SEG NEW ORLEANS 2006 — October 2, 2006 — Panasas, Inc. today announced that Xinjiang Oil Company in Mainland China has deployed the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster™. Through a partnership with ModernTech Computer & Peripheral Ltd. in Hong Kong, Panasas is providing high performance storage to Xinjiang Oil Company to help improve reliability, increase scalability and reduce overall IT costs at the oil company's facility in western China where aging UNIX mainframes are being replaced with newer Linux clusters.
Xinjiang Oil Company is a subsidiary of PetroChina. PetroChina is one of the three largest state-owned oil and gas exploration and production companies in China. As Xinjiang Oil Company evaluated storage systems during the transition from costly mainframe to clustered Linux computing, the oil company selected and deployed the Panasas Storage Cluster to replace legacy storage that was incapable of delivering the performance and scalability needed to support their ever-growing seismic processing applications. Currently, Xinjiang Oil Company is running 12 Panasas Storage Clusters in conjunction with 600-node Linux clusters at the company's Department of Earth Science in western China.
"We've been having problems trying to match the performance of our existing storage systems with the system performance of Linux clusters for a long time," said Jia Ya Jun, Chief Engineer of the Geophysical Research Institute Exploration and Development Institute of Xinjiang Oil Company. "The object-based Panasas storage solution totally turns things around by giving us the things we were looking for—high performance, expansibility, stability, dependability, and simplified management. Panasas storage has resolved the bottleneck problems and provided us with greater cluster performance for achieving our computing goals."
The Panasas Storage Cluster with DirectFLOW™ software is helping PetroChina's subsidiary drive the complexity out of its Linux clusters so that they can operate at peak performance—up to three times faster than with Xinjiang Oil Company's previous storage—and allows IT administrators at the oil company to be more productive. The custom DirectFLOW software provides a fully parallel data path for direct, high-speed communications between Xinjiang Oil Company's Linux clusters and Panasas storage. By doing so, costly performance bottlenecks that can cause the clusters to idle while waiting for data are eliminated.
In addition, Panasas' integrated hardware/software storage solution has enabled Xinjiang Oil Company to avoid time-consuming and often costly deployment problems by integrating easily with the newer Linux clusters as well as with existing legacy compute systems. From within a single, global namespace, the Panasas Storage Cluster has reduced many of the previous storage management burdens so that Xinjiang Oil Company can more fully maximize its investments in clustered Linux computing and reduce the overall cost of ownership.
"We're excited to have Xinjiang Oil Company join our growing family of oil and gas customers around the world whose highly competitive businesses rely on Panasas storage solutions to help drive business efficiencies and profitability," said Larry Jones, vice president of Marketing at Panasas. "With the help of our valued partner ModernTech, we look forward to expanding the deployment of the Panasas Storage Cluster to additional customers throughout Mainland China."
About ModernTech
ModernTech Computer & Peripheral Ltd. was founded in 1985. Modern Tech is based in Hong Kong. Over the last 25 years, ModernTech has continued to grow and respond quickly to new opportunities with innovative, high performance computing solutions. Today, ModernTech has expanded operations to various markets in the region, including Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Philippines and Singapore. Additionally, ModernTech has become the leading computer and peripheral products supplier in Hong Kong and Mainland China. ModernTech has been endeavoring to provide customer with the best products and services in the high-performance computing industry. ModernTech is Panasas' authorized agent in Mainland China. For more details, please visit www.moderntech.com.hk.
About Panasas
Panasas, Inc., the global leader in parallel storage solutions, helps commercial, government and academic organizations accelerate their time to results leading to real world breakthroughs that improve people’s lives. Panasas’ high-performance storage systems enable customers to maximize the benefits of Linux clusters by eliminating the storage bottleneck created with legacy network storage technologies. Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters, in conjunction with the ActiveScale® Operating Environment and PanFS™ parallel file system, offer the most comprehensive portfolio of storage solutions for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. Panasas is headquartered in Fremont, California. For more information, please visit www.panasas.com.
Panasas, ActiveScale, DirectFLOW and PanFS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Panasas, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
