Panasas Announces ActiveStor 14

Panasas Inc. announces Panasas ActiveStor 14 – the world’s fastest fully integrated parallel storage solution.

According to the announcement, ActiveStor 14 delivers extreme performance for the technical computing and big data workloads commonly found in HPC environments. ActiveStor 14 is based on a fifth-generation storage blade architecture and the Panasas PanFS storage operating system. And, according to the company, the single platform will “satisfy the bandwidth requirements of the most demanding high-performance storage applications while opening new opportunities for Panasas parallel storage technology in industries with I/O intensive workloads, including finance, life sciences, energy and manufacturing.”

According to the announcement, ActiveStor 14 leverages enterprise SATA drives to deliver an affordable, highly scalable storage appliance that provides more than eight petabytes of capacity in a single global namespace. The Panasas filesystem incorporates SSD technology to accelerate small file performance while minimizing SSD wear and expense. This combination of SATA and SSD storage provides industry-leading throughput performance for workloads consisting of both large and small files.

ActiveStor 14 models are based on three different types of storage blades featuring different HDD/SSD choices: 

  • ActiveStor 14: 2x4TB HDD + 120GB SSD, 8GB cache
  • ActiveStor 14: 2x4TB HDD + 300GB SSD, 8GB cache
  • ActiveStor 14T: 2x2TB HDD + 480GB SSD, 16GB cache 

ActiveStor 14 shelves support 11 blade slots, which can be populated with 0, 1, 2, or 3 director blades per shelf, with the remaining slots filled with storage blades. Panasas is now taking orders for ActiveStor 14, with initial shipments to begin in November 2012. Read more about Panasas and ActiveStor 14.