STORAGE

Partnership With Hong Kong-based ModernTech Delivers Second Major Deployment in Mainland China: Panasas, Inc. today announced that Xinjiang Oil Company in Mainland China has deployed the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster. Through a partnership with ModernTech Computer & Peripheral Ltd. in Hong Kong, Panasas is providing high performance storage to Xinjiang Oil Company to help improve reliability, increase scalability and reduce overall IT costs at the oil company's facility in western China where aging UNIX mainframes are being replaced with newer Linux clusters. Xinjiang Oil Company is a subsidiary of PetroChina. PetroChina is one of the three largest state-owned oil and gas exploration and production companies in China. As Xinjiang Oil Company evaluated storage systems during the transition from costly mainframe to clustered Linux computing, the oil company selected and deployed the Panasas Storage Cluster to replace legacy storage that was incapable of delivering the performance and scalability needed to support their ever-growing seismic processing applications. Currently, Xinjiang Oil Company is running 12 Panasas Storage Clusters in conjunction with 600-node Linux clusters at the company's Department of Earth Science in western China. "We've been having problems trying to match the performance of our existing storage systems with the system performance of Linux clusters for a long time," said Jia Ya Jun, Chief Engineer of the Geophysical Research Institute Exploration and Development Institute of Xinjiang Oil Company. "The object-based Panasas storage solution totally turns things around by giving us the things we were looking for-high performance, expansibility, stability, dependability, and simplified management. Panasas storage has resolved the bottleneck problems and provided us with greater cluster performance for achieving our computing goals." The Panasas Storage Cluster with DirectFLOW software is helping PetroChina's subsidiary drive the complexity out of its Linux clusters so that they can operate at peak performance-up to three times faster than with Xinjiang Oil Company's previous storage-and allows IT administrators at the oil company to be more productive. The custom DirectFLOW software provides a fully parallel data path for direct, high-speed communications between Xinjiang Oil Company's Linux clusters and Panasas storage. By doing so, costly performance bottlenecks that can cause the clusters to idle while waiting for data are eliminated. In addition, Panasas' integrated hardware/software storage solution has enabled Xinjiang Oil Company to avoid time-consuming and often costly deployment problems by integrating easily with the newer Linux clusters as well as with existing legacy compute systems. From within a single, global namespace, the Panasas Storage Cluster has reduced many of the previous storage management burdens so that Xinjiang Oil Company can more fully maximize its investments in clustered Linux computing and reduce the overall cost of ownership. "We're excited to have Xinjiang Oil Company join our growing family of oil and gas customers around the world whose highly competitive businesses rely on Panasas storage solutions to help drive business efficiencies and profitability," said Larry Jones, vice president of Marketing at Panasas. "With the help of our valued partner ModernTech, we look forward to expanding the deployment of the Panasas Storage Cluster to additional customers throughout Mainland China."