Panasas ActiveStor System Speeds Siemens PLM Software

Summary

• Customer: Digital Factory Division of Siemens PLM Software, Inc. (formerly CD-Adapco, Inc.)
• Size: 10,001+ employees
• Location: Melville, NY
• Industry: Manufacturing

Challenges

• Remove storage bottlenecks to improve system performance.
• Minimize the administration and maintenance time storage requires.
• Provide high reliability for mission-critical systems.

Solution

• Benchmarked Panasas, Inc.‘s ActiveStor system storage to identify desired level of performance
• Replaced legacy network-attached storage with Panasas solution
• Deployed more than 3PB of Panasas storage to date

Results

• Enabled multiple CFD simulation runs without affecting other users
• Minimized overhead of storage administration
• Achieved high reliability for mission-critical systems

If you carry a smartphone, go to the doctor, turn on a light, or drive a car, your life is affected by engineering simulation. Simulation allows engineers to test new ideas using software models that mimic the behavior of real-world objects, which greatly simpli es the process of trying out alternatives.

Models are only approximations of the real world. As designers need more accurate simulations, they push the limits of technology. That’s where Siemens PLM Software comes in. The company is pioneering an approach known as multidisciplinary design exploration (MDX). MDX analysis involves multiple physics domain simulations, all within a single software tool, each addressing a specific part of the problem, which together allow an engineer to simulate the entire system as a whole.

MDX demands much higher performance from technical infrastructure.

Steven Feldman, Siemens PLM Software’s program VP, explains: “When we rst started doing just CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis by itself a few years ago, a single simulation would stop everything else running on the system.“

His staff traced the problem to legacy NAS, which could not keep up with the I/O requirements of the highly data-intensive CFD calculations. Systems that can’t keep up with CFD-only analyses have no chance of performing MDX calculations well.

Feldman’s team began its search for a storage system that would eliminate the I/O bottleneck of the existing storage. To avoid overtaxing the company’s thin IT staff, the new system had to be easy to use, reliable, and backed by good support.

“Once Panasas is up and running, you just forget about it, which is exactly what we need,” said Feldman.

Panasas Storage Eliminates I/O Bottlenecks,
Improves Performance for System Users
A search of commercial storage vendors led Feldman’s team to develop a short list that included Panasas. Now it was time to put the vendors through their paces.

“The Panasas engineers worked together with us on benchmarks that showed the kind of speed improvements we could expect,” says Feldman.

Impressed by the benchmark results, his team installed a Panasas ActiveStor system to perform a real-world test.

Little Impact on Other Users
The result? “When we turned on the Panasas system, the bottleneck disappeared,” says Feldman. “We were able to run a complex MDX simulation without signi cantly impacting other system users.“

The reason is performance: The Panasas PanFS storage OS for the ActiveStor appliance uses parallel data paths to substantially increase data throughput to and from storage.

Good Reliability That It’s ‘Forgettable’
One of Siemens PLM Software’s requirements was high reliability, both to ensure that the company could meet its commitments to customers and to avoid overloading busy IT technicians. By this measure, the Panasas solution has exceeded expectations.

“The new storage system is something we just don’t worry about,” Feldman says. “Once Panasas is up and running, you can just forget about it, which is exactly what we need.“

Easy-to-Use GUI and Support
No system can run without any manual intervention, but the Panasas system comes close.

“Administration for the Panasas storage is almost nonexistent,” Feldman explains. “The GUI is easy to understand, so on those rare occasions when we do have to go into the system, it takes very little time away from our other IT assignments. The Siemens PLM Software team also benefits from exceptional support from Panasas. Data loss is not something we worry about now.”

Siemens PLM Software uses Panasas storage
on range of cluster sizes, from 16 to 112 nodes

Siemens PLM Software Leverages Panasas Storage
to Move into New Markets
Panasas storage may be ‘forgettable’ in operation, but it’s top of mind when Siemens PLM Software needs more storage.

“Panasas is deployed on all mission-critical systems,” Feldman says. “We have more than 1PB of Panasas ActiveStor deployed, with more to come.”

Siemens PLM Software is moving ahead on a number of fronts, including the design of Formula One race cars.

“Formula One pushes automotive technology to its ragged edge,” says Feldman. “Their designers optimize the car’s aerodynamic design for every race track.”