Panasas introduces ActiveStor and Ultra XL platforms

Panasas has announced the general availability of its all-NVMe ActiveStor® Flash and high-capacity ActiveStor® Ultra XL data storage appliances.

The new systems, together with the company’s flagship hybrid ActiveStor® Ultra appliance, mark Panasas’ emergence as a multi-platform data storage company. The Panasas ActiveStor systems have been tailored to a broad range of use cases, including advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) training, high performance data analytics (HPDA), modelling and simulation, and massive-scale data workloads.

Panasas has been a dominant player in the high performance computing (HPC) storage industry since the launch of its first parallel file system in 1999 by RAID co-inventor Garth Gibson. The convergence of HPC with HPDA and AI/ML projects at research institutes, commercial organisations, and large enterprises has led to new requirements for the underlying storage stack serving those data-intensive environments. Panasas’ updated product portfolio delivers the capabilities necessary to support customers’ current and emerging high-bandwidth applications that are fuelling their business growth.

“The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute’s mission includes advancing research and innovation by providing state-of-the-art HPC technology to the University of Minnesota,” said Dr. Jim Wilgenbusch, Director of Research Computing at UMN. “We have a long-standing relationship with Panasas that has helped us to address increasing demands for high-performance storage.  We look forward to accelerating cutting-edge research with their newly diversified storage solutions based on their robust PanFS® data engine.”

All Panasas ActiveStor systems are powered by the PanFS data engine, the company’s parallel file system built on 23 years of hardening through commercial deployment and engineered to take the complexity out of high-performance data environments. The newest release, PanFS 9.2, is more portable to address the rapidly growing enterprise HPC and AI sector.

“We started out as an HPC company with the world’s leading parallel file system – the first ever for Linux – founded on the four pillars of reliability, scalability, performance, and manageability,” said Panasas Chief Operating Officer, Brian Peterson. “We’re proud of our legacy and the trust we’ve earned from our customers, and we’re relentlessly committed to refining our technology to provide the storage foundation data-driven organisations need today. With our new ActiveStor systems and the latest version of the PanFS data engine, we are delivering Panasas’ world-class solutions to an even broader audience.”

Panasas’ all-flash, hybrid, and high-capacity ActiveStor systems are optimally suited for a wide variety of data environments across multiple industries, including life sciences, manufacturing, energy, financial services, and university research. Key features and benefits of the portfolio include:

ActiveStor Flash. The all-NVMe ActiveStor Flash provides outstanding scratch and small- and random-file storage performance. It is ideal for AI/ML training, trading strategy backtesting, as well as life sciences and electronic design automation (EDA) projects.

ActiveStor Ultra. The hybrid ActiveStor Ultra has been a stalwart high-performance mixed workload solution for traditional and enterprise HPC. It delivers exceptional performance for HPDA, complex modelling and simulation, molecular imaging techniques in life sciences, and converged HPC and AI projects.

ActiveStor Ultra XL. The new high-capacity ActiveStor Ultra is optimal for massive-scale data environments in addition to workloads with cooler and reference datasets and large file sizes, such as seismic resource exploration; scientific, academic, and government research; manufacturing; and media and entertainment.