Panasas, Inc. announced a significant reduction in total cost of ownership for Panasas parallel storage systems. The new high-performance ActiveStor 5200 and ActiveStor 3200 parallel storage clusters offer 33 percent higher capacity per storage shelf and overall lower cost and energy consumption per terabyte. The Panasas ActiveStor product family now supports up to 200 TBs of storage in each standard 42U rack. This higher-capacity solution further improves total cost of ownership by providing higher capacity in the same floor space, power, and cooling envelope than its prior generation of storage systems. Panasas parallel storage systems are used by performance-oriented users who want to improve time to market and accelerate time to results.

The Panasas ActiveStor 5200 and ActiveStor 3200 storage systems include the latest Seagate Enterprise-class Barracuda disk drives. These high reliability drives come with in-drive data integrity protection guaranteed through Seagate's advanced error detection and correction technology, a protection scheme designed to protect the integrity of the user data sent to and from the host computer. When coupled with the Panasas Tiered Parity media error data protection codes, Panasas storage solutions provide superior reliability for customers running their business-critical applications.

The ActiveStor 5200 (AS5200) and ActiveStor 3200 (AS3200) deliver 20 TBs of storage capacity per 4U shelf, and up to 200 TBs in a single-rack system which can be easily installed in as little as 15 minutes. Panasas customers in seismic processing, computer-aided engineering, advanced simulation, and financial modeling now have a solution with industry-leading performance that meets the widest range of workloads. This includes applications using small- to medium-sized files with more random access and those with higher sequential I/O demands for large files.

"The ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters are designed to meet the needs of customers running interactive and batch-oriented design, analysis, simulation and modeling applications deployed on clusters," said Len Rosenthal, Panasas chief marketing officer. "As users continue to deploy larger clusters containing, dozens, hundreds and even thousands of processing cores, the requirement for parallel storage continues to accelerate. Panasas customers enjoy distinct competitive advantages with Panasas storage solutions: faster application performance, increased user productivity, unsurpassed scalability, exceptional manageability and faster time to market."

Panasas has installed its products in more than 30 countries across six continents as parallel storage is being adopted globally as the preferred solution for high-performance computing environments. All Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage systems include the award-winning object-based PanFS parallel file system. The Panasas parallel storage family contains the only storage architecture specifically designed to accelerate the performance of applications deployed on clusters. This architecture, which solves performance and scalability issues through direct parallel data paths, is the foundation of the emerging open pNFS (Parallel NFS) industry standard endorsed by every major storage and system provider.