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PanFS Architecture

Flexible Storage Architecture That Grows As You Do

The Panasas® ActiveStor® modular architecture includes customizable, flexible components that can easily adapt to meet dynamic business needs. Grow quickly, within budget, using our plug-and-play solution powered by Panasas PanFS® parallel file system. Orchestrated with powerful components, such as director and storage nodes, client software, client protocols, data protection, and centralized management. The result is true linear scalability and superior performance.

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Configurable Hardware in a Holistic Platform

The Panasas PanFS file system eliminates siloed storage. It runs on two different classes of ActiveStor bladed hardware, and lets you easily configure the ratio of director to storage nodes to meet your specific application workload and file protocol demands.

PanFS Parallel File System

The Panasas PanFS operating environment combines a distributed and clustered parallel file system, volume manager, and software-based erasure-coding data protection into an integrated platform that offers unprecedented speed.

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ActiveStor Director

As the metadata conductor for the ActiveStor solution, Director nodes intelligently process and manage metadata, orchestrating end-to-end operations.

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ActiveStor Storage

Panasas architecture separates storage from metadata. Under the management of a Director node, Storage nodes are dedicated to data storage for clients and Director Nodes.

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Client Software

With a simple-to-install Panasas DirectFlow client application, administrators can access and manage corresponding server-side components in the Director and Storage nodes. And, the client software uses a standards-compliant POSIX file system.

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Client Protocols

Translation between the DirectFlow protocol and standards-defined storage protocols NFS and SMB is handled by Director nodes, which act as a gateway in the architecture—all without being in the data path.

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Superior Performance

ActiveStor delivers scale-out storage that supports your highest data transfer requirements, accelerating time to results through direct parallel data I/O to multiple storage nodes.

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Data Protection

PanFS approaches top-level data protection on a per-file basis–not per drive. File shards are shared across storage nodes. If one node fails, only a fraction of a file is affected, so it can easily be rebuilt.

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Linearly Scalable

To enable efficient scaling, Panasas clusters one or more ActiveStor enclosures together into a shared storage pool with a single namespace. As a cluster grows from one to 10, or even 100 ActiveStor enclosures, performance, capacity, and client access increase by the same factor, with nearly perfect linear scaling.

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Centralized Management

One IT administrator can easily manage dozens to hundreds of terabytes of storage. Administration remains easy, even when the ActiveStor system scales to petabytes of storage capacity

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Learn More About ActiveStor System Architecture

White Paper
Panasas ActiveStor Solution: Architectural Overview
Solution Brief
Panasas ActiveStor Solution Brief
Solution Brief
Panasas PanFS File System
Data Sheet
ActiveStor Director 100
Data Sheet
ActiveStor Ultra
Data Sheet
ActiveStor Prime 100

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