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Panasas has a long history with object storage, starting with Dr. Garth Gibson’s groundbreaking work in the early 1990’s at Carnegie Mellon.  Garth’s work on NASD (Network Attached Secure Disk) became the foundation for the OSD (Object Storage Device) standard and Panasas file system.  He is also credited with being the key inspiration for the Google File System (GFS).  Both file systems are object based storage, but should not be confused with web object storage systems such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Windows Azure.  In fact there are two classes of object...

Object storage is a generic term that describes an abstract data container and related metadata. The data can be an image, a file, a sensor reading, or whatever an application needs to store. The metadata describes the data, including a useful name for that data, where it came from, when it was created, how long it is valid, and whatever else may be important to the application that creates and uses the data object.

Objects are explicitly created and deleted, which is unlike storage on a block device. In a traditional block storage system, a file system or...

Panasas Director of Channel Sales for EMEA, Derek Burke, points out that pure performance isn’t the only important aspect of an HPC storage solution, especially when it’s tasked with processing multiple technical computing application workloads. Here is what he says… 

Whether Panasas® ActiveStor® is the storage backbone of a departmental HPC system for a specific application domain or for a centralized HPC service for a diverse range of users and applications – ‘performance’ is generally given the highest consideration.

From a compute performance...

In late February, Red Hat announced the release of Enterprise Linux 6.4 with pNFS support. This validates the pNFS standard that Panasas and its founder and chief scientist, Dr. Garth Gibson, have long been championing. While the announcement did not receive much fanfare in the press, Red Hat adoption of pNFS is a key advance for the pNFS standard which until now has lacked a mainstream commercial release vehicle. We believe this to be the most important step forward for pNFS since the protocol was first included in the upstream 3.0 Linux kernel in 2011, after years of effort by engineers...