Parallel Storage

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.

Now that we’ve talked about Solid State Disk (SSD) technology and what it’s good and not good for, it’s worth talking about how and why SSD technology is used in our new flagship parallel storage solution, ActiveStor 14.

Browsing one of my favorite channel-focused magazines, CRN, I read with some amusement the comments of Jay Kidd, senior vice-president of product strategy and development at NetApp. Kidd was highlighting one of the major new features of ONTAP 8.1.1 – the nine-year-long integration of Spinnaker Systems’ clustering capabilities.  “In the past we brought Ethernet storage…to the mainstream,” Kidd said. ”Now we are doing the same with clustering. We’re bringing it from the crazy world of high-performance computing to the world of commercial storage.”

I recently attended a panel event at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley (http://www.churchillclub.org). “The Elephant in the Enterprise: What Role Will Hadoop Play?” certainly packed the house. The panel included users and vendors from Facebook, Cloudera, Oracle, MapR, and Metamarkets, each providing very different perspectives on Hadoop’s readiness for the enterprise. . It was interesting to compare the user perspective “…it is no way ready for primetime,” with the vendor perspective being “…of course it’s ready!”