Panasas said its ActiveStor NAS system will be able to scale to 57 PB and increase bandwidth to 360 GB/sec on a single file system beginning early in 2018, when the company ships its new ActiveStor Director 100 (ASD-100) control-plane engine, which now comes in a rack form factor, along with version 7 of the company’s PanFS file system. Metadata performance will be doubled, cutting access time in half, when using an upcoming update of the PanFS parallel file system, the company said.
Panasas ASD-100
The ActiveStor Hybrid 100 (ASH-100) storage appliance, which supports both 12 TB HDDs and 1.9 TB SSDs in a parallel hybrid storage system, is shipping now. It can be configured with traditional ActiveStor Director Blades or with the new ASD-100 blades, which have been designed to be backward- and forward-compatible with other ActiveStor products, including the ASH-100 as well as the AS20 and AS18. Multiple ASD-100s can be employed depending on a user’s metadata performance requirements, Panasas said — for example, a system could be configured with ample HDD capacity for streaming very large files, or with hefty SSD storage for a more metadata-intensive workflow involving smaller files.
PanFS 7.0 will be released with an updated FreeBSD operating system, including drivers for recently released Ethernet NICs and an improved NFS server implementation, Panasas said. The upgraded ActiveStor GUI, based on Node.js, supports dynamic refresh of status displays, the company said. Existing users will see a 15% improvement in throughput thanks to improved memory allocation and read-ahead in the company’s DirectFlow protocol when using PanFS 7, Panasas said.
“The release of our new ActiveStor solutions reflects our commitment to delivering products that keep pace with new, demanding high-performance applications and workloads,” said Panasas CEO Faye Pairman in a prepared statement. “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.”
The ASD-100 and PanFS 7.0 are slated for Q1 2018 availability. Panasas did not publish price information. The new system will be demonstrated in the Panasas booth at the SuperComputing Conference running November 12-17 in Denver, Colorado.
Panasas: www.panasas.com
