httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JUp0oGK5_M
In this video, Geoffrey Noer from Panasas showcases the company’s HPC storage solutions. Recorded at the ISC’11 conference in Hamburg.
Panasas ActiveStor 12 brings appliance-like plug-and-play simplicity to large scale storage deployments. It provides industry-leading performance and unrivaled performance per gigabyte for complex business-critical applications. This fourth generation Panasas storage blade system more than doubles performance over the previous generation product, going from 600MB/s to a stunning 1.5GB/s per chassis.
After ESG installed, configured, and connected to the system, completing the entire set-up procedure in only minutes, they saw ActiveStor 12 aggregate performance to be 1.5GB/s per chassis with near-linear performance scaling.
I’m not easily impressed by GB/s numbers, but 150GB/s did get my attention. Does this really mean that ESG set up 100 units in minutes? If so, that’s even more impressive than the I/O rates.
Thanks for your question. The intro text to the ESG report above looks like it got messed up somehow (I’ll follow up on this separately). You’re welcome to download the ESG report which is clear — what they did was to validate the 1.5GB/s per shelf of ActiveStor 12 claim and prove that it does scale in a near-linear fashion. And the set up took under ten minutes.
A 6PB, 10-rack, 100-shelf system capable of up to 150GB/s does require more time than ten minutes to set up although the additional time would mostly be in the physical racking of the units. Once physically set up, configuring and deploying a file system of the maximum performance is not substantially more difficult or time consuming than setting up the file system from a single shelf.