HPCwire: Panasas Announces New ActiveStor Platforms

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April 22, 2009

Panasas Announces New ActiveStor Platforms

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Three new ActiveStor platforms, featuring parallel storage architecture, enable customers to innovate faster by delivering new levels of speed and flexibility

FREMONT, Calif., April 22 -- Panasas, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance storage for the world's most performance-intensive applications, today announced a new, broader product line that extends the company's performance and scalability leadership to additional markets and price-performance levels. The new ActiveStor Series 7, 8 and 9 portfolio of parallel storage products is designed to bring the highest level of speed and flexibility to data-driven enterprises with high-performance computing requirements. Panasas also introduced new data management features including automatic virtual storage tiering, asynchronous replication, and automated data migration.

The new product line expands the company's market reach across a broader scope of data-intensive applications for industries including aerospace, energy, finance, government, life sciences, consumer products, and manufacturing. The exceptional throughput of the Panasas parallel storage architecture eliminates bottlenecks in application performance for faster time to results, enabling customers to accelerate innovation by running their simulations and other data-intensive workloads significantly faster.

"Panasas' laser sharp focus has enabled them to solve difficult storage performance issues for data-intensive applications," said Marc Staimer, president of industry analyst firm Dragon Slayer Consulting. "Their new product portfolio fits a range of storage requirement profiles to meet the needs of a wider range of technical computing applications."

The new products range from an aggressively priced, full-featured entry-level system, the Series 7, to the Series 9, a high-end system that integrates solid-state disk (SSD) technology to further accelerate performance. The new offerings also provide customers with unparalleled investment protection with new price-performance points and seamless upgrade paths throughout the product line.

ActiveStor Series 7: This full-featured, entry-level system offers Panasas parallel storage performance at the most aggressive price point in the company's history. The Series 7 also offers full upgradeability to the higher performance Series 8 and 9 systems.
ActiveStor Series 8: This series offers almost double the performance of the Series 7, with expanded enterprise-class features for higher availability and data management.
ActiveStor Series 9: This series builds upon the performance and functionality of the Series 8 by adding significantly higher IOPS (I/Os per second) performance, much lower latency, maximum data availability, and integrated tiered storage capabilities. It integrates SSDs for maximum system speed and uniquely optimizes SSD usage to maintain performance and reliability over time. Customers with a wide variety of data-intensive applications will benefit from these performance enhancements, as well as Panasas's new automatic tiered storage capability, which relies on hybrid "turbo" blades (an SATA disk plus SSDs) to deliver unprecedented performance -- up to 10 times greater IOPS than before -- with maximum reliability and infinite scalability.

New Data Management Features

In addition to extending performance across a wider range of applications and environments, Panasas also announced several new data management and data protection features for the ActiveStor family.

Available with the Series 9, the automatic tiered storage feature offers fully automatic storage optimization. The storage is self-managing, and all three tiers reside on a single Panasas storage blade. The ActiveStor Series 9 system uses these three tiers to accelerate application performance without data movement between devices and without user intervention.

Asynchronous replication, available this calendar quarter, is supported on all of the new systems and will also be available to existing Panasas customers. This capability enables data to be replicated from the primary Panasas system to a backup/disaster recovery Panasas system offsite. The system continually compares successive data snapshots to assess what data has changed, and sends only the changes over the wire for maximum speed and efficiency of data transfer.

The new Panasas Disk Migration Utility enables seamless data migration from any legacy Panasas storage to the new ActiveStor products for painless migration without downtime. The migration utility feature is backwards compatible with existing ActiveStor products, offering customers added investment protection.

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