Panasas Scales Linux Cluster Markets
Published for the Week Of September 6, 2004
As the Linux cluster market grows, so should Panasas. Company founders Garth Gibson and Bill Courtwright set out in 2000 to meet the need for scalable Linux storage.
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The company launched its first product, the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster, into the market in October. With Linux clusters serving as supercomputers growing from two in 1998 to more than 200 last year, the timing was right.
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“We put lots of demo units in the field and worked with big companies that are noticed by everyone--Los Alamos, Berkeley, Sandia,” said Larry Jones, vice president of marketing at Panasas, Fremont, Calif. “Today, we’re working to engage with partners that are very focused on our target market.”
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Early partners are enthusiastic. “Our clients were moving over to clusters, so we partnered with Panasas because they lead the industry,” said Allan Grimes, president of MW Solutions, a storage solution provider that works with oil and gas companies in Houston.
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Sicorp, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based storage integrator with clients such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has tracked Panasas’ progress since before it was Panasas. “Some data centers use NAS and some use SAN, but neither can meet all enterprise-class needs,” Sicorp CEO Joseph Bridges said. “Panasas’ object-based storage bridges the gap between SAN and NAS, providing the performance of SAN with the manageability and convenience of NAS … along with a security model that rivals both.”
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Panasas says its object-based architecture and parallel file system give its devices scalability and manageability. Hundreds of its appliances can be clustered, scaling from gigabytes to petabytes, and more than 10 GBps can be read and written to a single system. On a spec benchmark, the appliance set an industry-record 305,805 SFS operations per second, the company said.
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With 30 customers and plans to begin volume production this quarter, Panasas last month brought in Victor Perez, a former StorageTek COO, to move the company from development stage to market stage. Perez, president and CEO, said he wants at least half of Panasas’ sales to go through partners.
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“We are focused in four verticals: gas and oil, science, the media and life sciences,” he said. “The plan is to complement those verticals with indirect channels.”
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