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ActiveStor 14
The world’s fastest parallel storage system just got faster with Panasas ActiveStor 14. By accelerating small file and metadata performance with Solid State Drive (SSD) technology, ActiveStor 14 delivers extreme performance, for the technical computing and big data workloads commonly found in HPC environments. Based on a fifth-generation storage blade architecture and the Panasas® PanFS™ storage operating system, ActiveStor 14 delivers unmatched scale-out NAS performance in addition to the manageability, reliability, and value required by demanding computing organizations in the bioscience, energy, finance, government, manufacturing, media, and other sectors.
Overview
Maximum Performance and Scalability
ActiveStor eliminates the many scalability and performance bottlenecks associated with legacy NAS architectures. Simply scale out the number of blade enclosures to non-disruptively increase the capacity and performance of the global file system as storage requirements grow. Parallel access to data and automated load balancing ensure that performance is optimized and hot-spots are eliminated. This makes it easy to linearly scale capacity to over eight petabytes and performance to a staggering 1.4M IOPS or 150GB/s, the industry’s highest single file system throughput per terabyte of enterprise SATA storage.
Superior Manageability and Reliability
A single point of management for a single, scalable file system allows 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 with Panasas storage. Intelligent object RAID optimizes data placement, boosting performance and reliability. Data is safeguarded by both horizontal (blade-based) and vertical (disk-based) parity, greatly increasing system reliability and availability. ActiveStor 14 is fully compatible with ActiveStor 11 and ActiveStor 12, enabling simple integration and varying levels of performance for different workloads in private cloud deployments.
Best Price/Performance and Compelling TCO
ActiveStor appliances provide exceptional performance at an affordable price, storing large files on high capacity SATA drives while leveraging SSD technology to accelerate small file and metadata performance for lightning-fast response times. This fifth generation platform is available in two models—ActiveStor 14 combines high density with exceptional throughput (GB/s) while the turbocharged ActiveStor 14T leverages larger cache and SSD capacity to maximize small file IOPS performance while maintaining best of class bandwidth performance. Both models offer excellent investment protection, increased storage utilization rates, and simplified management. ActiveStor delivers a compelling total cost of ownership while fully satisfying the big data requirements of even the most I/O intensive technical computing applications.
Features & Benefits
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Scale-Out NAS Architecture | Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance consists of modular Panasas ActiveStor storage blades running the Panasas PanFS storage operating system. Simply add more 4U shelves to non-disruptively expand capacity and performance. ActiveStor 14 is compatible with ActiveStor 11 & 12 within a single storage system. |
| Optimized Price/Performance | Integrated SSD/SATA tier: high-speed SSD drives for faster access to metadata and small files combined with cost-effective, high capacity SATA drives to provide the best price/performance. |
| Fully Integrated Parallel File System | Panasas PanFS delivers a parallel file system with a single, scalable namespace. PanFS offers a fully journaled, fully distributed, and globally coherent read/write cache and stores files as smart data objects, dynamically distributing and load balancing data transfer operations across the blade architecture. |
| Scalability | Scales to over 8 petabytes and up to 150GB/s or 1.4M IOPS of aggregate performance, accessed by as many as 12,000 clients. Throughput and IOPS scale linearly with capacity. Automated load-balancing ensures optimal performance and eliminates hot spots. |
| High Availability | No single points of failure. Self-healing design protects against failures throughout the system, including disk, storage blade, director blade, and power failures. Redundant networking data paths with automatic failover. |
| Reliability | Intelligent per-file object RAID optimizes reliability, based on file size and performance requirements. Data is safeguarded by sophisticated dual parity algorithms, based on separate horizontal (blade) and vertical (disk) parity protection. With ActiveStor, only damaged objects are rebuilt, not entire drives, minimizing rebuild times. More importantly, RAID constructions are performed in parallel to rapidly restore data protection in case of blade failure. This means that, unlike traditional storage systems, ActiveStor rebuilds get faster as the system grows. |
| Simplified Management | Single point of management via GUI or CLI. Enterprise management features include snapshots and user & group quotas. System sets up in under ten minutes. System scaling is performed without downtime. |
| Protocol Support | Panasas® DirectFlow® parallel NFS, NFS v3 (UDP or TCP), CIFS, NDMP, SNMP, LDAP, ADS |
| Client Support | Linux®, Microsoft® Windows®, UNIX® |
Specifications
| System Specifications | ActiveStor 14 | ActiveStor 14T |
|---|---|---|
| ActiveStor Generation | Fifth | Fifth |
| Suitability | Price/performance: high capacity and throughput | Highest performance for mixed workloads of large and small files |
| Max. System Capacity(1) | 8.3PB | 4.5PB |
| Max. System Throughput (2) | 150GB/s | 150GB/s |
| Max. System IOPS - 4KB File, Random Read(3) | 1,300,000 | 1,400,000 |
| Max. Tested Configuration - Shelves per System(1) | 100 | 100 |
| Per-shelf Specifications | ||
| Capacity per Shelf(2) | 81 or 83TB | 45TB |
| HDD Capacity (TB)(2) | 80 | 40 |
| SSD Capacity (TB)(2) | 1.2 or 3.0 | 4.8 |
| % SSD Storage | 1.5% or 3.6% | 10.7% |
| Drive Configuration (2) | 20 x 3.5" Enterprise SATA + 10 x 1.8" MLC SSD | 20 x 3.5" Enterprise SATA + 10 x 1.8" MLC SSD |
| ECC Memory (GB of Cache)(2) | 92 | 172 |
| Max. Throughput, Write (MB/s)(2) | 1600 | 1600 |
| Max. Throughput, Read (MB/s)(2) | 1500 | 1500 |
| Max. IOPS(3) | 13,550 | 14,150 |
| Supported Blade Configurations (Director Blade + Storage Blade) | 1+10, 2+9, or 3+8. Also 0+11 for expansion. | 1+10, 2+9, or 3+8. Also 0+11 for expansion. |
| Switch Modules per Shelf | Two | 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 10GbE Networking per Director Blade | 2 x 10GbE SFP+ | 2 x 10GbE SFP+ |
| High Availability Link Aggregation with Network Failover Support | Yes | Yes |
| InfiniBand Router Compatibility | Yes | Yes |
| Power Supply | 1050W 1+1 redundant auto-switching 100–240VAC (47–63Hz) | 1050W 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
(3) Per shelf based on a 2+9 blade configuration