Panasas introduces next-gen ActiveStor NAS
November 10, 2017

Panasas introduces next-gen ActiveStor NAS

SUNNYVALE, CA — Panasas (www.panasas.com), a provider of high performance scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) solutions, has introduced its next generation ActiveStor. The new ActiveStor is capable of scaling capacity to 57PBs and delivering 360GB/s of bandwidth. 

The flexible system doubles metadata performance to cut data access time in half, scales performance and capacity independently, and seamlessly adapts to new technology advancements. The new ActiveStor Director 100 (ASD-100) control-plane engine and the new ActiveStor Hybrid 100 (ASH-100) configurable plug-and-play storage device offer users the flexibility to design storage systems that meet their exact specifications and workflow requirements. 

“The release of our new ActiveStor solutions reflects our commitment to delivering products that keep pace with new, demanding high-performance applications and workloads,” says Faye Pairman, chief executive officer at Panasas. “These modern ActiveStor solutions deliver a new level of flexibility that enables performance and capacity to scale independently for all data types and file sizes, along with the reliability and manageability that our customers have come to depend on.”

Users have the ability to mix and match HDD and SSD configurations under a single global namespace, creating a best-matched system for their workload requirements.

For the first time, Panasas is offering a disaggregated Director Blade (ASD-100), the brain of the Panasas storage system, to provide a hugh level of flexibility. Customers can now add any number of ASD-100s to drive exactly the level of metadata performance they need. With double the raw CPU power and RAM capacity of previous Director Blades, the ASD-100 delivers double the metadata performance on metadata-intensive workloads. 

The ASH-100 is a hardware platform that offers high capacity HDD (12TB) and SSD (1.9TB) in a parallel hybrid storage system. A broad range of HDD and SSD capacities can be paired as needed to meet specific workflow requirements. The ASH-100 can be configured with ASD-100s or can be delivered with integrated traditional ActiveStor Director Blades (DBs), depending on customer requirements.

The latest version of the plug-and-play parallel file system - PanFS 7.0 - features an updated FreeBSD operating foundation and a dynamic GUI that supports asynchronous push notification of system changes without user interaction.

The updated DirectFlow parallel data access protocol offers a 15 percent improvement in throughput due to enhancements to memory allocation and readahead. All ActiveStor models will benefit from this performance increase after upgrading to the new release of PanFS.

The ASH-100 is shipping now and the ASD-100 and PanFS 7.0 will be available in Q1 2018.