Panasas

Panasas, Inc.
Private
Industry Data Storage
Founded 1999
Headquarters Sunnyvale, California, USA
Key people
 Faye Pairman, CEO
Products ActiveStor
Number of employees
 51-200
Website www.panasas.com

Panasas is a data storage company that creates network-attached storage for technical computing environments.

History

Founded in 1999 by Garth Gibson and William Courtright, Panasas is a computer data storage product company and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Panasas received seed funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) and others. The first Panasas products were shipped in 2004, the same year that Victor M. Perez became CEO.[1] Faye Pairman became CEO in 2011.[2]

Technology

Panasas developed an extension for managing parallel file access in the Network File System,[3] which was later integrated in Parallel NFS (pNFS), part of the NFS version 4.1 specification, published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 5661 in January of 2010. pNFS described a way for the NFS protocol to process file requests to multiple servers or storage devices at once, instead of handling the requests serially.[4]

Panasas supports DirectFlow, NFS, Parallel NFS and Server Message Block (also known as CIFS) data access protocols to integrate into existing local area networks. Panasas blade servers manage metadata, serving data for DirectFlow, NFS and CIFS clients using 10 Gigabit Ethernet.[5] Panasas systems provide data storage and management for high-performance applications in the biosciences, energy, media and entertainment, manufacturing, government and research sectors.[6]

ActiveStor

The ActiveStor product line is a computer appliances that integrate hybrid storage hardware (hard drives and solid state drives), the PanFS parallel file system, its proprietary DirectFlow data access protocol and the industry standard NFS and CIFS network protocols.[7] ActiveStor 20 was announced in August 2016 with increased capacity, using larger and faster disks.[8][9] In November 2017, Panasas released the ActiveStor Director 100 (ASD-100)[10] and the ActiveStor Hybrid 100 (ASH-100).[11]

ASD-100

The ActiveStor Director 100 (ASD-100) is a control-plane engine that sits atop a rack of ActiveStor arrays. The ASD-100 Director appliance is a 2U four-node chassis with 96 GB of DDR4 nonvolatile dual-inline memory modules (NVDIMM) to protect metadata transactions.[12]

ASH-100

The ASH-100 can be configured with ASD-100s or can be delivered with integrated traditional ActiveStor Director Blades (DBs). The 4U Panasas storage array tops out at 57 PB of raw capacity with 200 populated shelves, and has the ability to independently scale HDDs and SSDs in the ASH-100 box. A shelf scales to 264 TB of disk storage and 21 TB of flash. The ASD-100 blade appliance and ASH-100 array are compatible with ActiveStor AS18 and AS20 systems.[12]

PanFS

Panasas created the PanFS clustered file system as single pool of storage under a global filename space to support multiple applications and workflows in a single storage system.[13] PanFS supports DirectFlow (pNFS), NFS and CIFS data access protocols simultaneously.[14] PanFS 7.0 added a FreeBSD operating foundation and a GUI that supports asynchronous push notification of system changes without user interaction.[12]

DirectFlow

DirectFlow is a parallel data access protocol designed by Panasas for ActiveStor. DirectFlow avoids protocol I/O bottlenecks by accessing Panasas storage directly and in parallel.[15] DirectFlow was originally supported on Linux, and expanded in April 2016 to support Apple's MacOS.[16]

References

  1. ↑ "Panasas Plots New Path". Byte and Switch. August 10, 2004. Retrieved July 19, 2013.
  2. ↑ "Faye Pairman, President and CEO, Panasas, Inc". HPCWire. 2011. Retrieved July 19, 2013.
  3. ↑ Mary Jander (May 26, 2007). "Panasas Leads Charge to Parallel NFS". Network Computing. Retrieved July 19, 2013.
  4. ↑ S. Shepler, M. Eisler, and D. Noveck, editors (January 2010). Network File System (NFS) Version 4 Minor Version 1 Protocol. IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC5661. RFC 5661. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5661. Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  5. ↑ "Panasas ActiveStor 14 Parallel Storage". Product web page. Panasa. Retrieved July 19, 2013.
  6. ↑ "Scale-Out NAS Storage Vendor | Panasas". www.panasas.com. Retrieved 2015-09-17.
  7. ↑ "Panasas Corporate Overview" (PDF). Panasas. September 14, 2012. Retrieved July 19, 2013.
  8. ↑ "Click your heels Dorothy, ... We're not in gen-7 Panasas any more; 8th generation scale-out box lands - The Register.com". Retrieved 2017-01-19.
  9. ↑ Michael Feldman (August 2, 2016). "Panasas Upgrades ActiveStor Line with Bigger, Faster Drives". Top 500. Retrieved March 19, 2017.
  10. ↑ https://www.storagereview.com/panasas_announces_nextgen_activestor_scaleout_nas_solution
  11. ↑ https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/03/13/changing-hpc-workloads-mean-tighter-storage-stacks-for-panasas/
  12. 1 2 3 "Panasas storage, director blades split into separate devices". SearchStorage. Retrieved 2017-12-12.
  13. ↑ "New Multi-Petabyte, Scale-Out NAS". Storage Newsletter. 2010-04-20. Retrieved 2011-07-08.
  14. ↑ "PanFS". Panasas. Retrieved 2011-07-08.
  15. ↑ "DirectFlow". Panasas. Retrieved 2017-01-19.
  16. ↑ "Panasas brings DirectFlow NAS to Mac platform". Post Magazine. 2016-04-12. Retrieved 2017-01-19.
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