Start-up Panasas Corp has emerged from stealth with seven paying customers from the HPC market already signed for its super-scaling NAS filer, which it claims doubles the performance of the fastest hardware currently on the market.
"We're going to publish a benchmark showing 300,000 SFS IOPS. That's twice as fast as a Spinnaker box, and more than ten times faster than the top-end Network Appliance single NAS filer," said Panasas CEO Rod Schrock.
"We're aiming at anywhere that there are groups of Linux servers, and naturally we'll be targetting the HPC market first, because that's where we'll shine." The performance is delivered via an object-based storage architecture that treats files as objects, and replaces conventional NAS heads with multiple "director" and "storage" blades which scale "nearly linearly" according to the start-up. The emerging architecture is already the subject of an industry standardization effort, and was described by ESG president Steve Duplessie as "a rare inflection point in technology."
Panasas stressed that although it is supplying storage clusters, its devices can be managed as one entity with a single domain or name-space. The largest sale Panasas has made to date is to the US Los Alamos National Laboratory which has signed a deal to buy up to a whopping 600TB of Panasas storage over the next twelve months, and has taken 120TB already. Panasas' other customers include Berkeley University, the US Sandia National Laboratories, and oil and gas drilling businesses.
Panasas was founded in 1999, and has raised $72.5m of funding in three rounds, with profits expected "in the next couple of years."
The object-based architecture involves "director" and disk-carrying "storage blades," which together replace a central filer or NAS head. "The object based model allows storage blades to act independently, sharing the work of taking data and putting onto disks or reading it back," said Schrock. Panasas said the EMC Corp's Centerra filer already uses an object-based architecture, and that an Object-Based Storage interface has been developed with contributions from IBM Corp, Veritas Software Corp, Seagate and Intel Corp and next month will be presented to the ANSI T.11 committee for standardization.
The HPC - high performance computing - market is moving towards Linux clusters, and although Panasas' hardware handles the CIFS or NFS protocols, it involves Linux clients. With Linux blade servers emerging in the commercial world, Panasas said that long-term its market will not be restricted to HPC customers.
© ComputerWireTM 2003 Article Date: 20 Oct 2003
