Panasas: Storage Solution for Energy, Finance, Government, and Manufacturing
Founded in 1999, Panasas is an enterprise storage company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Panasas claimed to be the world's highest performance storage system in 2009. Panasas systems are primarily designed for storage environments in the energy, government, finance, manufacturing, bioscience and higher education industries.
Panasas provides the most comprehensive family of parallel storage solutions available today. Every Panasas ActiveStor system is based on the leading PanFS parallel file system and delivers exceptional performance, scalability and manageability. Leveraging its DirectFLOW parallel storage access technology, Panasas now supports more than 500,000 servers with cost-effective, data-intensive, and linearly scalable storage solutions. This innovative architecture enables multiple parallel data paths between computing nodes and Panasas ActiveStor storage, thereby eliminating the inherent performance and capacity bottlenecks of today's file systems and file servers. Panasas also dramatically lowers the cost of managing data storage by supporting petabytes of data capacity growth within a single, easily managed namespace and framework.
The Panasas ActiveStor achieves its unprecedented performance by using multiple storage technologies via a synchronized architecture combining three tiers of storage - cache, SSD, and SATA - on each blade. The new system utilizes the high-performance SSDs for meta-data operations and smaller user files. Larger files are handled by cost-effective, large-capacity SATA disk drives. Managed, optimized, and completely automated via the Panasas PanFS operating system, the three tiers synchronize to deliver cost-effective and highly tuned performance for a wide range of data-intensive applications.
Products:
Activestor: The Activestor product line is a computer appliance which provides network-attached storage using a computer cluster to provide scalability using a technique known as "scale-out". The ActiveStor 14 systems use solid state drive acceleration for improved metadata and small file performance, up to 1.5 GByte/s per shelf. Activestor 11 and 12 systems (announced in 2011) claim from 600 MByte/s to up to 1.5 GByte/s per shelf.
PanFS: The PanFS clustered file system creates a single pool of storage under a global filename space to support multiple applications and workflows in a single storage system with high performance for technical applications. PanFS supports DirectFlow (pNFS), NFS and CIFS data access protocols simultaneously.