Panasas brings DirectFlow NAS to Mac platform
April 12, 2016

Panasas brings DirectFlow NAS to Mac platform

SUNNYVALE, CA — Panasas (www.panasas.com), which offers high-performance, scale-out network-attached storage (NAS), will show its new DirectFlow for Mac solution at NAB. Previously available only for Linux, DirectFlow for Mac now brings the performance benefits of parallel I/O over Ethernet to the Apple Mac platform and Apple OS X operating system. 

DirectFlow is the parallel data access protocol designed by Panasas and delivered as part of the integrated ActiveStor storage solution that incorporates the PanFS file system as well as NFS and SMB protocols. Currently deployed across a large variety of Linux-based computing environments, the DirectFlow protocol has proven success at delivering more than 10x the performance of workloads using traditional I/O protocols.

DirectFlow avoids traditional protocol I/O bottlenecks by allowing compute clients to access Panasas storage directly and in parallel. This results in higher performance than what can be achieved with industry standard protocols such as NFS and SMB. Using DirectFlow, Panasas customers have been able to re-render entire movies quickly, reduce the cost of sequencing a human genome, and design products by running twice as many engineering simulations more quickly than before.

With DirectFlow for Mac, production teams are able to ingest, process and deliver video in higher resolution, and consolidate their workflows under a single global namespace – all while working alongside DirectFlow for Linux clients and other platforms using traditional file protocols. In addition, users have access to the latest Panasas data-protection techniques based on modern erasure-coding methods, which deliver triple parity protection for reliability that scales with capacity.