Oxford University Relies On Panasas For Round-The-Clock Operation

SUNNYVALE, California, May 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Panasas, Inc., the leader in hybrid scale-out NAS for technical research and enterprise customers, today announced that Oxford University has installed Panasas ActiveStor® 14 storage to improve reliability and performance at their Advanced Research Computing (ARC) Centre.

The ARC facility is a central resource available to university researchers that need access to high performance computing resources. ARC operates a range of distributed memory, shared memory, and GPU enabled HPC clusters that are primarily used for scientific and statistical modeling workflows.

"We don't have a large support staff available to manage the system 24 hours per day and therefore we needed to find a solution that offered excellent manageability, load balancing, and performance monitoring," stated Dr. Andrew Richards, Head of Advanced Research Computing, University of Oxford. "We also needed a high performance solution that would work across a range of HPC systems and could be easily deployed into our existing production environment."

The installation consists of 330TB of Panasas ActiveStor 14 storage that is now providing a single pool of storage under a global name space at the heart of the centre's infrastructure. The hybrid scale-out NAS system provides university researchers with the storage required for home areas, general purpose mid-term projects, and high-performance short-term jobs.

"We are delighted that ARC at Oxford University chose Panasas to satisfy its HPC storage requirements," said Anthony Yeates, Vice President of EMEA Sales at Panasas. "ActiveStor provides unmatched performance, scalability, and reliability without complex and time-consuming system management for both academic and enterprise organizations."

About Panasas
Panasas ActiveStor^® hybrid scale-out NAS appliances drive enterprise and research innovation by accelerating workflows and simplifying data management. ActiveStor solutions leverage the patented PanFS^® storage operating system, delivering high performance and reliability at scale from an appliance that is as easy to manage as it is fast to deploy. Now in its fifth generation, ActiveStor is optimized for the most demanding big data workloads in energy, government, life sciences, manufacturing, media, and university environments and has been deployed in more than fifty countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.panasas.com.

About Oxford University Advanced Research Computing (ARC)
Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is a central resource available to any Oxford University researcher who needs high performance computing (HPC) from any Division or Department. ARC is an IT Services partner facility operated by the Oxford e-Research Centre.

To find out more visit http://www.arc.ox.ac.uk/

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James McIntyre
McClenahan Bruer
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+1-503-546-1000

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