Panasas Storage Meets the Demanding Requirements of Uppsala's High-Performance Computing Service and Next-Generation Sequencing Archive

Panasas announced today that Sweden's Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science (UPPMAX) has increased the performance, scalability and manageability of its high-performance computing service and next-generation sequencing archive through the deployment of Panasas ActiveStor storage. In addition to providing additional storage capacity for the university and its users, the Panasas solution significantly reduces system administration time and increases the performance of Uppsala's data-intensive scientific software applications.

High-Performance Storage Resources Required for Diverse Applications

Serving a wide range of academic users with diverse application workloads requires a delicate balance of compute, network and storage resources. With the upcoming integration of a new high-performance compute cluster, the UPPMAX team needed to acquire a high-bandwidth storage solution capable of serving many concurrent clients with data. "We quickly realized that we needed storage with much higher performance. Our traditional NFS servers could not handle the load of our new clusters," said Jukka Komminaho, group leader of system experts, UPPMAX. "We required a mix of high-bandwidth access to our clusters and low-latency access to our home directories. Panasas is easily meeting our performance requirements serving applications such as VASP, Gaussian and BLAST as well as our users' home-grown applications."

Scalability and Ease-of-Management Required for Next-Generation Sequencing

In addition to providing high-performance for the UPPMAX compute clusters, Panasas storage is utilized for storing project data produced by next-generation sequencing machines. With new data being produced at an estimated rate of 1 terabyte (TB) per day, the data storage management and scalability challenges are significant. "We're standardizing on Panasas storage in our next-generation sequencing archive today, and are planning to double the capacity in early 2010," said Jonas Hagberg, storage expert, UPPMAX. "The ease of scalability of our Panasas solution is very important, as is the ability to integrate Panasas seamlessly with Tivoli Storage Manager which is our existing back-up solution."

Panasas Provides Simple Deployment and High Reliability

The 500 TB Panasas solution was installed in two working days in August 2009 by local Swedish reseller, South Pole. The system then entered a one-month acceptance period with stringent performance and reliability criteria. "We have measured performance and reliability in our general acceptance tests and are very pleased with the results," said Ingela Nystrom, director of UPPMAX.