Learn why: 1. HPC workloads are on the rise 2. Enterprise storage can't meet HPC demands 3. Traditional HPC storage is a poor fit 4. 3 Steps to design Enterprise-Class HPC

1. Is Your Storage Ready for Commercial HPC? -
Three Steps to Take
Learn why:
1. HPC workloads are on the rise
2. Enterprise storage can’t meet HPC demands
3. Traditional HPC storage is a poor fit
4. 3 Steps to design Enterprise-Class HPC
Receive a Copy of our Latest Paper “Designing Storage For Commercial HPC”

2. Our Speakers
Dale Brantly is the Director of Worldwide Storage Systems Engineering at Panasas, where he leads the team
responsible for architecting and delivering ActiveStor storage solutions to customers worldwide. He has more
than 30 years of experience in defining engineering requirements and achieving architectural and quality
excellence for complex storage solutions deployed in a large high-performance computing and enterprise
environments. Prior to joining Panasas, Dale managed global solutions development at Silicon Graphics (SGI)
and ran SGI’s Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) product line. Other appointments include field and
customer site technical positions at Cray Research, Control Data Corporation, and ETA Systems.
George Crump is the founder of Storage Switzerland, the leading storage analyst focused on the subjects of big
data, solid state storage, virtualization, cloud computing and data protection. He is widely recognized for his
articles, white papers, and videos on such current approaches as all-flash arrays, deduplication, SSDs,
software-defined storage, backup appliances, and storage networking. He has over 25 years of experience
designing storage solutions for data centers across the US.

3. What is High
Performance
Computing
● Applications that require intensive
computation, memory usage or
data management
● Examples of traditional HPC

4. ● Convergence of traditional HPC and
the intelligent processing of
unstructured data
● IT needs to analyze what to store,
what to analyze and what to discard
● Most of all IT needs insight - What is
the data telling them
What is Commercial HPC?

5. ● “Big” Manufacturing
(large products)
● Media and Entertainment
● Life Sciences
● Energy Applications
Use Cases

6. Understanding
HPC’s Two
Critical
Components
● Clustered Compute
● Scalable Storage

7. ● Massive Capacity Requirements
● And High Performance I/O
● I/O Varies - Lots of large
sequential but increasing need for
small sequential and Random I/O
The Unique Storage Challenges

8. ● The first attempt by the
commercial market is to use what
they know but…
● Single Threaded Nature Doesn’t
Match up well with Clustered
Compute
● Enterprise Scale-Out Bottlenecks
Why Legacy Enterprise Storage Falls Short

9. ● Too Wild West for Enterprise
○ Open Source file systems
○ DIY servers and internode
networking
○ Limited Reliability Features
○ Vendors with limited history in
the space
○ High support costs
Why HPC Storage Falls Short

10. ● Scalable Performance
● Scalable Capacity
● Turnkey Solution
● Historically Vetted Architecture
Designing HPC Storage For
Commercial Use Cases

11. Three Steps to
Commercial HPC
● Understand the priorities of the
Enterprise
● Differentiate between a Bundled
System and an Integrated System
● Understand Data Migration

12. Requirements of a Commercial HPC
Filesystem
● Get the job done!
● Easy
● Reliable
● Flexible and adaptable

13. ActiveStor® - Designed for Success
ActiveStor was designed to reduce the
complexity of implementing, utilizing, and
maintaining a parallel filesystem for commercial
HPC.
● Panasas PanFS®, the only plug-and-play parallel
file system, features a volume manager and a
scalable RAID engine on a single integrated
platform
● Ultra-high bandwidth with Panasas DirectFlow®
parallel protocol
● Separate control and storage planes
● Balanced design of DRAM cache, SSD, and SATA
HDD

14. Low Touch - Low Stress
● Engineered for maximum
performance with minimal
effort
● PanFS is presented as a
traditional POSIX file system
● Easy to deploy
● Easy to manage

16. Predictable - In a good way!
● Triple parity protection to ensure data integrity
● Distributed sparing and component object
backend provides ultra fast rebuilds in the
event of a failure
● Redundant software and hardware architecture
● Randomly distributed file objects for increased
reliability as the system grows
● World class support - no L1/2/3 hierarchy

17. Future Proof - Future Ready
● Metadata scales independently,
capacity and performance linearly
and simultaneously
● Capacity and performance scale
without forklift upgrades
● Incorporate and transition to new
ActiveStor products while
remaining in production
● Start small and continue to grow
to meet your evolving business
requirements

18. ActiveStor Performance Storage
The industry’s only plug-and-play parallel file
system, delivering a unique combination of
capabilities:
● Performance that improves with scale
● Data protection that increases with scale
● Manageability that retains with scale

19. Recording of this and other webinars available
on our website (no need to re-register)
Before we get to your questions...
Select the Attachments
button for Papers and
Data Sheets

20. Questions and Answers

21. Thank you!
Storage Switzerland
http://www.storageswiss.com
georgeacrump@storageswiss.com
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