New PAS HC Delivers Massive Scalability, Cost Efficiency and Performance for Technical Computing

Panasas today released the PAS HC, a high capacity, multi-petabyte, scale-out NAS system. The PAS HC is an ideal solution for organizations requiring massive scalability, cost efficiency, and performance to capture and archive huge amounts of data for technical applications.

PAS HC interoperates with the full suite of Panasas tiered storage products, and incorporates Intel’s new Nehalem microarchitecture, delivering a significant increase in bandwidth and processing performance.  Using Panasas’ new 64 bit operating system architecture and 64 Gb/second Fibre Channel backend capacity, the system delivers more than 5GB/second throughput per rack, with initial customer implementations in excess of 160GB/second per system.  

“Panasas’ high performance storage system is a key element of our supercomputing infrastructure which enables multiple petaflop/s class systems, including the new CIELO supercomputer, to perform critical calculations needed to ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the nuclear stockpile,” said Gary Grider, deputy division leader for the High Performance Computing Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We’ve been a long time customer of Panasas and the PAS HC will provide the high performance with 160GB/second throughput, and the capacity to meet our current multi-petascale needs.”

PAS HC’s efficient design provides nearly one PB of raw capacity in a single, floor tile-sized footprint, and capacity can be added without disruption to create massive, multi-petabye storage pools. Utilizing the patented PanFS storage operating system, PAS HC complements the current PAS 7, 8, and 9 family of solutions to create a single global namespace.  This provides customers with the flexibility to support multiple workflow applications in a single storage system, plus blazing performance for complex technical applications combined with massive capacity to archive the results for future analysis. Eliminating multiple islands of storage dramatically reduces system cost and complexity.

“Panasas’ scale-out NAS approach is exactly the type of solution enterprises need today,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group.  “The ability to granularly add capacity or performance so customers can tune their NAS systems to match different application requirements is essential in today’s storage environments.  Panasas’ new system will be able to accommodate spiraling data growth over time while also controlling operational costs for added investment protection.”

 PAS HC is a high availability solution featuring RAID 6 data protection, redundant power and cooling, and automatic and transparent failover and recovery.  In addition, total cost of ownership (TCO) is low due to its:

• High density footprint which saves valuable space in the data center
• 15 minute self-configuring installation
• Modular design that facilitates simple removal or replacement of components
• Single mount point and administrative interface that avoids the incremental system administration that burdens competitive storage alternatives

“The PAS HC was developed in cooperation with our largest customers and delivers a high density footprint to maximize floor space utilization which is critical in a tight economy where storage costs are skyrocketing,” said Bob Schoettle, Panasas’ chief marketing officer.  “PAS HC is a multi-petabyte capacity solution for managing massive amounts of data and provides the highest levels of performance, scalability and manageability at a low overall TCO.”

PAS HC is currently in early deployments at multiple customer sites and will be generally available this summer.