The massive parallelism found in the file system stems from the out-of-band DirectFLOW data path. All Linux cluster nodes are empowered with a small installable file system -- the DirectFLOW client -- enabling direct communication between Linux servers and StorageBlade modules. A simple three-step process is required to initiate direct data transfers:

1. The DirectFLOW client makes a request to the DirectorBlade module to access data files.
2. The DirectorBlade module authenticates the request, obtains the object map of all applicable objects across the StorageBlade modules and sends the map to the client
3. With authentication and a virtual map, clients access data on StorageBlade modules directly and in parallel

This concurrency eliminates the bottleneck of traditional, monolithic storage systems and delivers record-setting data throughput. The number of data streams is limited only by the number of StorageBlade modules and the number of clients in the server cluster.

PanFS has the ability to support all three data access protocols – DirectFlow, NFS and CIFS – simultaneously. Multiple clients can access the Panasas storage cluster using the protocol required by that client. This delivers an unprecedented level of flexibility to optimize the utilization of the storage system.