Panasas offers high-performance parallel storage

High-performance computing (HPC) storage experts Panasas today added ActiveStor 11 to its portfolio of blade architecture technology.

Panasas announced ActiveStor 11 at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, emphasising its balanced performance and storage capabilities.

Geoffrey Noer, Panasas senior director of product marketing, said, "Our storage architecture is a blade-based system, with the drive for performance being the high I/O requirement."

The new Panasas system has one director blade contained in a shelf with 11 storage blades, with dual 10Gbit/s connections or quad data rate (QDR) Infiniband connections [see picture].

Director blades have CPU, cache and network connectivity (10Gbit/s Ethernet or Infiniband connections) and control system activity. The storage blades have CPU, cache and hard drives, with the latest enterprise 3TB SATA drives now available.

The storage blades enable parallel reading and writing and are directly accessible by compute clients over the network. They don't have standard hardware RAID controllers and file servers in between the disks and the network, which bottlenecks the system, according to Panasas.

Shelves full of blades can fit into a 4U rack chassis, giving a 60TB footprint [see picture].

Panasas said an ActiveStor 11 system is scalable to 6 petabytes (PB) (1PB = 1,000TB).

Noer said that the majority of operating systems using its systems are Linux clusters.

"We do support Windows clients, but the trend is towards large Linux clusters, whether they are connected via Ethernet or Infiniband," he said.

Another trend is for organisations to consolidate resources – a trend that Noer argues began long before the term "private cloud" was coined.

He gave the example of university research departments: each department would normally have its own HPC clusters, but the departments are now looking to consolidate these in a site-wide deployment with a shared environment.

The Panasas system is optimised to handle hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data. "There's no way to pump that through a network pipe affordably to a public cloud," said Neor. "Firms still want to keep control of their data, because it's their core business."

Panasas' customers range from biosciences companies, such as the Bioinformatics Institute at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, to gas and oil firms (BP and Total), to financial companies (BNP Paribas).

Companies in these sectors need HPC storage for tasks from genomic sequencing and deep sea floor modelling to financial portfolio performance for risk analysis applications.

Panasas is now taking orders for delivery in August, with a 60TB rack of ActiveStor 11 blades costing about $90,000 (£56,000).