Panasas has announced immediate availability of Panasas ActiveStor 12 (PAS 12), the world's fastest parallel storage system. This fourth-generation storage-blade architecture, featuring the Panasas PanFS parallel file system, 64-bit multi-core processing and integrated 10GbE technology, more than doubles performance, moving from 600MB/s to an unmatched 1.5GB/s per chassis. Aggregate system performance scales to 150GB/s -- the industry's ultimate system throughput per gigabyte of storage. This leading parallel performance, combined with a seven-times performance increase in NFS access, makes PAS 12 ideal for highly demanding applications in the energy, government, finance, manufacturing, bioscience, and other core research and development sectors.

"PAS 12 raises the performance bar to well above what competing products can deliver. With multi-protocol support for both direct and parallel storage, PAS 12 provides outstanding performance for critical, value-creating applications such as seismic processing or genome sequencing," said Faye Pairman, president and CEO of Panasas. "PAS 12 clearly underscores our commitment to provide parallel storage solutions at the extremes of performance and capacity so that Panasas customers can concentrate on delivering results."

Each PAS 12 chassis houses 40TB of RAID protected storage, expandable to 4 petabytes (PB) per system and extensible as drive capacities increase. Performance and capacity easily scale by adding individual blades, chassis or entire racks, all without system disruption. A global namespace presents a single pool of virtualized storage, giving customers the flexibility to employ multiple applications and workflows in a single storage system. Any number of chassis can be networked to create extremely large high performance storage pools. Additional capacity can be added and available in minutes.

"When most organizations talk about data growth they focus on the leap from storing terabytes to petabytes of information. Of equal importance is the explosion in demand for more rapid creation and delivery of this information," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage and IT executive strategies at IDC. "The parallel file system and architectures used in solutions like Panasas PAS 12 will play a key role in enabling more data-intense and data-hungry high performance computing environments."

Integrated RAID Protection with PanFS
Only Panasas includes RAID data protection as a component of its parallel file system. This means customers need not rely on third-party RAID controllers, thus reducing cost and complexity while eliminating performance bottlenecks and single points of failure. Client-driven Scalable Panasas Object RAID obviates the need for separate management of the operating system and the RAID system. System-managed parallel rebuilds mitigate the risk of successive drive failures by providing the industry's fastest rebuild times, which actually decrease as the size of the storage pool increases.

Availability and Pricing
PAS 12 is immediately available in modular configurations starting at 40TB of storage and 1.5GB/s performance for $110,000.