HAMBURG, Germany, June 22 -- Panasas, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance storage for the world's most performance-intensive applications, today announced that it has begun shipping a new software release that increases data protection capabilities and overall application performance for data-intensive enterprises. Available on all new shipping ActiveStor Series 7 and 8 systems, and also as a free upgrade to existing Panasas customers, the new capabilities are being showcased at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, Germany this week.

"We're very pleased with our new Panasas system," said Colin Bannister, University of Nottingham, UK. "As well as being easy to manage, the Panasas solution delivers excellent performance, even on our most data-intensive applications. We are also extremely impressed with the level of support that we have received from Panasas."

"With this new release, Panasas has expanded its features and performance to provide high-performance storage solutions for a broader range of scientific and technical workloads," said Nick Sundby, Storage and Systems research analyst at IDC Europe.

The new Panasas features and enhancements build upon the success of existing Panasas deployments that are serving data to over 500,000 clients in 35 countries. Panasas provides a distinctive, object-based file system environment, with unique features such as automatic provisioning which allows users to add new capacity and performance with zero loss in productivity.

The new release includes the following enhancements:

• Dramatically Improved Single-Client Performance
  
  Delivering single client performance gains of between 40 and 300 percent over previous versions, the new Panasas release has been shown by early customers to sustain throughput of over 1 Gigabyte per second (GB/sec) in their production environments.

• Fast and Efficient Data Protection
  
  Panasas' new Asynchronous Replication capability enables rapid replication of data from the primary Panasas system to a remote backup/disaster recovery Panasas system. The system continually compares successive data snapshots to assess changes in data, maximizing data transfer efficiency by sending only the changes over the wire.

• Faster, Easier Data Migration
  
  A significant new capability is the ability to perform zero-downtime data migration to the new ActiveStor Series 7 and Series 8 products from any existing Panasas storage platform. The migration feature is backwards compatible with all installed ActiveStor products, offering customers investment protection.

• Enhanced Security
  
  With the new release, Panasas is now delivering Access Controls (ACL), which improves overall system security by providing client permissions at the directory and/or file level.

• IBM Partnership
  
  Panasas has partnered with IBM on the new ActiveStor release, delivering optimized application performance and integrated support when new ActiveStor Series 7 and 8 storage systems are configured with IBM Power Systems running Linux. Tested on the latest Power 6 Systems, the combination provides outstanding performance levels and is an ideal solution for data-intensive applications in many industries including aerospace, energy, finance, government, life sciences, and consumer products manufacturing.

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance storage for the world's most performance-intensive applications, helps commercial, government and academic organizations accelerate their time to results, leading to real-world breakthroughs that improve people's lives. Panasas high-performance storage systems enable customers to maximize the benefits of high-performance computers and clusters by eliminating the storage bottleneck created with legacy network storage technologies. Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters, in conjunction with the PanFS parallel file system, offer the most comprehensive portfolio of high-performance storage solutions for compute-intensive environments. Panasas is headquartered in Fremont, Calif. For more information, visit www.panasas.com.

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Source: Panasas, Inc.