Nearly 3.5 billion people around the world had a rare view of a zoom in from outer space directly into the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake Olympic winter games on 8 February, a phenomenon powered in part, by Los Angeles based storage networking company DataDirect Networks.

The Silicon Storage Appliances of the company deployed at the NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center distribute and accelerate satellite imaging and data analysis information from Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectoradiometer (MODIS). This was one of the instruments used to create the astonishing Space Imaging Zoom into the opening ceremonies, according to a company release.

DataDirect Networks claims to be the leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent storage networking appliances. Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include BBC, Star TV, Loudeye and Sonic Foundry, it says. DataDirect claims to create highly scalable, simple to deploy and easy-to-manage solutions for business, broadcasting and government. It claims to excel in the demanding imaging, simulation and visualisation environments required by governmental agencies - and the content-rich environments surrounding TV broadcasting.

The release says that the development of NASA's Olympic Space Imaging Zoom has roots in important scientific research. In the path from the vacuum of outer space to the billions of people around the world, the computer science expertise necessary to assemble the scene demanded powerful hardware and world-class software. Images like this illustrate the power of remote sensing, the ability of scientists to gain perspective on their subject and make measurements from a distance, it adds.

The process works like this. Orbiting 438 miles above the earth is Terra, a $1.3 billion school bus-size satellite carrying a detection instrument called MODIS, the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectoradiometer. Scanning the earth, MODIS takes the pulse of the planet, watching atmosphere, oceanic and terrestrial changes, and relays this information to ground stations in the United States. Data from these sweeps are transmitted down to NASA Goddard for processing and analysis. Once on the ground, the information is then moved from disk and tape into a mixed data center environment of comprised of Linux, SGI Origin and Sun servers, DataDirect Silicon Storage Appliances and storage. Together, the four Silicon Storage Appliances manage 1.5 TB of data moving through the network and out to servers and workgroups each day, with an overall storage environment of almost 200 Terabytes of data. The Imaging Zoom was done by the NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualisation Studio.

For broadcasters and creative professionals needing high stream count, rock solid audio and video streams, storage and host scalability, and simplified management, DataDirect Networks claims to present a storage networking technology that sets new standards in application acceleration and plug and play simplicity.

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