| MSI Panasas ActiveStor 14 Data Storage System Announced |
| Wednesday, 24 October 2012 | ||
MSI Panasas ActiveStor 14 Data Storage System AnnouncedMinnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) Putting Into Production Panasas ActiveStor 14 Data Storage System The new system will consist of twenty shelves of Panasas ActiveStor 14 storage provided by Advanced Clustering Technologies, Inc. and by Panasas. It will integrate filesystem with hardware for a single storage solution. The usable storage capacity will be 1.281 PB, and each shelf will be capable of 1.5 GB/sec or 13,500 IOPS, with the full solution being capable of 30 GB/sec read/write and 270,000 IOPS. The ActiveStor 14 solution will support up to 12,000 simultaneous clients as well as CIFS, NFS, and Panasas' high-performance PanFS filesystem; and it will incorporate 24 TB of solid-state drives (SSDs) as part of the hardware solution. The new system will allow users to do things they couldn't do before. As a central storage solution with excellent performance specifications, it will eliminate the need to transfer data within systems at MSI while meeting the challenging requirements of users with large sets of data. Current MSI users are required to migrate their data between high-performance scratch storage and capacity project space storage, which has created, for many, bottlenecks in their data flow. The new system will blur the line between these two storage types. Users will be able, for example, to generate data on MSI's flagship Itasca system and use an MSI laboratory queue to visualize it. Overall, the new storage system will more than double the capacity of MSI's current storage offering. It will enable users both to perform more interesting research with datasets of finer resolution and to operate on enormous datasets that in the past presented operational challenges. Related to these issues, MSI will address the often overlooked need for access bandwidth by employing a capable system of servers for moving data to and from storage, and it will employ a set of data movers to efficiently channel data between MSI external consumers and producers of data. Generally, the ActiveStor 14 system will strike a balance between bandwidth and IOPS. Given the explosion of research with large data requirements, the above capabilities are key to enabling research of the future. The Panasas ActiveStor 14 solution will give MSI researchers a significant edge in research and establish MSI as a leader in research involving big data. In addition to being one of the largest storage systems among U.S. universities (1.281 PB of usable storage, 24 TB of SSD and 1.84 TB of cache), MSI's system will also be one of the fastest among U.S. universities with respect to storage bandwidth. The solution is expected to be delivered in late November 2012. The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute seeks to provide researchers at the University of Minnesota and at other institutions of higher education in the State of Minnesota access to high-performance computing resources and user support to facilitate successful and cutting-edge research in all disciplines, help researchers attract funding, contribute to undergraduate and graduate education, and benefit the broader community. MSI is committed to expanding and developing the types of service it offers in order to continue to play its key support role across the growing spectrum of scientific fields. For more information visit www.msi.umn.edu.
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