Panasas announced that Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) has installed Panasas ActiveStor 11 to deliver high performance parallel storage as part of its newly upgraded high performance computing (HPC) facilities for advanced computational science and engineering.

CACR operates large-scale computing facilities and provides support services for numerous campus research groups that require reliable I/O, including the aeronautics, applied mathematics, astronomy, biology, engineering, geophysics, materials science, and physics departments. Because CACR previously experienced non-critical data loss with its legacy storage systems, and endured the use of problematic system administration tools, it was important to ensure that manageability, reliability, and stability of the parallel file system and its underlying storage hardware was best-in-class.

"We needed a high performance storage solution that was big enough and fast enough for our I/O demands, and that would not get in the way of our research. It was key to be able to take file system usability and customer support as a given," said Sharon Brunett, senior scientist at CACR who was tasked with the overall Panasas ActiveStor selection and installation. "ActiveStor is an extremely reliable parallel storage platform. It has eliminated many of our file system administration and system management hassles, as well as user complaints about lackluster performance and application response times."

ActiveStor appliances eliminate the bottlenecks found in traditional NAS systems, accelerating application I/O performance by enabling HPC cluster nodes to directly access a single, scalable file system in parallel. Users simply add individual blade chassis or entire racks to non-disruptively scale the capacity and performance of the file system as storage requirements grow. This makes it easy to linearly scale capacity to six petabytes and performance to 150GB/s, the industry's highest single file system throughput per terabyte of SATA storage. Its advanced blade architecture blends performance, capacity, and cost-efficiency in a system optimized for scientific computing applications where ease of use and time-to-results are critical concerns.

"With a limited system administration budget, it was clear that CACR needed a powerful, yet easy to use, fully integrated parallel storage solution that would allow researchers to focus on their work, rather than on IT headaches," said Bill Ribera, vice president of worldwide sales and field operations at Panasas. "Panasas ActiveStor with the fully integrated PanFS parallel file system delivered on all fronts."