48 Percent of Respondents Not Satisfied with Current Application Performance; Faster Storage Viewed as Top Priority

Panasas has announced the results of a recent survey of 114 professionals from aerospace, energy, automotive, higher education, government, and other industries regarding their high performance computing environments.  The objective of the survey was to better understand the business benefits of greater performance, as well as the current and future needs of high performance computing users.  The survey found that even though the overwhelming majority of organizations depend on high performance computing to grow their business, 48 percent of respondents are not satisfied with the current performance levels of their applications.    Furthermore, 67 percent of respondents cited the need for a faster, more scalable storage solution as their number one priority to reach higher levels of application performance.   

Improved customer service was clearly considered to be the greatest benefit of increased performance with 50 percent of respondents answering in that way.  Following improved customer service, cost savings was the most important perceived benefit from higher performance, as 41 percent of respondents believed increasing performance of highest-need applications would save their company money. Given the economy, this statistic is not surprising due to the fact that organizations are being asked to do more with fewer resources.

“Customers clearly recognize the business benefits of pushing the technical performance envelope,” said Randy Strahan, CEO of Panasas.  “They also clearly identify that there is a large opportunity for high performance storage to take them to the next level.”

Key Findings from the Panasas Survey:

• 93 percent of respondents stated that high performance computing was fundamental to the growth of their business.  Even with today’s constrained budgets, they are faced with the increased demands for faster access to information and accelerated processes to stay competitive and support their business.
• 50 percent of respondents believe that improved customer service would be a direct benefit to increased performance for highest-need applications.  This statistic, coupled with open ended comments regarding faster reporting, higher quality results, and improved scientific input, reveals that higher performance would have a positive impact on service levels and quality of research results. 
• 48 percent reported that they were not satisfied with the performance of the applications that required the highest performance.  Despite the advanced technology that is available today, the survey suggests that many organizations are still using legacy solutions that don’t perform at required levels.
• An overwhelming 67 percent of respondents stated that they need a faster, more scalable storage solution to keep up with the data and I/O performance requirements of their computing environments. 
• 63 percent plan to invest in high performance storage over the next year and 67 percent of those surveyed indicated they are considering deploying parallel storage. 

Panasas ActiveStor

Panasas provides the most comprehensive family of parallel storage solutions available today. Every Panasas ActiveStor system is based on the leading PanFS Parallel File System and delivers exceptional performance, scalability and manageability. Leveraging DirectFLOW, a parallel storage access technology, Panasas now supports more than 500,000 servers with cost-effective, data-intensive, and linearly scalable storage solutions. This innovative architecture enables multiple, parallel data paths between computing nodes and Panasas ActiveStor storage, thereby eliminating the inherent performance and capacity bottlenecks of today’s file systems and file servers. Panasas also dramatically lowers the cost of managing data storage by supporting Petabytes of data capacity growth within a single, easily managed namespace and framework.