Oxford University Relies on Panasas

Panasas, Inc. announced that Oxford University has installed its ActiveStor 14 storage to improve reliability and performance at their Advanced Research Computing (ARC) centre.

The ARC facility is a central resource available to university researchers that need access to HPC resources. ARC operates a range of distributed memory, shared memory, and GPU enabled HPC clusters that are primarily used for scientific and statistical modeling workflows.

“We don’t have a large support staff available to manage the system 24 hours per day and therefore we needed to find a solution that offered excellent manageability, load balancing, and performance monitoring,” stated Dr. Andrew Richards, head of ARC, University of Oxford. “We also needed a high performance solution that would work across a range of HPC systems and could be easily deployed into our existing production environment.“

The installation consists of 330TB of Panasas ActiveStor 14 storage that is providing a single pool of storage under a global name space at the heart of the centre’s infrastructure. The hybrid scale-out NAS system provides university researchers with the storage required for home areas, general purpose mid-term projects, and performance short-term jobs.

“We are delighted that ARC at Oxford University chose Panasas to satisfy its HPC storage requirements,” said Anthony Yeates, VP of EMEA sales, Panasas. “ActiveStor provides unmatched performance, scalability, and reliability without complex and time-consuming system management for both academic and enterprise organizations.“