Panasas ActiveStor 16 Hybrid Storage Appliance With PanFS 6.0 OS

Panasas, Inc. has unveiled ActiveStor 16 hybrid storage appliance with the PanFS 6.0 storage OS, for reliability and availability for high-performance storage and big data workloads.

As adoption of high-performance computing increases in the enterprise and big data deployments continue to grow in scale, traditional RAID approaches no longer deliver an adequate level of storage reliability. With ActiveStor 16 and PanFS 6.0, Panasas answers the challenges of reliability and availability at scale along with high performance, ease of management and virtually limitless capacity.

ActiveStor 16 marks the debut of the PanFS 6.0 file system, with RAID-6+ triple parity protection that achieves a 150x increase in reliability over dual parity approaches while minimizing drive rebuild times. Other Panasas firsts for ActiveStor 16 include 6TB HGST UltraStar He6 helium-filled drives and a doubling of the capacity of on-system SSD resources for increased metadata and small file performance. The new platform nets a 50% gain in system density while optimizing on-system flash for the new RAID-6+ implementation.

“With big data workloads pulling HPC into the mainstream of the enterprise, customers’ expectations for reliability and availability have increased at a time when traditional data protection has reached its limits,” said Steve Conway, research VP, IDC. “The developments in Panasas ActiveStor 16 and PanFS 6.0 show timely industry leadership in addressing this growing concern and tackling the challenges of reliability and availability at scale.“

ActiveStor 16 and PanFS 6.0 achieve reliability and availability at scale with software advances that extend system-wide data protection far beyond traditional approaches:

• RAID-6+ with triple parity protection, which decreases the odds of data loss by 150x when compared to dual parity protection schemes. Capacity and performance overhead are minimized, offering the efficiencies of less protective approaches.
• Per-file distributed RAID, based on erasure codes, allowing reliability and availability to increase as capacity grows, rather than decreasing at scale as traditional RAID approaches do.
• Extended File System Availability, which helps ensure BC by keeping the file system online even in the event of ‘one too many’ drive failures – events that normally take other storage products completely offline.
• Improved DR, allowing administrators to quickly restore a small, specific list of files rather than having to restore the entire file system in the event of catastrophic failure.

“With the introduction of ActiveStor 16 and PanFS 6.0, Panasas is strongly positioned to serve the rapidly growing market driven by technical workflows in enterprise computing,” said Faye Pairman, CEO, Panasas. “Combining recent advances such as commercial-grade Windows support with our new RAID-6+ support in PanFS 6.0, it’s clear that Panasas is ahead of the curve in assuring the feature functionality, reliability and availability, and performance required to drive big data’s biggest discoveries.“

“As an inventor of RAID taxonomy more than 25 years ago, I couldn’t be more pleased with our engineering organization for the leap forward in data protection at scale that RAID-6+ represents,” noted Garth Gibson, co-founder and chief scientist, Panasas, and co-author of A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), also known as the Berkeley RAID paper. “As storage performance and capacity continually escalate with the demands of technical computing and big data workloads, it is absolutely essential that the tools for protecting that data keep pace with the rate of change.”

The hybrid ActiveStor 16 system blends cost efficient disk-based storage with additional flash capacity and metadata performance, making the platform a choice for PanFS 6.0 with RAID-6+ data protection. Depending on configuration, ActiveStor 16 ships with up to 122.4TB of capacity per 4U enclosure, providing more than 1.2PB per rack. In production, ActiveStor 16 will achieve up to 150GB/s throughput with capacity that scales beyond 12PB in a single file system. Manageability is simple and initial systems can be deployed in less than 10mn. Capacity and performance scaling is seamless, without requiring downtime.

ActiveStor 16 and PanFS 6.0 are available for order and expected to ship in September.