Thu, 20 Sep 2012 06:19:34 GMT – Panasas, Inc.

SSD-Accelerated Scale-out NAS Appliance Delivers Extreme Bandwidth

and Small File Performance for Big Data Workloads

 SUNNYVALE, NEW YORK, LONDON, Sept. 17, 2012 – Panasas, Inc., the leader in high performance parallel storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, today announced Panasas® ActiveStor™ 14, the world’s fastest fully integrated parallel storage solution. Through its unique application of Solid State Drive (SSD) flash technology, ActiveStor 14 achieves a dramatic leap forward in small file performance without the prohibitive cost of SSD-only solutions. The single platform will satisfy the bandwidth requirements of the most demanding high-performance storage applications while opening new opportunities for Panasas parallel storage technology in industries with I/O intensive workloads, including finance, life sciences, energy and manufacturing.

 “As big data workloads become pervasive within the enterprise, a parallel architecture is a necessary weapon to address critical analysis in a timely manner in order to drive competitive advantage,” said Faye Pairman, president and CEO at Panasas. “ActiveStor 14 broadens the appeal of our fully integrated parallel file system appliances by supporting a diverse set of workloads and applications—all from a single scale-out NAS solution.”

ActiveStor 14 leverages cost-effective enterprise SATA drives to deliver an extremely affordable, highly scalable storage appliance providing more than eight petabytes of easily deployed, easily managed capacity in a single global namespace. The Panasas file system efficiently incorporates SSD technology to accelerate small file performance and metadata operations while minimising SSD wear and expense. This intelligent blend of cost-effective, high density SATA and SSD storage assures industry-leading throughput performance for mixed workloads consisting of both large and small files while delivering fast rebuilds for always-on performance.

“Scale-out storage systems like ActiveStor 14 are needed to keep pace with the increasingly challenging big data workloads found in technical computing environments.” said Steve Conway, HPC research vice president at IDC. “The use of SSD technology to accelerate namespace operations and small file performance is a solid approach aimed at benefiting a wide variety of customers by addressing their mixed workload requirements.”

Panasas demonstrated ActiveStor 14 performance for mixed workloads by publishing compelling SPEC SFS benchmark results measuring network-attached storage NFS performance. A single ActiveStor 14T shelf containing only 27 data drives delivered 20,745 SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 operations per second with an overall response time of 1.99 milliseconds—a stellar 768 ops/s per data drive. Scaled out to two shelves, ActiveStor 14T produced 41,116 SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 operations per second with an overall response time of 1.39 milliseconds. This showed near-linear scaling of performance as you would expect from a Panasas system.

Panasas and its global partners are taking orders for ActiveStor 14 effective immediately with initial shipments in November 2012. Multiple product configurations are available with varying SSD and cache capacities. Panasas will demonstrate ActiveStor 14 this week at the HPC for Wall Street conference in New York City and the Trading Architecture Europe conference in London.

Full benchmark disclosure for the referenced SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results can be found at: www.panasas.com/sites/default/files/docs/panasas_activestor_14_sfs_results_1089.pdf.

For more information, visit www.panasas.com, call (888) PANASAS, or email [email protected].

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc., the leader in high performance parallel storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, enables customers to rapidly solve complex computing problems, speed innovation and accelerate new product introduction. All Panasas storage products leverage the patented PanFS™ storage operating system to deliver superior performance, data protection, scalability and manageability. Panasas systems are optimized for demanding storage environments in the bioscience, energy, finance, government, manufacturing, and university markets. For more information, visit www.panasas.com.

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 Panasas Media Contacts

EMEA

Zoe Mitchell

Napier Partnership Ltd.

[email protected]

+44 1243 531123

©2012 Panasas, Inc. Panasas, the Panasas logo, ActiveStor, and PanFS are registered trademarks or trademarks of Panasas, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.