Panasas:” [We have] the World’s Highest-Performance File Storage System”

Panasas, Inc. announced the availability of the ActiveStor Series 9 parallel storage system, which helps customers dramatically lower cost with unprecedented storage performance and consolidation capabilities.

"Today, we achieved 30 GB/sec bandwith performance  in a production environment with the Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Clustered Storage. The Panasas scalable architecture gives us the flexibility to gain more performance by growing the size of the storage system in the future."
James Nunez, Los Alamos National Laboratories

The Series 9 is believed to be the highest-performance file storage system in the world, combining new solid-state drive (SSD) technology with traditional disk drives to produce a system with breakthrough performance and consolidation capabilities.  The new product will be showcased at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists International Exposition in Houston, Texas at the George R. Brown Convention Center, Oct. 25-30.
 
This breakthrough system expands Panasas’ ability to help customers save money across their storage infrastructure by increasing their ability to consolidate a wider variety of applications and workloads in a single storage architecture, including high-performance clustered applications, single-client applications, and technical and commercial applications running NFS and CIFS file protocols. The new system has been developed in response to specific consolidation and cost reduction needs in a wide variety of industries, including aerospace, energy, finance, government, life sciences, consumer products, and manufacturing.
 
Unlike single-dimensional storage solutions, which offer either high-bandwidth performance or optimized IOPS, the ActiveStor Series 9 uses multiple storage technologies in a synchronized architecture to produce both. A single 42U rack configured with the new Series 9 system is capable of delivering an estimated 80,000 NFS operations per second, as well as 6 gigabytes per second of throughput.  Additional performace can be gained in a linear fashion simply by adding additional Panasas shelves or racks to a configuration. This unique ‘no compromise’ combination of performance and expandability allows Panasas to deliver industry-leading throughput, as well as IOPs performance as much as 80 percent higher than most competitive storage systems. In addition, the new Panasas system can achieve these results with fewer disk drives than others, thereby increasing the overall reliability and lowering the cost of the ActiveStor Series 9.
 
“Panasas has now upped the ante in terms of performance relative to footprint and is allowing customers to reduce management costs and increase productivity by consolidating on a single platform,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group.  ”Inadequate performance of storage is a major inhibitor of the compute environment to perform with enough speed to support the data intensive problems companies are required to solve today.”
 
“This is an exciting performance breakthrough for our industry,” said Randy Strahan, CEO of Panasas. “The Series 9 allows Panasas to offer the best performance in its class while enabling our customers to reduce acquisition and management costs, and innovate substantially faster.”
 
About the Panasas ActiveStor Series 9
The ActiveStor Series 9 achieves its unprecedented performance by using multiple storage technologies via a synchronized architecture combining three tiers of storage – cache, SSD, and SATA – on each blade. The new system utilizes the high-performance Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD for meta-data operations and smaller user files. Larger files are handled by cost-effective, large-capacity SATA disk drives. Managed, optimized, and completely automated via the Panasas PanFS operating system, the three tiers synchronize to deliver cost-effective and highly tuned performance for a wide range of data-intensive applications. Panasas ActiveStor Series 9 is available immediately through Panasas’ direct and reseller channels worldwide.  

Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage
Panasas provides the most comprehensive family of 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 its DirectFLOW 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.