Panasas: Lab Rat No More

After more than a year as a lab rat, Panasas Inc. is campaigning to get its clustered NAS system out into the media and energy markets.

Panasass first product, launched 13 months ago, established it as a niche player, chiefly for laboratories. That segment was attracted to Panasas thanks to the startup's high-clustered Linux NAS architecture, which prompted Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories to sign on as early customers (see Panasas).

Now Panasas wants to branch into the broadcasting, oil and gas exploration, and high-performance computing markets. But to do that, the startup must change the way it sells its products. New would-be customers require specific services and features, all wrapped up in a neat package.

“We sold hardware, blades, the shelf, and software separately,” Panasas CEO Victor Perez says. “That’s good for labs, but not for commercial companies.”

Or, as marketing VP Larry Jones says, “The labs are happy to pull it together with bailing wire and spit.”So Panasas today unveiled an upgraded file system, two hardware bundles, and expanded support through service provider GlassHouse Technologies Inc. to help companies in specific verticals deploy and manage their systems.

Panasas's new operating system, Active File System 2.0, includes features such as file locking, enhanced load balancing, and disk monitoring. File locking is an essential addition: Broadcast companies consider file locking mandatory for rendering because it keeps more than one person from making changes to an open file. The lab guys don’t need file locking and find it slows them down.

Panasas also split its product line into two packaged bundles: Parallel NAS and Scalable NAS. Scalable NAS is for commercial customers. It supports the new operating system but not the proprietary protocol for out-of-band access between Linux servers and Panasas disk drives that Parallel NAS supports. That's because out-of-band access is considered a high-end feature that adds extra cost. Scalable NAS has nine 500-Gbyte SATA drives and two servers. Parallel NAS comes in a shelf with ten 500-Gbyte SATA drives and a server.

The success of the new product line is essential if Perez is to accomplish the goals he laid out when he took over as CEO in August (see Panasas Plots New Path). The former Chaparral CEO wants to beef up international sales and hit profitability by the end of 2005. To do that, Panasas will have to cut into the market of other NAS startups BlueArc Corp. and Isilon Systems

on the digital media front, and NAS giant Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) in the energy field.

“If Panasas wants to be anything but a niche company, there wasn’t any other choice,” analyst Arun Taneja of Taneja Group says. “But it’s not a trivial challenge. Technical guys are oozing performance requirements. They want the highest amounts of computing power you can get from a system, and they’re more forgiving about ease of use and day-to-day management tools. The people inside Panasas have to think differently to reach the commercial market.”The new release shows Panasas is thinking differently about its product. The question is whether it can get customers to think about Panasas in a new light.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch