UK Science and Technology Facilities Council/Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Expands Panasas ActiveStor Storage System

Panasas Inc. announced that the Science and Technology Facilities Council‘s (SFTC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in UK has expanded its JASMIN super-data-cluster with an additional 1.6PB of the company’s ActiveStor storage, bringing total storage capacity to 20PB.

ActiveStor storage system

This expansion required the formation of the largest realm of the firm’s storage worldwide, which is managed by a single systems administrator. Thousands of users worldwide find, manipulate and analyze data held on JASMIN, which processes an average of 1-3PB every day.

STFC and the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) pioneered climate data analysis at petabyte scale with the JASMIN infrastructure. It is a flexible system combining petabytes of performance storage with batch and cloud computing over terabit-bandwidth networking to support data analysis at scale for all UK environmental science communities and their worldwide collaborators.

JASMIN underlies many environmental scientific efforts, including the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) global model intercomparison project (CMIP5,6) which feeds into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, and programs such as the Global Surface Displacement Monitoring program, which collects data from space on a global scale to monitor and model earthquakes, volcanoes, tectonics and the retreat of ice.

“We are proud of our long-term partnership with RAL and STFC, and of our ability to facilitate research that protects the lives and livelihood of all who inhabit the planet,” said Faye Pairman, CEO, Panasas. “We remain committed to meeting STFC’s needs for affordable storage solutions that deliver performance, reliability and manageability at any scale, without compromise.“

ActiveStor accelerates workflows and drives time-to-results with an managed storage system that scales to contribute more storage capacity and processing power to any number of computing clients across the entire system. It is delivered as a integrated clustered NAS appliance solution that incorporates flash and SATA storage nodes and combines parallel data flow and direct data access technology to boost performance, increase data availability, and eliminate hot spots in a single namespace environment.