Panasas ActiveStor at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Panasas, Inc., in hybrid scale-out NAS for technical research and enterprise customers, has deployed an upgrade to its ActiveStor installation at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), one of the UK’s principal government laboratories.

The JASMIN facility is a ‘super-data-cluster’, providing the UK and European climate and earth-system science communities with an efficient data analysis environment. Panasas ActiveStor 11 was deployed for the first phase of the project in 2011, enabling RAL to further their global climate research capabilities. When the capacity needed to be upgraded to respond to the demand to store increasing amount of climatic data models, RAL opened up the competitive bid for phase 2 of the project. Having proved their reliability, ease of management and quality of support, Panasas secured the storage business for a second time running.

The table below outlines the original JASMIN1 installation on site at RAL, the latest JASMIN2 installation, and the total amount of Panasas storage available on site. The JASMIN project at RAL is becoming the largest HPC storage facility in Great Britain.

After implementing Panasas PanFS 5.5 update across the installation, performance tests were carried out across the JASMIN system as part of the acceptance phase, producing data transfer bandwidth in excess of 140GB/s. This is very close to the theoretical maximum, and makes JASMIN one of the fastest, as well as one of the largest, HPC storage deployments in Europe.

“The RAL deployment is particularly impressive due to its sheer size and is our largest single site installation in Europe. It is particularly pleasing to achieve industry-leading performance along with the ease of management and reliability that differentiates us from competitive solutions,” said Faye Pairman, president and CEO, Panasas.