S2A Technology

Unsurpassed Quality-of-Performance

S2A technology is built upon a open-platform state-machine design employing custom high-speed FPGA parity calculation accelerators to overcome performance bottlenecks commonly seen with conventional RAID systems when serving large file data sets. Supported by a parallel and fully redundant host and disk side architecture, the internal bandwidth and separation of command and data paths ensures extremely low latency data access.

The S2A parallel parity calculation design eliminates bottlenecks across the information data path by intelligently managing and buffering system congestion in real-time. This hardware-accelerated parity calculation provides robust data protection without sacrificing system performance. As a result, the unique S2A appliance is capable of delivering full write performance equaling system read performance. Compared to conventional RAID systems which deliver degraded performance when writing data - or when correcting a spurious media error - the S2A appliance is the platform of choice for storage managers who care about performance and quality-of-performance.

Real-Time Protection for Mission-Critical Data

In contrast to storage systems that only parity-protect data, but can be vulnerable to system outages from numerous hardware failures, S2A is extremely robust and designed for maximum data availability. S2A is engineered to safeguard applications from multiple levels of storage system errors. This intelligent data protection design can withstand the loss of multiple drives, a drive channel, a connecting cable or transceiver, or even an entire disk enclosure without any loss of data or system performance.

DDN's DirectRAID 6 algorithms separate S2A from other storage technologies, by allowing the delivery of full system bandwidth (reads and writes) without compromising performance during drive correction events.

Zero-Latency Parallel Data Access

The parallel host access capability of the S2A appliance allows all host ports to see your entire disk storage pool. This unique capability precludes the need for storage switching and virtualization software generally required when using conventional storage systems. Multi-pathing is natively supported because all of the system's host ports share the same view of your entire storage pool.

Massive Scalability

Purpose-built for high capacity as well as high performance - the S2A contains a broad disk-side architecture that supports up to 1,200 disk drives behind a single system. This unique capability allows for single storage implementations that are as much as four times larger than conventional storage platforms.

Benefits of DDN S2A Technology Include:

• Sustained high-performance DirectRAIDTM reduces system expenditure requirements
• Real-time read & write capability delivers low-latency, immediate storage access
• Robust SATAssureTM Plus safeguards protect data from issues common with cost-effective SATA technology
• Massive storage scalability future-proofs evolving business objectives and maximizes IT budgets