Panasas intoroduced the ActiveStor Series 9 parallel storage system, which is believed to be the highest-performance file storage system in the world, as the company claims.
"This is an exciting performance breakthrough for our industry," said Randy Strahan, CEO of Panasas.
The new company’s system 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.
It utilizes the Intel® X25-E Extreme SATA SSD for meta-data operations and smaller user files. Larger files are handled by cost-effective, large-capacity SATA disk drives.
Unlike single-dimensional storage solutions, which offer either high-bandwidth performance or optimized IOPS, the ActiveStor uses multiple storage technologies in a synchronized architecture to produce both.
A single 42U rack configured with the new Series 9 system is capable of delivering an estimated 80,000 NFS operations per second, as well as 6 gigabytes per second of throughput. Additional performace can be gained in a linear fashion simply by adding additional Panasas shelves or racks to a configuration.
This unique "no compromise" combination of performance and expandability allows Panasas to deliver industry-leading throughput, as well as IOPs performance as much as 80 percent higher than most competitive storage systems. In addition, the new Panasas system can achieve these results with fewer disk drives than others, the company claims.
According to Strahan, this new system expands Panasas’ ability to help customers save money across their storage infrastructure by increasing their ability to consolidate a wider variety of applications and workloads in a single storage architecture, including high-performance clustered applications, single-client applications, and technical and commercial applications running NFS and CIFS file protocols.
"Panasas has now upped the ante in terms of performance relative to footprint and is allowing customers to reduce management costs and increase productivity by consolidating on a single platform," said Terri McClure, senior analyst at analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group.
"Inadequate performance of storage is a major inhibitor of the compute environment to perform with enough speed to support the data intensive problems companies are required to solve today."
Comments