Panasas Powers Up

Startup Panasas Inc. today ended three years in stealth mode with the launch of its high-scale clustered NAS system -- which the company claims blows everything else on the market out of the water (see Panasas Launches Clustered Linux NAS).

But never mind the usual braggadocio of well-funded startups: Panasas has a marquee customer backing it up. A huge customer, actually. Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has already installed 120 Tbytes of Panasas's storage system and has signed a contract with the option to purchase up to 500 Tbytes more over the next twelve months.

Gary Grider, scaleable I/O team leader for Los Alamos's high-performance computing environment, says the lab evaluated several other vendors but none of the others even came close to offering what Panasas did.

"We really, really like the object-based file system model," he says. The Panasas architecture provides much greater I/O throughput -- in the range of 3 to 4 Gbyte/s -- compared with traditional NAS systems. "Normal off-the-shelf NFS servers won't do that. That's what makes object-based file systems different... It enables this kind of scaleability." Grider notes that Los Alamos, which among other applications runs large-scale nuclear weapons simulations, has been working with Panasas since around the time it was founded in September 2000.

Rod Schrock, CEO and president of Panasas, says the system took 250 person years of engineering. "The proof is in the pudding: We have the largest customer in the history of Linux," he crows. The Los Alamos contract is worth an estimated $2.6 million, according to Panasas.In addition to Los Alamos, Panasas has lined up customers that include: GeoTrace Technologies, NuTec Energy, The Rockefeller University Laboratory for Computational Genomics, Sandia National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley Center for Integrative Genomics, and the University of California at San Diego Center for Marine Genomics.

Functionally, the Panasas storage system looks and acts like a NAS server. It supports Unix NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing protocols, as well as an optional proprietary Panasas protocol for even higher performance out-of-band data access.

But the company says its clustered storage technology differs from other networked storage systems in two ways: First, it uses an object-based internal file system, which increases overall performance and allows it be more "self-managing"; second, it allows hundreds of Panasas devices to be clustered together, just like a Linux compute cluster.

That design lets the Panasas storage cluster read and write multiple gigabytes of data per second to a single server. The company says its system delivers random I/O performance of 305,805 operations per second on the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC)'s SFS test.

"Customers know within an hour that it is quite a bit different from anything they've seen to date," Schrock says. "It's a pretty stunning level of advancement for storage." [Ed. note: If he does say so himself.]The clustering capability of the system allows customers to better employ existing capacity. "We've been in customers that have 12 NetApp boxes, and one will be 90 percent utilized and the other will be 8 percent utilized," Schrock says. "We let customers avoid that problem."

The company has ties to Carnegie Mellon University: Co-founder and CTO Garth Gibson created the Parallel Data Laboratory, which studied parallel storage technologies, while he was at CMU. In fact, Panasas's name (pronounced pa-NASS-iss) is an abbreviation of "Pittsburgh Advanced Network Attached Storage."

Besides a heritage of hardcore storage technology, Schrock says Panasas has a business plan that will let it succeed where others have failed. In the past year, startups like Scale8 and Zambeel have closed up shop when their high-end distributed NAS systems failed to find traction.

"Most of the scaleable NAS folks have tended to go into an organization and say, 'We can run all your critical information on our scaleable NAS systems,' " he says. "We're moving to a new compute paradigm with Linux."

Panasas also felt it was necessary to provide high-quality customer support and offer a system with a relatively low initial price point, he says: The starting Panasas configuration costs $25,000 for 1.6 Tbytes, whereas some other startups selling high-scale NAS topped $100,000 starting prices.Schrock expects Panasas to become profitable by early 2005, and he says the startup has enough funding to last it until that point. The Fremont, Calif.-based company has received around $72.5 million to date (see Panasas Hauls in $32M Round). Its current headcount is 125, which includes 100 engineers.

Now that he's kicked Panasas out of its nest, Schrock says he's getting ready to leave. "I committed that I would take the company to this level, and I have announced to the Panasas board and company that I'll be phasing out in the next six months," he says. So what's he doing next? "I'm gonna write a book or two."

If Panasas lives up to his expectations, Schrock will have a nice fat chapter on a clustered Linux storage startup to throw into one of them.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch