
Products
Panasas® ActiveStor™ 11 & 12 represent the fourth generation of the world’s fastest parallel storage system, bringing plug-and-play simplicity to large scale storage deployments. Based on a unique storage blade architecture and the Panasas® PanFS™ storage operating system, ActiveStor delivers unmatched parallel file system performance in addition to the scalability, manageability, reliability, and value required by demanding technical computing and big data workloads.
ActiveStor 11 & 12 appliances are fully compatible with the latest, highest performance
ActiveStor 14.
Click here for more information about the latest enhancements for ActiveStor 11 & 12 in PanFS 5.

ActiveStor 11 and 12 appliances eliminate the bottlenecks found in traditional NAS systems, accelerating application I/O performance by enabling HPC cluster nodes to directly access a single, scalable file system in parallel. Simply add individual blade chassis or entire racks to non-disruptively scale the capacity and performance of the file system as storage requirements grow. This makes it easy to linearly scale capacity to six petabytes and performance to a staggering 150GB/s.
ActiveStor 11 and 12 systems provide a single point of management for a single, scalable file system, allowing storage administrators to focus on managing data instead of their storage systems. Capacity and performance planning, mount point management, and data load balancing across multiple pools of storage are all common administration problems that are easily solved by deploying Panasas storage.
Key to their high reliability and availability, ActiveStor appliances store data as objects, with RAID performed on a per-file basis as an integral part of PanFS, instead of depending on legacy hardware RAID controllers. Intelligent object RAID optimizes data placement, boosting performance and reliability. In addition to horizontal (blade-based) parity protection, separate vertical (disk-based) parity calculations compensate for media errors, greatly improving drive reliability. ActiveStor systems deliver industry-leading rebuild times, quickly restoring fault tolerance to the system. This robustness makes ActiveStor an ideal choice for a variety of business-critical applications.
Panasas ActiveStor 12 excels in price/ performance while ActiveStor 11 is a high performance, lower cost alternative. Both offer excellent investment protection, increased storage utilization rates and simplified management. As a result, ActiveStor appliances deliver an attractive total cost of ownership while fully addressing the big data requirements of even the most I/O intensive technical computing applications.
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| High performance – Up to 150 GB/sec for ActiveStor 12 | Removes the I/O bottleneck, making compute clusters more productive and accelerating time to results for a wide variety of technical computing applications and Big Data workloads |
| Easy scalability of capacity and performance | Pay as you grow, with no need to overprovision storage up front |
| Single point of management, under 10 minutes to install or scale Panasas storage | Storage administrators can focus on managing their data rather than their storage systems |
| Object RAID with RAID levels assigned on a per-file basis | Advanced data protection, distributing file data optimally to maximize performance and reliability while minimizing capacity overhead |
| Fast, parallel RAID reconstruction times | Increased availability by reducing probability of multiple failures during RAID rebuild |
| Fully integrated parallel file system | Panasas ActiveStor blades and PanFS storage operating system were designed to perfectly complement each other, with Panasas standing fully behind every system at a solution level |
| Best Price/Performance | Storage performance to meet demands of technical computing and big data workloads at an affordable price |
| ActiveStor Appliance Model | ActiveStor 11 | ActiveStor 12 |
|---|---|---|
| ActiveStor Generation | Fourth | Fourth |
| Max. System Capacity(1) | 6PB | 6PB |
| Max System Throughput, Write(2) | 95GB/s | 160GB/s |
| Max System Throughput, Read(2) | 115GB/s | 150GB/s |
| Per-shelf Specifications | ||
| Max. Shelves per system(1) | 100 | 100 |
| Supported Blade Configurations, (Director Blade + Storage Blade) |
1+10, 2+9, or 3+8. Also 0+11 for expansion. | 1+10 or 2+9. Also 0+11 for expansion. |
| Capacity per Shelf (TB)(2) | 40 or 60 | 40 or 60 |
| Hard Drives (3.5” SATA)(2) | 20 | 20 |
| ECC Memory (GB of Cache)(2) | 48 | 92 |
| Max. Throughput, Write(2) | 950MB/s | 1600MB/s |
| Max. Throughput, Read(2) | 1150MB/s | 1500MB/s |
| Networking Switch Modules | One (second optional) | Two |
| Networking Uplinks per Switch Module | 1 x 10GbE SFP+/CX4 or 4 x GbE Copper | 1 x 10GbE SFP+/CX4 or 4 x GbE Copper |
| Additional Networking per Director Blade | 2 x 10GbE SFP+ | 2 x 10GbE SFP+ |
| Network Failover | Optional | Standard |
| High Availability Link Aggregation | No | Yes |
| QDR InfiniBand Router Compatibility | Yes | Yes |
| Power Supply | 950W 1+1 redundant auto-switching 100–240VAC (47–63Hz) | 950W 1+1 redundant auto-switching 100–240VAC (47–63Hz) |
| Power Consumption at 208VAC, Typical/Max. In-rush/Max. | 4.8A/30A/7.0A | 4.8A/30A/7.0A |
| Thermal Rating, Typical (BTU/hr) | 3500 | 3500 |
| Environmentals (Operational) | 50–95° F / 10–35° C, 10–90% relative humidity, non-condensing. Derating applies at altitude. | 50–95° F / 10–35° C, 10–90% relative humidity, non-condensing. Derating applies at altitude. |
| Max. Weight | 150 lb. / 68 kg. | 150 lb. / 68 kg. |
| Dimensions (HxWxD) | 7.0" (4U) x 19.0" x 26" / 17.78 cm x 48.26 cm x 66.04 cm | 7.0" (4U) x 19.0" x 26" / 17.78 cm x 48.26 cm x 66.04 cm |
(1) No enforced limits. Max tested configuration – 100 shelves
(2) Per shelf based on a 1+10 blade configuration