Panasas Meets the IT Imperatives for Commercial Customers

Tuesday, Nov 15 @ 15:59 PST
Panasas today announced the next generation of the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster, further delivering on the company's commitment to meeting the IT imperatives of commercial customers. With enhancements that simplify deployment, accelerate performance and improve business continuity for Linux clusters, Panasas is setting the industry standard for high-performance clustered storage in mainstream commercial applications. This next generation of Panasas hardware and software provides customers with the maximum return on investment in Linux cluster computing and reduces overall total cost of ownership (TCO).

In commercial settings, every minute a Linux cluster is not running at peak performance can result in missed opportunities, said Victor Perez, president and chief executive officer at Panasas. Panasas is the clustered storage solution of choice for commercial businesses, helping customers more quickly achieve their objectives and successfully compete in global markets.?

High-performance computing (HPC) was once predominantly used in university and government labs. Commercial businesses are now using HPC to create a competitive advantage in billion dollar industries such as oil and gas exploration, digital animation, pharmaceutical research and automotive design. The IT imperatives for university and government installations are often different from commercial businesses. In the labs, researchers and technicians may spend hours or days customizing and fine-tuning HPC environments to solve a single experimental problem. In commercial operations, the deployment of Linux clusters, and the integration of components such as high-performance network storage, must be quick, seamless and require little if any customization.

Meeting the IT Imperatives of Commercial Customers

The newest additions to the Panasas Storage Cluster address the performance, management, deployment and integration demands of commercial customers. The Panasas Storage Cluster enables customers to maximize IT investments, simplify the management of heterogeneous server environments and make the best use of limited IT floor space.

Simplified Deployment and Integration - Panasas is now shipping 800GB StorageBlades to deliver 8TBs of storage capacity per 4U shelf and up to 80TBs per cabinet. Multiple cabinets can be configured in a single storage cluster scaling to petabytes of capacity. Panasas also introduces new three, five and 10-shelf rack systems that ship in a pre-configured and pre-wired 42U cabinet. Panasas provides the broadest support of server, processor and networking platforms to ensure seamless integration. This includes all 2.6 kernels of SuSE, RedHat, and Fedora Linux ?as well as the full line of SGI Altix servers. Panasas' new I/O Router provides full integration with clusters built on either InfiniBand or Myrinet networks. The I/O Router bridges the specialized cluster network and the Panasas Gigabit Ethernet storage fabric delivering high-performance storage access with optimal cost effectiveness.

Accelerated Performance - Panasas has extended its industry-leading performance with a 50 percent increase in single-client data throughput using the Panasas DirectFLOW parallel I/O protocol. A fully-configured 10-shelf rack system can deliver throughput exceeding 4GB/second. This level of performance allows for maximum server and cluster utilization and productivity, empowering customers to achieve the best return on investment.

Improved Business Continuity - To maximize cluster uptime and availability, Panasas now enables sharing of data reconstruction workloads across its DirectorBlades. This completes reconstruction of failed disk drives up to 10X faster than traditional RAID solutions and minimizes the impact of disk failures on the performance and reliability of the storage system. Panasas's parallel volume copy application enables the efficient migration of large amounts of data from legacy storage systems while maximizing the availability of the Panasas storage for use in processing cluster jobs. Customers can create a pipeline of jobs to be processed using the high throughput provided by the Panasas storage system maximizing utilization of their compute cluster and leveraging their traditional storage systems for second tier or archival purposes.

Commercial businesses require IT solutions that drop seamlessly into existing environments, with minimal set up and customization, and perform as promised. Downtime is not an option and cost controls are essential, said Larry Jones, vice president of marketing at Panasas. Unfortunately many clustered storage systems are exceedingly complex, difficult to install and manage, and ultimately add significant operational costs. The Panasas Storage Cluster drives the cost and complexity out of upgrading to a next-generation storage infrastructure.

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