Big data describes the phenomenon of using data to derive business value. Financial organizations create value with big data through the collection and simulation of data for risk analysis, research, and post-trade analytics. The sheer volume and growth rate of data can strain storage resources. Monte Carlo simulation, tick data analysis, and portfolio optimization require high performance parallel storage to satisfy the demand for fast, shared access to large and small files alike. This data explosion is driving the need for fast, extremely scalable, easy to manage, and affordable high performance storage system

1. BIG DATA CREATES COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES
Big data describes the phenomenon of using data to
derive business value. Financial organizations create value
with big data through the collection and simulation of data
for risk analysis, research, and post-trade analytics. The
sheer volume and growth rate of data can strain storage
resources. Monte Carlo simulation, tick data analysis, and
portfolio optimization require high performance parallel
storage to satisfy the demand for fast, shared access to
large and small files alike. This data explosion is driving
the need for fast, extremely scalable, easy to manage, and
affordable high performance storage systems.
Legacy storage systems were designed for highly
structured and centralized environments whereas the
big data world is highly unstructured and distributed.
Traditional NAS solutions, constrained by in-band filer
heads and hardware RAID controllers, frequently cannot
provide the required data throughput to keep ad-hoc and
real-time workflows running optimally. Legacy approaches
inevitably introduced bottlenecks which slowed research
and created costly islands of storage.
Panasas®
ActiveStor™ Parallel Storage
ActiveStor provides incredibly fast access to very large
data sets from many clients simultaneously. It removes
performance bottlenecks by allowing compute clients
to read and write data in parallel, to and from physical
storage devices. While market data is often generated in
A large international bank relies upon data-intensive,
business-critical applications for intra-day credit risk
analysis. Its large database which drives the Monte Carlo
scenarios contains financial simulation attributes of each
party. Multiple simulation scenarios involving up to 500,000
counter parties are required to predict the risk impact on
the bank. With its legacy SAN storage, risk figures that are
critical to traders were often unavailable even by the start of
the next trading day because of I/O bottlenecks. The bank
needed to provide traders with faster and more accurate risk
figures throughout the trading day.
The bank selected high performance, scalable, and reliable
Panasas storage to support its growing high performance
computing infrastructure. The migration from legacy SAN to
Panasas parallel storage increased bandwidth performance
by 6GB/s, enabling 100 times more scenarios per entity
in the same amount of processing time as the SAN, and
at a lower cost. Total cost/performance of the Panasas
solution provided even greater benefit by allowing the bank
to eliminate the need for an expensive ISV database solution.
The scalability and I/O issues with large databases were
resolved, enabling the bank to boost its competitiveness with
an increased number of simulations that minimized its risk in
credit markets.
single streams, analysis of that data can be done in parallel
among many clients. ActiveStor 14 uses Solid State Drive
(SSD) technology to accelerate access to metadata and
the small files that predominate within financial datasets.
Extreme performance for both large and small files supports
large numbers of users, intensive I/O, and enables financial
organizations to reduce their time-to-results.
Beyond satisfying performance demands, simplified
management makes ActiveStor a compelling solution for
financial applications. Linear scalability enables customers
to easily increase performance and capacity as demand
grows. ActiveStor delivers high availability and superior
reliability that financial organizations can depend on.
RISK ANALYSIS | MONTE CARLO SIMULATION | TICK DATA | MARKET ANALYTICS | PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION
A C C E L E R A T E F I N A N C I A L
S I M U L A T I O N & A N A L Y T I C S
W I T H H I G H P E R F O R M A N C E P A R A L L E L S T O R A G E

2. PANASAS ACTIVESTOR
THE WORLD’S FA STEST HPC STOR AGE SYSTEM
Panasas ActiveStor is the world’s fastest parallel storage
system, bringing plug-and-play simplicity to large- and
small-scale environments. ActiveStor delivers extreme
performance for small and large files, accelerating
time-to-results for big data workloads. Based on a fifth-
generation storage blade architecture and the Panasas®
PanFS™ storage operating system, ActiveStor delivers
unmatched scale-out NAS performance in addition
to the scalability, manageability, reliability, and value
required by the most demanding financial research,
simulation, and analytic workloads.
EASILY SCALABLE PERFORMANCE AND CAPACITY
Simply scale out the number of blade enclosures to non-disrup-
tively increase the capacity and performance of the global file
system as storage requirements grow. Parallel access to data and
automated load balancing ensure that performance is optimized
and hot-spots are eliminated. This makes it easy to linearly scale
capacity to over eight petabytes and performance to a staggering
150GB/s, or 1.4M IOPS, the industry’s highest single file system
throughput per terabyte of enterprise SATA storage.
Scalable capacity ensures that multiple datasets can be main-
tained and quickly made available across workflows. Even the larg-
est datasets such as tick data and market statistics are effectively
managed within a single scalable namespace and effortlessly
shared among analysts to streamline collaboration.
SUPERIOR MANAGEABILITY AND RELIABILITY
A single point of management for a single, scalable file system al-
lows storage administrators to focus on managing data instead of
their storage systems. Capacity and performance planning, mount
point management, and data load balancing across multiple pools
of storage are all common administration problems that are easily
solved by deploying Panasas storage. Intelligent object RAID op-
timizes data placement, boosting performance and reliability. Data
is safeguarded by both horizontal (blade-based) and vertical (disk-
based) parity, greatly increasing system reliability and availability.
LEADING PRICE/PERFORMANCE AND COMPELLING TCO
ActiveStor 14 has been purpose-built for the financial market and
its unique requirements for both fast response time (IOPS) for
small files, such as tick data, and high streaming throughput of
large files (GB/s) for analytics or Monte Carlo simulations.
ActiveStor leverages SSD technology to accelerate small file and
metadata performance for lightning-fast response times while de-
livering exceptional throughput performance at an affordable price,
and stores large files on high capacity, economical SATA drives. No
other storage system can offer the same level of performance for
both large and small file access.
ActiveStor systems offer excellent investment protection, increased
storage utilization rates, and simplified management at an afford-
able price. As a result, ActiveStor delivers an attractive total cost of
ownership while fully addressing the big data requirements of even
the most I/O intensive applications.
Extreme Performance—Lightning-fast response
time and parallel access for massive throughput
SCALABILITY—Effortlessly scales to 8PB and 150GB/s
or 1.4M IOPS
EASY MANAGEMENT—Single point of management
for a single, scalable file system allows administrators
to focus on managing data instead of their IT
infrastructure
UNSURPASSED DATA PROTECTION—Object RAID
delivers high reliability and the fastest RAID rebuilds
available
COMPELLING TCO —Outstanding price/performance,
investment protection, utilization rates, and simplified
management
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
1.888.PANASAS | WWW.PANASAS.COM
© 2012 Panasas, Inc. All rights reserved. Panasas, the Panasas logo, ActiveStor, PanFS and DirectFlow are trademarks or registered trademarks of Panasas, Inc., in the
U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks, registered trademarks, trade names, company names and service marks are the respective properties of their holders.
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Panasas®
ActiveStor™ Storage Blade Appliance