Panasas, Inc., the global leader in parallel storage solutions for the High Performance Computing (HPC) market, today announced that its ActiveStor Parallel Storage has been installed at Florida State University, along with Dell servers, to provide faster access to the institution's computational-based research generated primarily by the math, meteorology, and computer science groups. This new HPC infrastructure will elevate the capabilities of Florida State by increasing the productivity of research students and further attracting talented individuals to their undergraduate program.

The university's Department of Scientific Computing is leading the Panasas storage implementation to support the massively parallel data movement for computational-based research. Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage, while reducing storage management costs, allows Florida State University to provide its faculty and students with reliable, interactive access to research data through a centralized resource which will yield results much faster and increase their overall productivity.

~ Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Panasas.

"Universities such as Florida State have made great strides in leveraging advanced tools and applications to position their institutions as leaders in academic research and HPC excellence. Panasas parallel storage brings the next generation of storage technology to FSU, enabling them to maximize the performance of their HPC investments with a unified storage solution that offers unprecedented scalability and reliability."

In addition to the inherent benefits of faster application run-times, higher productivity and improved collaboration, Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage provides a global namespace that dramatically simplifies cluster management and will result in a lower total cost of ownership for the university. More importantly, it will meet any university needs to further increase capacity. Multiple rack systems can be configured seamlessly into a single storage cluster that can scale to petabytes and deliver more than 20 Gigabytes per second in aggregate bandwidth. Plus, each rack installation requires as little as 15 minutes.

The university will also leverage Panasas storage for its forthcoming visualization initiative, in which the Department of Scientific Computing will transfer I/O-intensive data into a visualization environment to allow further analysis for its meteorology and oceanography groups.

~ James Wilgenbusch, director of FSU's HPC Facility.

"Panasas parallel storage affords us an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of high-performance computing. This storage solution allows us to offer our students a state-of-the-art approach to running computational analyses in a unified environment while permitting us to quickly and easily scale storage capacity. We have deployed the premiere technologies in the HPC industry: Panasas parallel storage, Dell servers, and Cisco networking infrastructure. We look forward to continuing to satisfy the needs of our students and attracting additional talented individuals to our undergraduate and graduate program."

Panasas collaborated in this Florida State University deployment with both Dell and Cisco to ensure a smooth implementation.

~ John Mullen, VP/GM, Dell ESL Major Accounts.

"Our work with Florida State University is one of many projects involving Panasas solutions and illustrates the increasing demand for ActiveStor storage that we are experiencing in our customer base. Panasas parallel storage is renowned for superior performance and cost-efficiency, making this solution a great complement to our PowerEdge server products. Dell customers are the beneficiaries of the reliable and scalable attributes of our world-class technology."