Panasas ActiveStor 14: SSD-Accelerated Scale-out NAS

Panasas, Inc. announced ActiveStor 14, a fast fully integrated parallel storage solution.

Through its application of SSD flash technology, it 14 achieves a leap forward in small file performance without the prohibitive cost of SSD-only solutions. The single platform will satisfy the bandwidth requirements of the most demanding high-performance storage applications while opening new opportunities for Panasas parallel storage technology in industries with I/O intensive workloads, including finance, life sciences, energy and manufacturing.

"As big data workloads become pervasive within the enterprise, a parallel architecture is a necessary weapon to address critical analysis in a timely manner in order to drive competitive advantage," said Faye Pairman, president and CEO at Panasas. "ActiveStor 14 broadens the appeal of our fully integrated parallel file system appliances by supporting a diverse set of workloads and applications-all from a single scale-out NAS solution."

ActiveStor 14 leverages cost-effective enterprise SATA drives to deliver an affordable, scalable storage appliance providing more than eight PB of easily deployed, easily managed capacity in a single global namespace.

The Panasas file system efficiently incorporates SSD technology to accelerate small file performance and metadata operations while minimising SSD wear and expense. This intelligent blend of cost-effective, high density SATA and SSD storage assures throughput performance for mixed workloads consisting of both large and small files while delivering fast rebuilds for always-on performance.

"Scale-out storage systems like ActiveStor 14 are needed to keep pace with the increasingly challenging big data workloads found in technical computing environments," said Steve Conway, HPC research VP at IDC. "The use of SSD technology to accelerate namespace operations and small file performance is a solid approach aimed at benefiting a wide variety of customers by addressing their mixed workload requirements."

Panasas demonstrated ActiveStor 14 performance for mixed workloads by publishing compelling SPEC SFS benchmark results measuring network-attached storage NFS performance. A single ActiveStor 14T shelf containing 27 drives delivered 20,745 SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 operations per second with an overall response time of 1.99 milliseconds – a stellar 768 ops/s per data drive. Scaled out to two shelves, ActiveStor 14T produced 41,116 SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 operations per second with an overall response time of 1.39 milliseconds. This showed near-linear scaling of performance.

Panasas and its global partners are taking orders for ActiveStor 14 effective with initial shipments in November 2012. Multiple product configurations are available with varying SSD and cache capacities.

Panasas demonstrated ActiveStor 14 at the HPC for Wall Street conference in New York City, NY and the Trading Architecture Europe conference in London.