Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Then there are the storage system manufacturers that do it right; deliver SSD in a fashion that makes sense for the way their system is designed to be used and then optimize the technology to deliver maximum benefit for the added costs. Panasas I believe falls into this category.

Panasas has been shipping solutions since 2003 and they remain focused on the parallel storage market. Parallel storage essentially allows for clients to access the storage through Parallel NFS directly, what we know as the NAS head or gateway is essentially a meta data controller. The physical data is loaded directly to multiple clients in parallel. This removes the bottleneck of the NAS head from the Storage IO equation.

Part of the news on this briefing is that Panasas has realigned their product strategy into three tiers. First the Series 7 which offers excellent performance at a low cost per TB. This could be a less expensive way for a customer to get into parallel storage or it can also be a replication target for one of the higher performing tiers. The next level is the Series 8 which is focused on simulation and analysis application. The Series 8 offers superior application performance, high availability features and comprehensive data management.

At the highest level is the Series 9 which offers the highest possible IOPS at the lowest possible latency, maximum data availability and virtual tiered storage to take full advantage of SSD.

The Panasas systems are designed with storage blades which in the Series 9 house three types of storage each; a 4GB battery backed RAM cache, a 32GB SLC Solid State Disk Drive and a 2TB SATA drive. The movement of data within these tiers is completely transparent to users and administrators and can deliver up to 10X the performance of a SATA based storage blade.

This is one of the more intelligent implementations of SSD into an existing storage system that I have seen. Use a small amount of SSD almost as a secondary cache, similar to how a processor has L1 and L2 cache, the storage blades can provide essentially the same functionality.

Its obvious that Panasas considered its target market when engineering SSD into their environments. It would not have been cost effective to sell the amount of SSD capacity required to sustain those workloads, by integrating SSD and automatically managing the data placement they may have struck the perfect balance of performance and affordability.