Panasas ActiveStor is a Scale-out File System with software that executes on standard hardware and is used for high performance applications in vertical markets including research laboratories, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and artificial intelligence. Panasas has offered their parallel file system since their founding in 1999. A majority of customers have been in research and development, high performance computing environments. With the high performance, parallel access, Panasas primarily competes with GPFS (IBM Spectrum Scale), BeeGFS, WekaIO and Lustre.
While the PanFS software operates on standard hardware, it is only sold via ActiveStor appliances. ActiveStor is available in multiple models: ActiveStor Ultra, ActiveStor Flash, and ActiveStor Ultra XL.
Parallel access is through the POSIX client called DirectFlow. Data is distributed across multiple nodes with a single global namespace enabling the scaling of performance. A minimum of three storage enclosures (12 nodes) are required but there is no limit to scaling of nodes according to Panasas. There are both storage nodes and director nodes in a configuration. Standard NAS protocols of NFS and CIFS/SMB are also supported with ActiveStor through software executing on the Director nodes.
Panasas ActiveStor Product Brief Includes:
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