Panasas and Arista Partner on 10GbE Storage [CORRECTED]

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Panasas and Arista announced a partnership this morning to provide non-blocking 10GbE as a network choice for high performance storage systems.  The two companies agreed to test and optimize their respective platforms for one another in order to maximize performance.  The partnership was inspired by the folks at Los Alamos National Lab.  LANL is the home of the IBM RoadRunner system where Panasas currently provides the storage infrastructure.

At LANL, high-performance 10-Gigabit Ethernet access to storage is a critical component of our supercomputer,” said Gary Grider, deputy division leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Panasas and massively parallel applications of Ethernet for storage area networks have played an important role at LANL. We expect these technologies to become even more important in the next generation of our systems, which are targeting a 3x increase in performance and a 100x increase in future applications.”

Traditional 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches are optimized for oversubscribed routine backbone data delivery,” said Mansour Karam, director of business development at Arista. “Arista sees high-performance storage as a key application for non-blocking, high-performance Ethernet network designs and is working with the leader in that arena, Panasas, to optimize 10-Gigabit Ethernet for technical environments.”

In the past Panasas has had to work around the limitations of conventional oversubscribed Ethernet switches and network designs to deliver the performance customers like LANL expect,” said Garth Gibson, chief technical officer at Panasas. “Working with Arista allows us to leverage that experience into the design and deployment of new non-blocking network interconnect fabrics enabled by the powerful new architecture of the industry’s most innovative 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches.”

Those of you that have had direct experience building and operating large-scale storage systems know full well that disk spindles are a small portion of the battle.  File systems, redundancy and network fabrics play a large part in the success of the install.  For more info, read their full release here.


Comments

  1. This effort is very promising, and was inspired by LANL and Roadrunner, but Arista does NOT provide the 10G storage network at the lab and the release doesn’t say it does. Currently Arista can’t deliver the sheer scale that RR requires.

    The network is actually powered by over a dozen Force10 enterprise switches to get sufficient bandwidth and port counts.

  2. John Leidel says

    Mark, apologies for the discrepancy. The post has been updated.