Panasas Extends its Parallel Storage Platform

Panasas, Inc. announced the expansion of the ActiveStor product line with increased performance, enterprise-class storage capabilities and a new second-tier parallel storage solution. This production-ready parallel storage solution now extends the benefits of the industry’s most comprehensive high-performance file storage system, to commercial organizations, and will provide unsurpassed application performance, manageability and superior reliability to solve many of the largest, real world problems faster.

The new Panasas storage systems represent a significant performance and IT efficiency advancement for customers as the aggregate bandwidth that can be supported on each Panasas storage shelf is approximately double the prior generation. For bandwidth sensitive customers, this means they can deploy up to 50 percent less storage, use up to 50 percent less power, require up to 50 percent less cooling, and utilize up to 50 percent less floor space.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is utilizing the new Panasas product family for its work on genomic research in the 1000 Genomes Project. This project involves sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world and will develop a new map of the human genome that will provide a view of biomedically relevant DNA variations at a resolution unmatched by current resources. Data from the project will be made swiftly available to the worldwide scientific community through freely accessible public databases. Use of Panasas’ storage solutions on NIH projects such as this has resulted in application performance increases of up to 5X over the prior storage solution as jobs that once took up to a week to run, now can be completed in as short a time as one day.

"Without high-performance, scalable and manageable storage, organizations become severely limited in their ability to solve the most challenging problems facing the world today," said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Panasas. "Whether it is finding new energy reserves, modeling financial market behavior or simulating aerospace designs, Panasas enables commercial organizations to fully utilize and manage large quantities of business-critical data via the first and most complete, production-ready parallel storage platform available."

The new ActiveStor product family includes the ActiveStor 6000 (AS6000) and ActiveStor 4000 (AS4000) parallel storage clusters, and the new ActiveStor 200 (AS200), the industry’s first parallel second-tier storage solution.

All include the new third-generation Panasas ActiveScale 3.2 operating environment:

• AS6000 – Designed to meet the needs of commercial organizations heavily invested in research and product development (R&D) for design, modeling and visualization, the AS6000 includes 20 GB cache per storage shelf with an integrated 10GigE switch that doubles the throughput performance per storage shelf to over 600 MB/s. Additionally, the AS6000 features improved backup and recovery, and availability via Panasas ActiveImage snapshots and ActiveGuard High Availability software.
• AS4000 – Designed primarily for companies dependent on simulation and analysis, like those in the oil & gas, aerospace and automotive sectors, the AS4000 includes an integrated 10GigE switch for unsurpassed speed, plus improved reliability and data availability with the Panasas Tiered Parity architecture.
• AS200 – The industry’s first parallel second-tier storage solution, the AS200 configuration includes 104 TBs of available storage space, 5 Gigabit Ethernet ports for fast data transfer, and Panasas Tiered Parity data protection. The solution extends parallel storage capabilities to second tier applications, providing a fully unified parallel storage platform for both primary and secondary storage and delivering improved performance, scalability and manageability.

All three storage clusters offer nearly unlimited scalability as storage shelves can be combined into a single global shared file system supporting well over 10 Petabytes.

"Parallel storage and scale-out computing provide the ultra-high performance that some commercial computing applications now require," said Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "The new offerings from Panasas, a leader in delivering high-performance parallel storage systems that help solve the most complex engineering and scientific computing challenges, deliver the same level of performance to the enterprise business segment, and should be of interest to anyone needing the highest level of storage performance."

Panasas will host a webinar showcasing the new ActiveStor product line and how it is helping organizations solve real world problems faster. The broadcast date is September 17, 2008 at 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. PDT.

To register