INDUSTRY

Company Continues to Demonstrate Object Storage Technology Leadership With Award of a New Patent: Panasas today announced the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted the company a new patent for technology advances that enable object storage systems to further increase data availability through an advanced file system check/recovery mechanism. Panasas was awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,155,464 for "recovering and checking large file systems in an object-based data storage system." The new patent provides users of Panasas ActiveScale Storage Clusters, which are based on a leading edge object-based parallel file system technology, increased reliability for petabyte-scale storage systems typically found in Linux HPC data center environments. The Panasas ActiveScale parallel file system, PanFS, is a sophisticated, failover-duplexed and journaled file system designed to recover from even the most catastrophic failure modes. Traditional journaled file system checking methods, used by most other file systems, do not scale to meet the massive capacity and performance requirements in today's demanding high performance data centers. "This latest patent is further evidence of our object-based parallel file system technology advancements and our focus to provide unmatched performance and reliability in clustered storage," said Garth Gibson, chief technology officer at Panasas. "This patent addresses current and future versions of the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster, providing additional data protection to our global government, academic and corporate customers." This latest patent brings the total number of Panasas patents to nine with many other innovative parallel file system patents pending with the USPTO. Panasas expects to be granted numerous additional patents related to its storage technology over the next several years. Powered by the Panasas ActiveScale File System (PanFS), the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster helps customers achieve maximum application performance while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) by driving the cost and complexity out of deploying a next-generation storage infrastructure for the High Performance Data Center. The fully-parallel Panasas DirectFlow data path provides direct access between Linux cluster nodes and Panasas storage to eliminate the performance bottleneck caused by legacy storage systems.