Market Validates Panasas ActiveStor 14 With Unprecedented Rate Of Customer Adoption; Nearly 15 Petabytes Deployed

- Independent Lab Report Confirms Unmatched Performance for Mixed Workloads, Recognizes Scale-out NAS Solution for Versatility and Ease-of-Use

SUNNYVALE, California, Feb. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Panasas, Inc., the leader in high performance scale-out storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, announced it has recorded unprecedented adoption of its newly launched flagship product, the Panasas® ActiveStor® 14 parallel storage system. Nearly 15 petabytes of total capacity have been deployed to support a wide variety of performance-hungry applications in the big data market since the hybrid scale-out storage solution began shipping late last year.

"ActiveStor 14 is the first scale-out storage solution to deliver high performance for mixed data workloads, allowing customers to achieve timely and actionable results from their big data applications," said Barbara Murphy, chief marketing officer of Panasas. "The fast rate of customer adoption resoundingly affirms that customers are seeing significant improvements over their legacy storage systems in both small and large file performance with this hybrid platform."

Customers in finance, life sciences, manufacturing, media and university research have rapidly adopted ActiveStor 14, which employs solid state drive (SSD) technology for metadata and small-file storage to support their performance-focused big data applications. Intelligent tiering ensures that bandwidth-intensive large files are seamlessly stored on cost-effective SATA, delivering an excellent price/performance solution compared to competitive offerings. 

The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) recently announced its ActiveStor 14 acquisition aimed at driving big data discovery for one of the largest university storage systems in the country. According to MSI, ActiveStor 14 will serve as a centralized, high performance storage resource which will eliminate data flow bottlenecks. MSI noted:

"The Panasas ActiveStor 14 solution will give MSI researchers a significant edge in research and establish MSI as a leader in big data science. In addition to being one of the largest storage systems among U.S. universities, MSI's system will also be one of the fastest with respect to storage bandwidth."

In SPEC SFS benchmark testing, ActiveStor 14 demonstrated its leadership in mixed-workload NFS performance among SATA-based systems, recording 20,745 SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 operations per second (ops/s) on a single ActiveStor 14T shelf. This is significant because the ActiveStor system only contained 27 data drives, for an outstanding result of 768 ops/s per drive, more than doubling EMC Isilon's best published result and at one third EMC's list price per gigabyte.

Researchers at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab independently validated ActiveStor 14 performance and scalability, citing large-file throughput performance of 1.63GB/s on a single shelf which scaled in "near-linear fashion" to 150GB/s as shelves were added within the single file system; ESG recorded small-file random read performance at 14,424 4KB file operations per second. The report states: "In ESG's experience, scale-out NAS systems are usually optimized for either large file throughput or small file IOPS; ActiveStor 14 showed strong performance for both types of workloads, making it a particularly versatile scale-out NAS solution." Download the full report here.

About Panasas
Panasas, Inc., the leader in high performance scale-out storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, enables customers to rapidly solve complex computing problems, speed innovation and accelerate new product introduction. All Panasas storage products leverage the patented PanFS™ storage operating system to deliver superior performance, data protection, scalability and manageability. Panasas systems are optimized for demanding storage environments in the bioscience, energy, finance, government, manufacturing, and university markets. For more information, visit www.panasas.com.

©2013 Panasas, Inc. Panasas, the Panasas logo, ActiveStor, and PanFS are registered trademarks or trademarks of Panasas, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.