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Panasas: Page 2 of 4

In addition to Los Alamos, Panasas has lined up customers that include: GeoTrace Technologies, NuTec Energy, The Rockefeller University Laboratory for Computational Genomics, Sandia National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley Center for Integrative Genomics, and the University of California at San Diego Center for Marine Genomics.

Functionally, the Panasas storage system looks and acts like a NAS server. It supports Unix NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing protocols, as well as an optional proprietary Panasas protocol for even higher performance out-of-band data access.

But the company says its clustered storage technology differs from other networked storage systems in two ways: First, it uses an object-based internal file system, which increases overall performance and allows it be more "self-managing"; second, it allows hundreds of Panasas devices to be clustered together, just like a Linux compute cluster.

That design lets the Panasas storage cluster read and write multiple gigabytes of data per second to a single server. The company says its system delivers random I/O performance of 305,805 operations per second on the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC)'s SFS test.

"Customers know within an hour that it is quite a bit different from anything they've seen to date," Schrock says. "It's a pretty stunning level of advancement for storage." [Ed. note: If he does say so himself.]