Pananas Chosen by Minnesota Supercomputing Institute

The Minnesota Supercomputing
Institute (MSI) is putting into a production a new Panasas, Inc. ActiveStor 14 storage
system.

The new system will consist of twenty shelves of Panasas ActiveStor
14 storage provided by Advanced
Clustering Technologies, Inc. and Panasas, and will integrate file system
and hardware for a single storage solution. The usable storage capacity will be
1.281PB, and each shelf will be capable of 1.5GB/sec or 13,500 IOPS. The solution will be capable of 30GB/sec read/write and 270,000 IOPS.

The ActiveStor 14 solution will support up to 12,000 simultaneous
clients as well as CIFS, NFS, and Panasas’s PanFS
files ystem. The solution also incorporates 24TB of SSDs as part of the hardware
solution.

The system will allow users to do things they couldn’t do
before. As a central storage solution with excellent performance
specifications, it eliminates the need to transfer data within systems at MSI
while meeting the challenging requirements of users with large sets of data.
Current MSI users are required to migrate their data between performance
scratch storage and capacity project space storage, which has created, for
many, bottlenecks in their data flow. The system will blur the line between
these two storage types. Users will be able, for example, to generate data on
MSI’s Itasca system and use an MSI laboratory queue to visualize it.

Overall, the storage system will more than double the capacity
of MSI’s current storage offering. It will enable users both to perform more
interesting research with datasets of finer resolution and to operate on
enormous datasets that in the past presented operational challenges. Related to
these issues, MSI will address the often overlooked need for access bandwidth
by employing a capable system of servers for moving data to and from storage,
and it will employ a set of data movers to channel data
between MSI users and external consumers and producers of data. Generally, the
new storage system will strike a balance between bandwidth and IOPS. Given the
explosion of research with large data requirements, the above capabilities are
key to enabling research of the future.

The ActiveStor 14 solution will give MSI researchers a
significant edge in research and establish MSI as a leader in research involving
big data. In addition to being one of the largest storage systems among U.S.
universities (1.281 PB of usable storage, 24TB of SSD, and 1.84TB of cache),
MSI’s system will also be one of the fastest among U.S. universities with
respect to storage bandwidth.

The system is expected to be delivered in late November 2012.