Panasas is a data storage company that creates

network-attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...

for technical computing environments.

History

Panasas is a

computer data storage Computer data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The central processing unit (CPU) of a compute ...

product company and is headquartered in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

. Panasas received seed funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) and others. The first Panasas products were shipped in 2004, the same year that Victor M. Perez became CEO. Faye Pairman became CEO in 2011. Tom Shea, formerly Panasas COO, was appointed as CEO in 2020.

Technology

Panasas developed an extension for managing parallel file access in the

Network File System Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. NFS, lik ...

, which was later integrated in

Parallel NFS Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. NFS, like ...

(pNFS), part of the NFS version 4.1 specification, published by the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

as RFC 5661 in January 2010. pNFS described a way for the NFS protocol to process file requests to multiple servers or storage devices at once, instead of handling the requests serially. Panasas supports DirectFlow, NFS, Parallel NFS and

Server Message Block Server Message Block (SMB) is a communication protocol originally developed in 1983 by Barry A. Feigenbaum at IBM and intended to provide shared access to files and printers across nodes on a network of systems running IBM's OS/2. It also provide ...

(also known as CIFS) data access protocols to integrate into existing

local area networks A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

. Panasas

blade servers A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, whi ...

manage metadata, serving data for DirectFlow, NFS and CIFS clients using

10 Gigabit Ethernet 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE, 10GbE, or 10 GigE) is a group of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. It was first defined by the IEEE 802.3ae-2002 standard. Unlike previous ...

. Panasas systems provide data storage and management for high-performance applications in the biosciences, energy, media and entertainment, manufacturing, government and research sectors.

ActiveStor

The ActiveStor product line is a parallel file system appliance that integrates hybrid storage hardware (hard drives and solid state drives), the PanFS parallel file system, its proprietary DirectFlow data access protocol, and the industry standard NFS and CIFS network

protocols Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...

ActiveStor Ultra

ActiveStor Ultra (introduced in November 2018) is the newest generation of the Panasas ActiveStor storage system and features a re-engineered, portable file system that delivers performance and reliability on suitably qualified, industry standard storage hardware platforms. ActiveStor 20 (now ActiveStor Classic) was announced in August 2016 with increased capacity, using larger and faster disks. In November 2017, Panasas released the ActiveStor Director 100 and the ActiveStor Hybrid 100 (now ActiveStor Prime), which disaggregated the Director Blade, the controller node of Panasas storage system, from the storage nodes. In November 2018, Panasas introduced ActiveStor Ultra, which featured a completely re-engineered portable file system (PanFS® 8) running on industry standard hardware.

DirectFlow

DirectFlow is a parallel data access protocol designed by Panasas for ActiveStor. DirectFlow avoids protocol I/O bottlenecks by accessing Panasas storage directly and in parallel. DirectFlow was originally supported on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

, and expanded in April 2016 to support Apple's

MacOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

PanFS

Panasas created the PanFS clustered file system as single pool of storage under a global filename space to support multiple applications and workflows in a single storage system. PanFS supports DirectFlow (pNFS), NFS and CIFS data access protocols simultaneously. PanFS 7.0 added a FreeBSD operating foundation and a GUI that supports asynchronous push notification of system changes without user interaction. In August 2020, Panasas announced a new version of PanFS that features Dynamic Data Acceleration technology, which automatically tunes storage for small files and mixed workloads. While other storage systems assign data to media "tiers" based on how recently files were accessed, Dynamic Data Acceleration assigns data based on file size to most efficiently use the underlying media. The "novel" method is designed to improve performance, eliminate manual tuning and control storage costs.

References

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External links

Panasas Company web site

Parallel NFS
Computer storage companies Computer companies of the United States Computer companies established in 1999 Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Privately held companies based in California Companies based in Sunnyvale, California Network file systems American companies established in 1999