Panasas today announced the PAS HC, a high-capacity archive designed to store unstructured data and complement the company’s high-performance scale-out NAS systems.
The PAS HC is a multi-petabyte, scale-out NAS system that interoperates with the current PAS 7, 8 and 9 families of NAS products.
The system packs nearly 1PB (960TB per rack) of raw storage capacity, and can scale a storage pool into the multi-petabyte range under a single global namespace.
The PAS HC runs Panasas’ new 64-bit operating system architecture and 64Gbps Fibre Channel back end. The system is said to deliver more than 5GBps throughput per rack, with initial customer implementations expected to exceed 160GBps per system.
Bob Schoettle, Panasas’ chief marketing officer, says the company worked with some of its largest customers to design the PAS HC, including Los Alamos National Laboratory, which uses Panasas NAS and the PAS HC as storage for the new CIELO supercomputer.
PAS HC features RAID-6 data protection, redundant power and cooling, and automatic failover and recovery.
Pricing for an entry-level configuration of the PAS HC with 240TB of capacity starts at approximately $420,000. However, Schoettle says customers will likely start with larger configurations. He says the overall cost of the PAS HC breaks down to roughly $1/GB once the system reaches 1PB or more.
The PAS HC will be generally available in the third quarter of this year.
