Panasas ActiveStor 11 Parallel Storage System for HPC

Panasas, Inc. announced the ActiveStor 11 parallel storage system appliance.

Powered by the PanFS operating system, ActiveStor 11 scales to 6PB of capacity and 115GB/s of throughput from a single global namespace. Its blade architecture blends performance, capacity, and cost-efficiency in a system optimised for data-intensive applications where time-to-results is a critical concern.

"Our customers know that Panasas represents the ultimate in performance, capacity and usability for computationally intensive application environments," said Faye Pairman, president and chief executive officer of Panasas. "ActiveStor 11 is an attractive solution to deliver a new level of cost effectiveness for a variety of markets, whether deployed as part of a dedicated research cluster or a multi-tenant private cloud platform."

The Panasas parallel scale-out storage architecture eliminates bottlenecks seen in traditional NAS systems, enabling HPC cluster nodes to directly access a single, scalable file system. Administrators can easily add new storage to the global namespace from a single point of management in fewer than 10 minutes without disrupting workflows. ActiveStor 11 features user quotas, snapshots, and per-user chargeback reporting so administrators can monitor and manage storage resources within their private cloud.

"As private clouds become more pervasive, it is clear that increasing numbers of HPC users will require highly scalable parallel storage systems that are dependable, easy to manage, and deliver the high throughput required for a wide range of technical computing applications," said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for high performance computing. "The Panasas ActiveStor 11 appliance is well positioned to capitalise on this important high performance computing trend."

Panasas is taking orders for ActiveStor 11 and expects to start shipping in August 2011. In addition, a 60TB configuration of the existing ActiveStor 12 appliance is also expected to be available in the same timeframe.