Panasas Launches ActiveStor 18

by Adam Armstrong July 9, 2015

written by Adam Armstrong July 9, 2015

Today Panasas introduced its new hybrid scale-out NAS appliance, ActiveStor 18. The ActiveStor 18 is scalable over 20PB and has speeds of 200GB/s. This is a big increase from ActiveStor 16 that topped out at 12PB and 150GB/s. ActiveStor 18 also offers increased CPU power and twice the storage cache capacity.

ActiveStor 18 delivers performance and data protection that increases with scale. By combining high-capacity HDD (8TB now) and fast SSD gives users superior mixed-workload performance with rapid access to small and large files alike. ActiveStor 18 is designed to accelerate time-to-results for the most demanding high performance workloads in energy, government, life sciences, manufacturing, media and entertainment, and university environments. ActiveStor 18 is a fully integrated solution offing true scale-out architecture incorporating hybrid storage hardware, file system, and protocols.

Key Features of ActiveStor 18:

Linear scalability of capacity and performance
Field proven at more than 20PB and 200GB/s in a single global namespace with 130 shelves, 2,600 HDDs, 1,300 SSDs
33% increase in density
Up to 1.8PB per rack (or 181.2TB per 4U enclosure), leveraging 8TB drive technology
Flash capacity optimized for RAID 6+ triple parity data protection
Up to 20% faster mixed workload, metadata and small file performance
2x more storage cache – up to 2.7TB per rack (or 272GB per 4U enclosure)
19% faster CPU
PanFS storage operating system
A comprehensive single global namespace solution for simplified storage management
Multiple protocol support
Panasas DirectFlow protocol as well as NFS and SMB protocols
RAID 6+ Triple Parity Protection
Per-file distributed software based on erasure codes provides a 150-fold increase in reliability over dual-parity approaches and allows reliability to increase with scale

ActiveStor 18 specifications:

System:
- Suitability: Mixed workloads: large file throughput, IOPS performance, lowest cost per TB
- Max. System Capacity: 21.42PB
- Max. System Throughput: 200GB/s
- Max. System IOPS–4KB File, Random Read: >1,830,000 IOPS
Per Shelf:
- Capacity per Shelf: 82.4 or 164.8TB
  - HDD Capacity: 80 or 160TB
  - SSD Capacity (% capacity): 2.4 or 4.8TB (2.9%)
- Drive Configuration: 20 x 3.5” Enterprise SATA + 10 x SSD
- ECC Memory (GB of Cache): 128 or 208GB
- Max. Throughput, Write/Read: 1600/1700MB/s
- Max. IOPS – 4KB File, Random Read: >14,150 IOPS
- Supported Blade Configurations (Director Blade + Storage Blade):
  - : 1+10, 2+9, or 3+8. Also 0+11 for expansion
- Ethernet Connectivity:
  - Two switch modules per shelf. Uplinks per shelf: 2 x 10GbE SFP+/CX4 or 8 x GbE copper, supporting high availability link aggregation with network failover support
- InfiniBand Router Capable