ACADEMIA

Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Optimized for Intel-Based Clusters: Panasas today announced that its ActiveStor Storage Clusters are the first parallel storage solution to be certified as part of the Intel Cluster Ready program. The Intel Cluster Ready program is designed to make it easier for users to acquire and deploy clusters built with Intel components. Intel Cluster Ready applications and components have been vigorously tested to ensure applications will run on a given cluster configuration. The Intel Cluster Ready Specification is the key to Intel Cluster Ready certification, as it eliminates sources of variability that do not impact performance usability, or utility, but can spell disaster when left unspecified. This specification eliminates the risk of installing incompatible solutions and reduces the time to acquire, configure and deploy Intel-based clusters. The benefits to end users are increased productivity and faster time-to-results. "Panasas is pleased to be working closely with Intel to deliver best-in-class, Linux clustered computing and parallel storage solutions that address customers' most demanding HPC application I/O requirements," said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Panasas. "Our work with the Intel Cluster Ready program reflects a shared vision for commercial, government and academic customers to take advantage of the industry's highest performance and easiest-to-manage parallel storage solutions." "Intel's Cluster Ready program tries to assist our customers with the performance and total cost of ownership needs required to deploy rock-solid, Intel-based computing clusters," said Karl Solchenbach, director of cluster software and technologies for Intel's Software and Solutions Group. "Panasas' certification as Intel Cluster Ready will help our mutual customers accelerate the deployment of their Linux-based clusters." Panasas ActiveStor Storage Clusters eliminate storage I/O bottlenecks and optimize the application performance and compute utilization of Intel clusters. By using Intel clusters in conjunction with Panasas storage, customers from industries, including Oil & Gas, Computer Aided Engineering and Electronic Design Automation, receive a scalable, manageable and high performance turnkey solution that is optimized for multi-core servers. Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage includes the object-based PanFS parallel file system and ActiveScale 3.0, the third generation of the company's powerful operating software environment. The fully-parallel Panasas DirectFLOW client provides direct access between Linux cluster nodes and Panasas storage, eliminating costly performance bottlenecks that legacy storage systems can create when used with parallel applications. Additionally, a single global namespace dramatically simplifies cluster management. Panasas storage is rack mounted, delivering 15 terabytes (TB) of RAID-protected storage capacity per 4U shelf. Up to 150 TBs in a single-rack system can be installed in as little as 15 minutes. To further increase capacity, multiple rack systems can be configured into a single storage cluster that can scale to petabytes and deliver over 20 Gigabytes in aggregate bandwidth.