A Premier Provider of High-Performance Storage Solutions: Panasas

Panasas was founded in 1999 and is privately held. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, its sales offices are located in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Its solutions have been deployed in more than 50 countries worldwide.

Panasas^® ActiveStor^® Solutions support industry and research innovation around the world, with the fastest plug-and-play parallel data storage system, optimized to accelerate workflows, simplify data management, and deploy easily as an appliance.

Using the Panasas PanFS^® storage operating environment and Panasas DirectFlow^® protocol, Panasas ActiveStor^® scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) redefines what it means to scale. Performance, data protection, and manageability all grow as the solution scales.

The fully integrated ActiveStor clustered NAS appliance incorporates flash and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) storage nodes, a distributed performance-optimized file system, and client protocols to deliver data that is accessible, secure, and easy to manage. Its technology is optimized for high-priority, data-intensive workloads in life sciences, manufacturing, media and entertainment, energy, government, and academic research environments.

Panasas goes beyond storage to deliver the high-performance experience you demand your business-critical workflows. It’s more than storage—it’s your business.

Why Panasas?

The Panasas ActiveStor^® Solution drives industry and research innovation by accelerating workflows and simplifying data management. The ActiveStor^® Solution delivers ultrafast streaming performance, true linear scalability, enterprise-grade reliability, and unparalleled ease of management. As a fully integrated, clustered network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, ActiveStor incorporates flash and SATA storage nodes, a distributed performance-optimized parallel file system, and client protocols.

All the Features You Need

With ActiveStor, you can easily and seamlessly scale performance and capacity to any number of computing clients with a combined list of features that no other vendors offer. Your budget also scales in a predictable way because you pay for what you need when you need it—not for what you think you’ll need:

• True linear scalability for large, unstructured datasets
• Ultrafast streaming performance
• Uncompromised mixed-workload performance
• Enterprise-grade reliability and availability
• Superior manageability for low operating expenses

What Makes Panasas Stand Out

Parallel data flow and direct access to data are Panasas’ key differentiators. The Panasas parallel architecture increases input/output (I/O) throughput by adding more network channels between the client and Panasas storage. Panasas connect all storage clients to all storage nodes in its scale-out NAS cluster—boosting performance, increasing availability, and eliminating hot spots.

True Linear Scalability

To enable efficient scaling, Panasas clusters one or more ActiveStor enclosures together into a shared storage pool with a single namespace. As a cluster grows from one to 10, or even 100 ActiveStor enclosures, performance, capacity, and client access increase by the same factor, with nearly perfect linear scaling.

Ultrafast Streaming Performance

ActiveStor can scale to more than 45PB in a single namespace with the performance of up to 360GB per second and 2.6 million input/output operations per second (IOPS). By delivering data in parallel from the storage nodes to the application, the ActiveStor system multiplies the bandwidth and speeds streaming performance.

Enterprise-Grade Reliability and Availability

With ActiveStor, data reliability and availability increase as you scale performance. Panasas uses erasure-code-based per-file data protection to accelerate rebuild times and Extended File System Availability (EFSA) to provide an additional layer of data protection for the namespace, directory hierarchy, and file names.

Ease of Management

The Panasas scale-out storage system is a single entity managed from a single graphical user interface (GUI), no matter how many ActiveStor enclosures you integrate. One IT administrator can easily manage dozens to hundreds of terabytes of storage. The administration remains easy, even when the ActiveStor system scales to petabytes of storage capacity.

Customers Driven By Performance

Companies want their data to be accessible, secure, and easy to manage. Panasas’ customers accomplish this and more with the ActiveStor solution: the conduct advanced genomic research using the latest sequencing technology, render visual effects for animated films, design advanced aircraft with complex computer-aided engineering and finite element analysis models, and optimize the extraction of oil-and-gas deposits through seismic processing-based analysis.

Unique High-Performance Storage for Industries

Media & Entertainment

Media and entertainment organizations that focus on creative, data-intensive content need powerful processing horsepower and scalable storage to supercharge productivity and outflank competitors.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers need simulation tools, such as for multidisciplinary design explorations that support the design and engineering development for products in automotive, aerospace, consumer products, and semiconductor.

Life Sciences

Innovations in genomics, bioinformatics, and other life sciences discipline demand speed to store, retrieve, and analyze unprecedented volumes of information.

Government

Government agencies and laboratories need the right tools to work with enormous data sets for initiatives in energy research, biomedical advances, global climate change and weather forecasting, and defense and homeland security.

Energy

Oil and gas enterprises rely on the right tools to manage and analyze large datasets, quickly and accurately locate new natural resources, improve user productivity, and reduce overall project time.

Academic Research

Institutions of higher learning must support a broad range of high-performance applications—and their massive data sets—across scientific, engineering, and even humanities disciplines.

Meet the Elegant Lady

Faye Pairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Member of the Board of Directors: Faye has more than 20 years of executive leadership experience in the storage industry. Prior to joining Panasas in 2010, she was senior vice president and general manager of the storage business unit at Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, which acquired 3ware, where she had previously served as president and chief executive officer.

Faye holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of the Pacific and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

“Companies in many industries want their data to be accessible, secure, and easy to manage. Our customers accomplish this and more with our solution.”