FREMONT, Calif. (August 02, 2005) – Panasas, Inc., today announced that Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has deployed the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster. BNL chose Panasas to begin the transition from the organization’s legacy NFS storage and NFS file system infrastructure, which limited cluster performance and was not able to meet future computing requirements. With the deployment of 100 terabytes (TBs) of the Panasas Storage Cluster, BNL augmented its network storage environment with a clustered storage solution that delivers significantly greater performance and unlimited scalability.
BNL is a world-class scientific research facility and home to the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Hundreds of physicists from around the world use RHIC to study what the universe may have looked like in the first few moments after its creation and gain an improved understanding of why the physical world behaves the way it does. The RHIC Computing Facility, constructed to warehouse and analyze collider data, features a 2,000 node Linux cluster that relied on NFS servers and SAN storage for online access to the collider data. As the compute cluster grew, the NFS file system began failing with increasing frequency. Administrators also recognized that the existing client/server model would be insufficient to meet current and future computing demands. A comprehensive evaluation led to the selection of the Panasas Storage Cluster.
“The Panasas Storage Cluster enables our Linux cluster to have greater access to data. This improved cluster utilization directly results in the faster completion of jobs,” said Maurice Askinazi, group leader, general computing environment at BNL’s RHIC Computing Facility. “We are improving the capabilities of our Linux cluster to process data, and therefore getting greater value from our cluster investment.”
The Panasas architecture delivered the desired network bandwidth to access a growing pool of storage. The Panasas ActiveScale File System and DirectFLOW client empower each Linux cluster node to access data directly from the Panasas StorageBlades without the delays normally associated with NFS file servers. This unique, direct data transfer capability enables exceptional performance that scales almost linearly as capacity is increased.
“BNL is a classic case study showing the limitations of legacy storage and file systems for high-performance, technical computing environments,” said Victor Perez, chief executive officer at Panasas. “These systems were simply not built to meet the unique performance, management and scalability demands of organizations that rely on Linux clusters. The Panasas solution was built from the ground up specifically to meet Linux cluster computing requirements.”
About Brookhaven National Laboratory
One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization. For more information on Brookhaven, see www.bnl.gov.
About Panasas
Panasas, Inc. helps companies accelerate the speed and accuracy of their business decisions, leading to real world breakthroughs that improve people’s lives. Panasas enables customers to maximize the benefits of Linux clusters by breaking down the storage bottleneck created by legacy network storage technologies. Through the delivery of the company’s Storage Cluster Platform, which combines industry-standard hardware with the company’s ActiveScale File System and professional services, the company has become the established leader in object-based, clustered storage. Panasas’ headquarters are in Fremont, CA with development facilities in Pittsburgh, PA and Houston, TX. For more information, please visit www.panasas.com.
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