ACADEMIA

Patented Technology Provides High Performance Computing Users Increased Data Availability and Reliability: Panasas, Inc., the leader in parallel clustered storage solutions for the High Performance Computing (HPC) market, today announced the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted the company a new patent for advanced technology in object storage systems that increases data availability and reliability. Panasas was awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,191,357 for "hybrid quorum/primary-backup fault-tolerance model." This innovative technology provides users of Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters remarkably fault tolerant high performance storage solutions. The company's 10th patent reflects an ongoing mission to provide customers with the highest levels of integrity and availability in object storage systems. The patented hybrid technology combines two fault tolerance schemes into a single methodology that provides both robustness and performance. Quorum/consensus replicated databases are used to provide failover capability for core cluster management functions. The improved resilience that can be achieved using such a scheme allows the primary backup for file service to run quickly and efficiently. With the company's focus in providing unmatched performance and reliability, Panasas has incorporated this invention into its ActiveGuard High Availability software to provide fault tolerance for both component and network failures. Panasas' ActiveGuard high availability solution provides features for continuous performance with comprehensive failover capabilities that do not compromise data accessibility. "This newly patented technology forms the foundation for ActiveGuard software which provides Panasas customers a highly-available large-scale parallel storage solution," said Garth Gibson, chief technology officer at Panasas. "In addition, this method improves failover responsiveness for clients accessing the storage system." All Panasas storage clusters contain the object-based PanFS parallel file system. Using Panasas storage, customers can achieve maximum application performance while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) by driving the cost and complexity out of their storage infrastructure. The fully-parallel Panasas DirectFlow Protocol provides direct access between Linux cluster nodes and Panasas storage to eliminate costly performance bottlenecks that legacy storage systems can create when used with parallel applications. Additionally, a single global namespace dramatically simplifies cluster management.