Panasas Announces Next-Gen ActiveStor Scale-out NAS Solution

Panasas has announced the availability of their next-generation ActiveStor scale-out NAS solution, which is capable of scaling capacity to 57PB, delivering 360GB/s of bandwidth, and seamlessly adopting new technology advancements. Among these new advancements are the new ActiveStor Director 100 (ASD-100) control plane engine and the ActiveStor Hybrid 100 (ASH-100) configurable plug-and-play hardware platform, as well as a new version of the PanFS 7.0 parallel file system and enhancements to the DirectFlow parallel data access protocol.

Panasas has announced the availability of their next-generation ActiveStor scale-out NAS solution, which is capable of scaling capacity to 57PB, delivering 360GB/s of bandwidth, and seamlessly adopting new technology advancements. Among these new advancements are the new ActiveStor Director 100 (ASD-100) control plane engine and the ActiveStor Hybrid 100 (ASH-100) configurable plug-and-play hardware platform, as well as a new version of the PanFS 7.0 parallel file system and enhancements to the DirectFlow parallel data access protocol.

Combined, these technologies give users the flexibility to design storage systems to their unique specifications and workflows:

• Performance – Scale metadata performance, data bandwidth, and data capacity independently for faster time to results.
• Flexibility – Mix and match HDD and SSD configurations under a single global namespace to best match the system performance to your workload requirements.
• Productivity – Double productivity by cutting data access time in half, regardless of the number of users.
• Investment Protection – Backward and forward compatibility with the ActiveStor product portfolio.

Customers can now add as many ASD-100s as they need and boast twice the metadata performance on metadata intensive workloads. This was achieved by doubling the raw CPU power and RAM capacity compared to previous Director Blades. In addition, the ASD-100 delivers new capabilities such as managing metadata and global namespace, while acting as a gateway for standard data access protocols like NFS and SMB. The ASD-100 also uses NVDIMMs to store metadata transaction logs.

Panasas touts the ASH-100 as the market's first hardware platform with the high-capacity HDDs (12TB) and SSDs (1.9TB) in a parallel hybrid storage system, as well as a range of other HDD and SSD capacities. They can also be paired as needed to meet unique workflow requirements. Moreover, the ASH-100 can be configured with ASD-100s or delivered through integrated traditional ActiveStor Director Blades.

The latest version of the PanFS 7.0 plug-and-play parallel file system features an updated FreeBSD operating foundation and an intuitive interface that supports asynchronous “push” notification of system changes without user interaction. Additionally, Panasas indicates a 15% throughput improvement to the updated DirectFlow parallel data access protocol due to new enhancements such as memory allocation and readahead.

Availability

The ASH-100 is shipping now, while the ASD-100 and PanFS 7.0 is slated for Q1 2018 release.

Panasas

Discuss this story

Sign up for the StorageReview newsletter