Data-aware storage systems maker DataDirect Networks has expanded its big data appliance strategy with a new team-up with IBM. The Big Blue is consolidating its clustering solutions under a new name, the IBM Intelligent Cluster portfolio. Alongside the addition of new Ethernet switches, IBM is also offering DataDirect’s SFA 10K Storage Platform.

“Often deployed in HPC environments the Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) provides a number of innovations that increase performance, efficiency, and data protection. It is designed for multiple classes of data and storage performance requirements, with unique multi-RAID architecture that combines up to 1,200 SATA, SAS, and SSD disks into a simply managed, multi-petabyte platform.”

The news follows the launch of DDN’s SFA12K series a week ago. The SFA12K-40 appliance delivers 40GB⁄s and 1.4 flash I/O operations per second and can scale a file system to 1TB/second with a minimum of 25 arrays. The SFA12K-20E and SFA12K-20 on the other hand provide 20GB⁄s and 700,000 IOPs, while the latter is offered in a more cost-efficient configuration.

DataDirect had a lot of new product announcements in the past couple of months. Before it debuted the new series DDN unveiled Web object Scaler (WOS) 2.0 in October, the second version of the company’s object-based cloud storage appliance. It can scale 70 percent faster than Amazon S3 (with which it also integrates), and can pump out 55 billion object retrievals per day and 23 billion object writes per day.

In turn, IBM had a number of developments recently as well. The company entered into an agreement with Chinese manufacturer Suning Appliance to built two new facilities dedicated to development e-commerce products; one in Nanjing, China and one in Silicon Valley. The latter center will employ about 15,000 Suning employees in a few years’ time.