Panasas, Inc., is a private, multinational computer storage

Computer storage

Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, refers to computer components and recording media that retain digital data. Data storage is one of the core functions and fundamental components of computers....

 company based in Sunnyvale, California

Sunnyvale, California

Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...

. It specializes in high-performance scale-out network-attached storage

Network-attached storage

Network-attached storage is file-level computer data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous clients. NAS not only operates as a file server, but is specialized for this task either by its hardware, software, or configuration of those elements...

 optimized for Linux clusters.

History

Founded in 1999 by Dr. Garth Gibson and Dr. William Courtright, Panasas is an enterprise storage

Enterprise storage

In computing, an enterprise storage is the computer storage designed for large-scale, high-technology environments of the modern enterprises. When comparing to the consumer storage, it has higher scalability, higher reliability, better fault tolerance, and much higher initial price.From the...

 company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company initially started with funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures

Mohr Davidow Ventures

Mohr Davidow Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early stage technology companies. For over 28 years, Mohr Davidow has helped to build more than 250 startup companies. The firm has $1.85B under management...

 (MDV) and has obtained additional funding from leading technology investment firms including the Carlyle Group

Carlyle Group

The Carlyle Group is an American-based global asset management firm, specializing in private equity, based in Washington, D.C. The Carlyle Group operates in four business areas: corporate private equity, real assets, market strategies and fund-of-funds, through its AlpInvest subsidiary...

, Centennial Ventures, Evercore Partners

Evercore Partners

Evercore Partners is an investment bank located in New York City. Evercore also has an investment management business through which the Company manages private equity and venture capital funds for institutional investors...

, Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational bulge bracket investment banking and securities firm that engages in global investment banking, securities, investment management, and other financial services primarily with institutional clients...

, Intel Capital and Novak-Biddle Venture Partners.
The company uses McClenahan Bruer Communications for its public relations

Public relations

Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....

 in the US and Napier Partnership Limited

Napier Partnership Limited

Napier Partnership Limited is a B2B technology PR agency that also provides a range of additional marketing services, including direct marketing, advertising, design, digital marketing and social media...

 in Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

.

Technology

Panasas is credited with developing an emerging standard for managing Network File System (NFS) file access in parallel. The standard is Parallel NFS (pNFS), an extension of NFS present in NFS 4.1, published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 5661 in January, 2010. pNFS describes a way for the NFS protocol to process file requests to multiple servers or storage devices at once, instead of handling the requests serially.

Integration

Panasas supports a broad range of application profiles for NFS, Parallel NFS and CIFS data access protocols integrating into existing IT infrastructures. Panasas director blades serve metadata, acting as a cluster of NAS filers capable of serving data for NFS and CIFS clients.

Products

Panasas storage solutions claim to be the world's highest performance storage system. Panasas systems are primarily designed for storage environments in the energy, government, finance, manufacturing, bioscience and higher education industries.

Activestor

• Activestor 8 - Designed for highly sequential I/O workloads and large files, for scientific and technical applications.
• Activestor 9 - Designed for random I/O workloads and large and small files. PAS 9 utilizes solid state disks (SSD) that accelerates metadata
  Metadata
  The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
  
   operations.
• Activestor 11 & 12 - Fourth generation systems that up to double performance over PAS 8, growing from 600MB/s to up to 1.5GB/s per chassis.

PanFS

PanFS™ creates a single pool of storage under a global namespace that provides the ability to support multiple applications and workflows in a single storage system with optimal performance for complex technical applications. PanFS eliminates the need for multiple islands of storage.

PanFS supports DirectFlow (pNFS), NFS

NFS

NFS may mean:* Network File System , the Network File System protocol developed by Sun Microsystems* NFS , a former Icelandic television news service* National Financial Switch, a bank network in India...

 and CIFS data access protocols simultaneously.

External links

• Panasas Home Page
• Parallel NFS