Panasas ActiveStor 18 Delivers Increased Density, Performance and Scalability

Panasas, Inc. introduced ActiveStor 18, its latest generation hybrid scale-out NAS appliance.

It increases scalability to more than 2PB and 200GB/s by adopting 8TB drive technology. ActiveStor 18 offers increased CPU power and twice the storage cache capacity to further accelerate mixed workload performance.

By delivering performance and data protection that increases with scale, ActiveStor accelerates time-to-results for the demanding high performance workloads in energy, government, life sciences, manufacturing, media and entertainment and university environments. Whether advancing genomic research using next-gen sequencing technology, rendering visual effects for an animated film, designing advanced aircraft with complex CAE/FEA models, or optimizing the extraction of oil and gas deposits through seismic processing-based analysis, ActiveStor customers know their data is accessible, secure, and easily managed.

“Driven by growing unstructured data sets and the promise of big data, business continues to demand more of storage – more performance, greater scale and higher reliability – to drive ideas and innovation,” said Steve Conway, VP, research,  HPC/data analysis, IDC. “Panasas ActiveStor benefits from its deep roots in technical computing where performance, scalability and data protection, as well as ease of management, are tested by the most challenging compute workloads. As industries such as media and entertainment, manufacturing and life sciences find their storage needs moving further into the technical realm, Panasas is well positioned to meet their requirements.“

ActiveStor offers a scale-out architecture incorporating hybrid storage hardware, file system and protocols in a fully integrated solution. Its architecture combines high-capacity HDDs and fast SSDs for superior mixed-workload performance with rapid access to small and large files alike.

Key features ActiveStor 18:

• Linear scalability of capacity and performance

  • Field proven at more than 20PB and 200GB/s in a single global namespace with 130 shelves, 2,600 HDDs, 1,300 SSDs

• 33% increase in density

  • Up to 1.8PB per rack (or 181.2TB per 4U enclosure), leveraging 8TB drive technology

  • Flash capacity optimized for RAID-6+ triple parity data protection

  • Up to 20% faster mixed workload, metadata and small file performance

• Up to 20% faster mixed workload, metadata and small file performance

  • 2x more storage cache – up to 2.7TB per rack (or 272GB per 4U enclosure)

  • 19% faster CPU

• PanFS storage OS

  • A comprehensive single global namespace solution for simplified storage management

• Multiple protocol support

  • Company’s DirectFlow protocol as well as NFS and SMB protocols

• RAID-6+ triple parity protection

  • Per-file distributed software based on erasure codes provides a 150-fold increase in reliability over dual-parity approaches and allows reliability to increase with scale

“ActiveStor delivers a unique combination of high performance throughput, enterprise-grade reliability and ease of management at any scale,” said Tom Shea, COO, Panasas. “All competitive products compromise at least one of those key capabilities, leaving ActiveStor as the only proven no-compromise solution in the market today.“

ActiveStor 18 is available for ordering. Production systems are expected to ship in September 2015.

“The research at the Garvan Institute is dedicated to the development of better methods for the diagnosis, treatment, and ultimately prevention of disease. We are constantly looking for ways to improve and accelerate results, using highly advanced genome instruments like the Illumina HiSeq X Ten, capable of generating up to 16TB of sequencing data in less than three days. This kind of computing power calls for a storage solution with exceptional performance and reliability. We found such a solution in Panasas’ ActiveStor hybrid scale-out NAS with its high performance, PanFS RAID-6+ triple parity protection, and ease of operation and management. We are in the process of redefining genome research and Panasas is a valuable partner in this important endeavor,” said Warren Kaplan (PhD), chief informatics, Kinghorn centre for clinical genomics, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Australia.

“Our computer-aided engineering software uses multi-physics to achieve the highest degree of accuracy possible when modeling complex systems for our customers in the automotive, aerospace, energy, medical and life sciences as well as the oil and gas industries. When we started looking at various parallel file systems to solve our I/O bottlenecks, we tested the Panasas system and our bottlenecks disappeared. From that point on Panasas has been the only storage system we have purchased for anything but the absolute smallest systems. Panasas storage is something you just don’t worry about. It delivers high performance, is reliable and easy to use. Once it’s up and running you just forget about it, which is exactly what we want., said Steven Feldman, SVP, IT, CD-adapco.

“Post production has fundamental storage requirements. You need to have enough capacity to store all of your footage and that capacity must be affordable. You also need high enough throughput so that you can play that stored footage across your network in real time. The right solution offers all of this and more – it enables me to take for granted that the storage is making difficult tasks easy, and that has been my experience with Panasas ActiveStor. The elimination of the down-res process for some projects was the first step in revolutionizing our post-production workflow. Panasas ActiveStor is such a scalable solution, where capacity and bandwidth scale in parallel, that we can eliminate our offline process. The next task I accomplished with Panasas is that I can now archive and restore projects more easily. I’d say we are 33% more efficient with ActiveStor,” said Allen Dial, SVP, post-production, Asylum Entertainment.