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PanFS Architecture:
Built for Price/Performance,
Engineered for Manageability

The modular Panasas® architecture offers unlimited performance scalability and capacity in 4 GB/second building blocks. Grow quickly, within budget, using our set-it-and-forget-it solution powered by the Panasas PanFS® parallel file system. To scale out, simply add new director and storage nodes.

Extreme Flexibility and Surprising Simplicity

Panasas PanFS can be easily configured to meet your specific application workload and file protocol needs. The software automatically initiates, monitors, and executes common maintenance and recovery tasks, enabling true low-touch administration.

PanFS Parallel File System

Panasas PanFS combines a distributed and clustered parallel file system, volume manager, and software-based, erasure-coding data protection into an integrated platform. Intelligent three-tier data placement maximizes storage device performance.

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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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Exceptional Performance

ActiveStor delivers scale-out storage that transfers data between Storage Nodes and clients directly and in parallel.

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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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Linear Scalability

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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Featured Resources

White Paper
Panasas ActiveStor Solution: Architectural Overview
Data Sheet
PanFS - High Performance Parallel File System
Video
Panasas NAS Architecture Comparison - Not All NAS Architectures Can Keep Up With HPC