News

posted on 19 August 2008 15:42

Panasas has nearly doubled the thoughput of its clustered storage by adding two new models with integrated 10GbE switches.

The ActiveStor6000 and 4000 fit replace the existing AS5000 and AS3000 models with their 20GB RAM cache per shelf and 5GB of RAM cache per shelf respectively.

The AS6000 is, in effect, an AS5000 with embedded 10GbE switch and the AS4000 is a similarly equipped AS3000. The AS6000 nearly doubles the 350MB/s throughput of an AS5000 shelf to over 600MB/s per shelf with a shelf holding 20TB of disk drives and ten of them fitting into a rack.

There is a new entry-level AS200 which has five 1GbitE ports, 26GB of RAM cache and 104TB of capacity (208TB in a 42U rack). Panasas says this is for second tier applications.

These systems can be clustered together to produce a multi-petabyte storage cluster with parallel storage access. Panasas is happy to see high-performance computing (HPC) crossing over from the scientific and oil-and-gas type application world into more general commercial use. It thinks the coming v4.1 NFS with its parallel feature in which NFS clients can control the striping of data across multiple storage nodes will help parallel storage access grow in popularity.

The development of the systems has been helped by a new $24 million funding round.

The AS6000 costs $50,000 for the 10TB minimum entry point and will be available next month as will the AS4000, which is $70,000 for a 20TB configuration. The smaller AS200 is ready now and costs $124,000 for 104TB.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}