Panasas Increases Capacity at TRE

LONDON -- Panasas, Inc., the global leader in parallel storage solutions for the High Performance Computing (HPC) market, announced today that Tele-Rilevamento Europa (TRE) has halved the time it takes to access stored information by deploying Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage. This has significantly increased its production capacity and allows TRE to deliver processed satellite data much faster to its customers, which gives them a distinct competitive advantage in the market.

TRE, established in 2000, is the leading global expert in data processing services derived from satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Working with its customers TRE is able to detect, measure and monitor geophysical phenomena (e.g. subsidence, uplift, landslides, seismic faults, etc.) and verify the stability of individual buildings. Its customers include some of the world’s leading government bodies, energy companies, academic research institutes and space agencies.

The increasing global demand for monitoring land surfaces, analysing potential environmental hazards and increasing public safety, has contributed to increased customer demand for TRE’s services. This has led to TRE’s requirement to increase their processing performance and storage capacity to meet that demand.

”Our previous storage solution was based on a fiber-channel SAN, but it quickly became a bottleneck as we grew the number of compute nodes required to process the growing number of customer jobs and the increasing sizes of the data-sets” said Alessandro Menegaz, IT & Security Manager, TRE. “Our production capacity is tightly coupled with our hardware performance, so we needed a solution that could scale linearly in terms of capacity and performance as we increased the number of jobs we were processing.

Working closely with Panasas’ Italian partner E4 Computer Engineering, TRE focused on identifying the best storage solution. “Given the criticality of the solution to TRE, E4 Computer Engineering simulated a test environment to demonstrate Panasas storage capabilities against other storage solutions in the market.” said Simone Tinti, System Engineer, E4 Computer Engineering, Italy. “The Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage solution excelled in all the competitive tests and was the only solution to exceed the performance, scalability and manageability requirements.”Panasas Inc.