as single points of failure.

S2A9500 Features:

• 2U S2A9500 Singlet / 4U S2A9500 Couplet Controllers 2 / 4 Host Card Slots
  
  • Dual-Port 4Gb/s Fibre-Channel Interface Cards
  • Dual-Port 10Gb/s Infiniband Interface Cards>
  • Disk Port Options: 10 2Gb/s Fibre Channel Ports (Supports Bridged SATA Chassis’)
    
• Up to 1120 Disk Drives, 512 Direct Host logins, and 8192 LUNs supported
• 1.3TB to 556TB of Total capacity, 448TB Formattable (utilizing 500GB drives)
• Sustained Performance of over 3 Gbyte/s in both Reads AND Writes
• Full Duplex Host Transfer Operation
• Real-time Any to Any Virtualization
• No performance penalties in degraded mode operation, very fast rebuild rate
• PowerLUN™ 3 Gbyte/sec+ individual LUNs without host-based striping
• 2.5GB / 5GB of Cache, LUN-in-Cache Solid State Disk functionality
• SNMP, GUI, Telnet and API support
• directMirror™ multi-clone mirroring capability standard
• Hardware based RAID 6 with no performance degradation