DataDirect Networks Opens Japan Subsidiary to Support Domestic Growth and Asia Pacific Expansion

Dr. Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to Present at

DataDirect’s Japan Technical Seminar -- ‘Storage Systems for Petaflop

Clusters’

CHATSWORTH, Calif. and TOKYO, Dec. 5 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- DataDirect

Networks Inc., the storage performance and capacity leader, announced today

that the company has opened a fully-owned subsidiary in Japan, DataDirect

Networks Japan. The subsidiary will provide sales, marketing, training and

technical support to its OEM customers and partners in Japan, and together

with DataDirect’s Chinese subsidiary, will also support the expansion of the

company across Asia.

"DataDirect Networks, with the help of our Asian partners, has been an

established icon in the Asia Pacific media and entertainment market for over

a decade and enjoys a large installed base in Japan," said Paul Bloch,

president of DataDirect Networks. "Japan is also a leading market for high-

performance computing and we are now seeing a massive shift toward scalar-

based, clustered architectures -- an area where DataDirect’s Silicon Storage

Appliance storage solutions are the preeminent choice for large compute

cluster applications. We feel the timing is perfect to establish a local

presence in Japan to better support our customers and partners, and to

capitalize on this growing opportunity for high performance, high capacity

storage solutions in the APAC markets. Additionally, we will make an

official announcement of our new Japan subsidiary at a premiere event that we

are hosting for the high performance computing community on December 7th."

DataDirect Networks’ Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) is used by many top

tier Japanese television stations, media and internet companies, as well as

leading universities and manufacturing companies in Japan, including the

University of Tokyo and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and

Technology (JAIST) near Kanazawa.

About DataDirect Networks’ Technical Storage System Seminar

DataDirect Networks’ CEO Alex Bouzari and CTO David Fellinger, and Dr.

Mark K. Seager, Head, Advanced Technology, Computing Group, Lawrence

Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), as well as Dr. Peter Braam, President &

CEO, Cluster File Systems Inc. will be presenting at the DataDirect Networks

Japan Technical Seminar "Storage Systems for Petaflop Clusters" on December

7, 2006 in Tokyo.

The seminar will consist of two sessions. Session 1 will cover "Storage

Systems for Large-Scale HPC Clusters and Real-Time Environments" with Dr.

Seager speaking on "Petaflop Application Performance: Experiences with Large

Clusters and Storage Systems at LLNL." In addition, Alex Bouzari will give a

presentation on "Building Storage Systems for High-Performance Computing and

Rich Media." Session 2 will feature "Future Technologies for Extreme

Scalability and Performance" with Dave Fellinger discussing "The Future of

the S2A Architecture: Building Highly Scalable Storage Systems for Petaflop

Clusters." In addition, Dr. Braam will speak about "Scalable File Systems

for Petaflop Clusters: Present Status and Future Evolution of the Lustre File

System."

The Technical Seminar will be held at 14:00-18:30 in the Sumitomo Skyroom

A, Room 1, Shinjuku Sumitomo Building, 47F, Tokyo, Shinjuku, Nishi-Shinjuku 2-

6-1. DataDirect Networks will be hosting a reception in Room 2 to celebrate

the opening of its new Japan Subsidiary.

About DataDirect Networks Silicon Storage Appliance

Over the last three years, DataDirect Networks has achieved an astounding

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 out of the top 10 clusters in the

world, and 36 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’ 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 with continuous on-the-fly data protection with no loss

of performance) across a broad range of computational, visualization, and

nearline environments. DataDirect Networks’ S2A offers broad infrastructure

support and sales through IBM, Dell, Cray, SGI, Bull, Autodesk, Sony, Thomson

and others.

About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks is the world’s leading provider of 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, 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/SAN, cluster computing, production and

nearline, 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 (818) 700-7600 or visit

http://www.datadirectnet.com . For Japan or Asia Pacific inquiries, contact

Robert Triendl, Director, HPC, Asia Pacific, DataDirect Networks Japan,

Shibuya Mark City 22W, 1-12-1 Dogenzaka, Shibuya, Tokyo 150-0043, Tel: +81

(0) 3-4360-5686.

DataDirect Networks and Silicon Storage Appliance are trademarks of

DataDirect Networks, Inc. All other names are property of their respective

owners.