Los Angeles, California - (The Hosting News) - January 15, 2007 - Network storage solutions firm, DataDirect Networks' S2A9550, the HPC storage solution of choice by the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at UIC, also won this year's Bandwidth Challenge at SuperComputing '06, held in Tampa, Florida.

The S2A9550 also powered the 2nd and 3rd place winners, Cal Tech and Indiana University. A team of experts from the University of Illinois at Chicago's NCDM, Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University won the 7th annual Bandwidth Challenge by transporting the 1.3 TB Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data (SDSS) from the University of Illinois at Chicago to the SC'06 floor at Tampa with a sustained data transfer rate of 8Gb/s over a 10GbE link, and a peak rate of 9.18 Gb/s. The data set was the BESTDR5 catalog data set from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and when compressed consisted of 60 files of about 23 GB each and totaling 1.3 TB. The technology that made this easy was an open source peer-to-peer storage solution, powered by DataDirect's high performance S2A9550, called SECTOR that NCDM. SECTOR is built using UDT, an open source high performance network transport protocol designed to distribute large e-science data sets such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This was a major new milestone that demonstrated that it is now practical for working scientists to transfer large data sets from disk-to-disk over long distances using a 10GbE network versus traditional physical mail carriers. Additionally, DataDirect's S2A9550 high performance storage system also enabled the 2nd and 3rd place winners of the Bandwidth Challenge.

The 2nd place team consisted of CalTech, CERN, University of Florida and the University of Michigan for their project ''High Speed Data Gathering, Distribution and Analysis for Physics Discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider.'' The 3rd place team consisted of Indiana University, Pittsburgh SuperComputing Center and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for their project "All in a Day's Work: Advancing Data Intensive Research with the Data Capacitor.''

DataDirect Networks was also the recipient of the HPCwire 2006 Readers' Choice Award for the "Best Price / Performance Storage Solution." This is the third consecutive year that DataDirect Networks has won the award for the best customer valued storage solution and is based on its innovative Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) solutions. More on DataDirect Networks and the Silicon Storage Appliance Over the last three years, DataDirect Networks has achieved 150 percent growth in the storage capacity shipped to its HPC customers, becoming the storage of choice for many government, academia and corporate supercomputing sites, and ranked as the 5th largest independent storage provider by Gartner. DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) family of products are in production in 7 of the top 10 clusters in the world and 35 of the Top 100 supercomputing sites in the world with major installations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories, PCS, NCSA, NOAA, NASA and NASA Ames, NERSC, SDSC, LNXI, ORNL, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, Dresden TUD, and many others.

DataDirect Networks' successes have included the deployment of more than one petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of storage behind the world's fastest supercomputer, IBM's Blue Gene/L, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as well as with a cluster of Bull NovaScale SMP servers and power ''Tera10'' in Europe. DataDirect Networks' success is driven by its industry leading S2A technology, a 7th generation RAID storage networking system and solutions with FC-4 and InfiniBand front end server connectivity, and Fibre Channel and SATA back-end disk support. The S2A delivers ultra-high levels of performance (3 GB/s), scalability (1,000 disks) and reliability (multiple levels of redundancy including RAID 6 and parity checking of all read I/Os without performance loss) across a broad range of computational, visualization, and nearline environments. DataDirect Networks' S2A offers broad infrastructure support powering compute clusters from IBM, Dell, Cray, SGI, Bull and others. DataDirect Networks works closely with OEMs, well known systems integrators, and advisors who serve the needs of Government and High Performance Computing community.

DataDirect Networks is a high performance, high capacity network storage solution firm. 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.

To learn more, please visit: www.datadirectnet.com.