Panasas Systems to Support IBM Power Linux Servers

Panasas, Inc. has partnered with IBM to develop integrated support and optimized application performance when new Panasas ActiveStor storage systems are configured with IBM Power Systems running Linux. The combination provides outstanding performance levels and is an ideal solution for data-intensive applications in many industries including aerospace, energy, finance, government, life sciences, consumer products, and manufacturing.

The exceptional throughput of the Panasas parallel storage architecture eliminates bottlenecks in application performance for faster time to results, enabling customers to accelerate innovation by running their simulations and other data-intensive workloads significantly faster. In addition, IBM’s Power blade servers provide a secure, resilient and dynamic compute layer solution that helps drive down costs, reduces risk, improves energy efficiency and enhances flexibility.

"High-performance and data-intensive application environments are growing segments of the market in which IBM Power servers offer exceptional computational performance, especially in clustered configurations," said Katalin Bartfai-Walcott, IBM sales executive and senior technical staff member. "Panasas’ leading-edge storage performance and scalability allow us to help customers scale as their businesses grow. Panasas ActiveStor storage and IBM Power Linux servers are the perfect match to deliver the robustness, scalability, and performance to meet high-performance storage and parallel I/O needs, and dramatically improve total cost of ownership. We see the synergy between our two product lines as strategic to our business and look forward to developing best-of-breed solutions for our common customers."

"One of our large oil and gas customers has measured more than 500MB/s of read and write performance from a single IBM Power 6 server," added Larry Jones, vice president of marketing, Panasas. "We’re impressed with the initial performance reports and believe our relationship with IBM is important because these new solutions deliver unlimited scalability, as well as investment protection and improved productivity for our joint customers."

Panasas ActiveStor Benefits
Panasas provides the most comprehensive family of high-performance parallel storage solutions available today. Every Panasas ActiveStor system is based on the leading PanFS Parallel File System and delivers exceptional performance, scalability and manageability. Leveraging DirectFLOW, a parallel storage access technology, Panasas now supports more than 500,000 servers with cost-effective, data-intensive, and linearly scalable storage solutions. This innovative architecture enables multiple parallel data paths between computing nodes and Panasas ActiveStor storage, thereby eliminating the inherent performance and capacity bottlenecks of today’s file systems and file servers. Panasas also dramatically lowers the cost of managing data storage by supporting petabytes of data capacity growth within a single, easily managed namespace and framework.

Availability
Panasas ActiveStor Series 7 and Series 8 systems with IBM Power Linux servers are immediately available through Panasas’ direct and reseller channels worldwide. The ActiveStor Series 9 will be available during the second half of 2009.