STORAGE

CTO Garth Gibson to Chair High Performance NFS Panel and Host Petascale Data Storage Workshop: At this year’s SC06, the international conference on high-performance computing, networking and storage, Panasas, Inc. will showcase the latest Panasas ActiveScale™ Storage Cluster solutions and demonstrate the company’s continued advances in parallel file system technology and predictive self-management capabilities. Show attendees visiting Panasas at booth 1635 or attending one of several panels, tutorials and exhibitor presentations will learn from Panasas executives and its customers about the advantages of Panasas’ ActiveScale Storage Clusters. The SC06 show will be held at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida, November 11-17, 2006. “As the use of high-performance Linux clusters in both large enterprises and research organizations continues to expand, the need for high performance, highly reliable clustered storage solutions that are easy to manage becomes more critical.” said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer of Panasas. “Only Panasas, with its ActiveScale Storage Clusters and PanFSTM parallel file system, is able to meet the performance, scalability, reliability and manageability requirements of these innovative users of large-scale Linux clusters. At SC06, we will showcase these leadership technologies both in our booth and via several speaking sessions throughout the week.” Panasas Everywhere at SC06 Linux clusters powered by Panasas are used by customers in a growing number of mainstream applications that touch every aspect of life, from helping accelerate the development of life-saving drugs, to meeting global demands for oil and gas discovery, to enabling the next wave of fully animated feature films. Panasas object-based parallel storage solutions, designed for Linux clusters, helps customers more quickly achieve their objectives and successfully compete in global markets. The power of Panasas will be on display throughout the week at several SC06 locations and venues. Storage Solutions Presentation – On Tuesday, November 14 from 1:30 p.m. – 3 p.m., Garth Gibson, co-founder and CTO for Panasas, will deliver a presentation titled, “Advances in RAID and HPC Storage Reliability.” Gibson will discuss a range of storage reliability issues including the impact of the ever-increasing density of disk drives on storage system availability and Panasas Object RAID - a new solution for overcoming the problem of incomplete reconstructions of failed disks and the advantages of this approach over traditional RAID 6. High Performance NFS Panel – On Thursday, November 16 from 10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m., Gibson will chair the “High Performance NFS: Facts and Fiction” panel session. The panel will address the future of NFS, including a discussion of new alternatives and strategies for maximizing the performance of NFS, such as parallel NFS (pNFS). Panasas Booth #1635 –Presentations by experienced Panasas clustered storage users will be delivered by Baylor College of Medicine, Dell, Fairfield Industries, Fluent, Los Alamos National Labs, Stanford University, and StatOil. Show attendees can also learn more about Panasas’ latest generation of integrated software and hardware solutions which will be demonstrated at the show. Cluster Storage and File System Technologies Tutorial – On Sunday, November 12 from 1:30 p.m. –5 p.m., Brent Welch and Marc Unangst of Panasas will host a tutorial on cluster storage and file system technologies. This tutorial will examine current state-of-the-art high performance parallel file systems and the underlying technologies employed to deliver scalable performance across a range of scientific and industrial applications. Petascale Data Storage Workshop – On Friday, November 17 from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m., Gibson will host a one-day workshop on data storage problems and emerging solutions found in petascale scientific computing environments. This workshop is composed of six topic areas: Performance & Benchmarking Results & Tools; Failure Tolerance Problems & Proposals; API (POSIX, etc) Standards Problems & Proposals; Protocol Standards Problems & Proposals; New Projects Showcase (NSF HECURA, etc); and New Funding Directions (HEC IWG Debrief, etc.).