Florida State University Installs Panasas Parallel Storage

Panasas, Inc. announced that its ActiveStor Parallel Storage has been installed at
Florida State University, along with Dell servers, to provide faster access to
the institution’s computational-based research generated primarily by the
math, meteorology, and computer science groups. This new HPC infrastructure
will elevate the capabilities of Florida State by increasing the productivity
of research students and further attracting talented individuals to their
undergraduate program.

The university’s School of Computational Sciences is leading the Panasas
storage implementation to support the massively parallel data movement for
computational-based research. Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage, while
reducing storage management costs, allows Florida State University to provide
its faculty and students with reliable, interactive access to research data
through a centralized resource which will yield results much faster and
increase their overall productivity.

"Universities such as Florida State have made great strides in leveraging
advanced tools and applications to position their institutions as leaders in
academic research and HPC excellence," said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing
officer at Panasas. "Panasas parallel storage brings the next generation of
storage technology to FSU, enabling them to maximize the performance of their
HPC investments with a unified storage solution that offers unprecedented
scalability and reliability."

In addition to the inherent benefits of faster application run-times,
higher productivity and improved collaboration, Panasas ActiveStor Parallel
Storage provides a global namespace that dramatically simplifies cluster
management and will result in a lower total cost of ownership for the
university. More importantly, it will meet any university needs to further
increase capacity. Multiple rack systems can be configured seamlessly into a
single storage cluster that can scale to petabytes and deliver more than 20
Gigabytes per second in aggregate bandwidth. Plus, each rack installation
requires as little as 15 minutes. The university will also leverage Panasas
storage for its forthcoming visualization initiative in which the School of
Computational Sciences will transfer I/O-intensive data into a visualization
environment to allow further analysis for its meteorology and oceanography
groups.

"Panasas parallel storage affords us an exciting opportunity to be at the
forefront of high-performance computing," said James Wilgenbusch, director of
Florida State University’s High Performance Computing Facility. "This storage
solution allows us to offer our students a state-of-the-art approach to
running computational analyses in a unified environment while permitting us to
quickly and easily scale storage capacity. We have deployed the premiere
technologies in the HPC industry: Panasas parallel storage, Dell servers, and
Cisco networking infrastructure. We look forward to continuing to satisfy the
needs of our students and attracting additional talented individuals to our
undergraduate and graduate program."

Panasas collaborated in this Florida State University deployment with both
Dell and Cisco to ensure a smooth implementation. "Our work with Florida State
University is one of many projects involving Panasas solutions and illustrates
the increasing demand for ActiveStor storage that we are experiencing in our
customer base," said John Mullen, vice president and general manager, Dell ESL
Major Accounts. "Panasas parallel storage is renowned for superior performance
and cost-efficiency, making this solution a great complement to our PowerEdge
server products. Dell customers are the beneficiaries of the reliable and
scalable attributes of our world-class technology."

Panasas, Inc.

Florida State University