Panasas today announced that it has collaborated with Cray Inc. to certify Panasas storage with the Cray CX1 deskside supercomputer. For organizations wanting to harness supercomputing power without the complexity of traditional computing clusters, the combined solution delivers exceptional performance with the ease of use and seamless integration of a workstation.

"Panasas storage is a strong complement to the Cray CX1 system," stated Ian Miller, senior vice president of the productivity solutions group and marketing at Cray. "We pride ourselves on the combination of speed, ease and affordability of the Cray CX1 product, and Panasas has the storage systems that complement us on all three attributes. We were very pleased with the recent ease-of-use and performance results of our combined certification testing."

"There are more and more applications that require high-performance computing and storage in order to accelerate time to results, but system complexity often is an inhibitor," noted Terri McClure, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Cray and Panasas combination is appealing in that it provides supercomputing power without the traditional complexity of cluster management and at an attractive entry price for high-performance computing needs."

In workgroup environments, Panasas storage can be a pooled, private-storage cloud resource shared by scientists, ensuring appropriate storage resources can be flexibly and quickly provisioned to meet storage requirements in near real time. Recent ESG research indicates that early adopters of scale-out architecture believe time to provision is the number one reason for choosing a scale-out architecture, with availability, managability and scalability tied for second place. Panasas storage combined with the Cray CX1 system delivers on these requirements.

Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage

Panasas provides the most comprehensive family of parallel storage solutions available today. Every Panasas ActiveStor(TM) system is based on the leading PanFS(TM) parallel file system and delivers exceptional performance, scalability and manageability. Leveraging its DirectFLOW® parallel storage access technology, Panasas now supports more than 500,000 servers with cost-effective, data-intensive, and linearly scalable storage solutions. This innovative architecture enables multiple parallel data paths between computing nodes and Panasas ActiveStor storage, thereby eliminating the inherent performance and capacity bottlenecks of today's file systems and file servers. Panasas also dramatically lowers the cost of managing data storage by supporting petabytes of data capacity growth within a single, easily managed namespace and framework.

Cray CX1 Supercomputer

The Cray CX1 system is an affordably priced supercomputer. Easy to configure, deploy, administer and use, it is the right size in performance, functionality and cost for a wide range of users, from the single user who wants a personal supercomputer to a department of users as a shared clustered resource. Equipped with powerful Intel® Xeon® processors and Windows HPC Server 2008 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Clustercorp Rocks+, the Cray CX1 product offers performance leadership across a broad range of applications and standard benchmarks.