Panasas has announced an expansion of its 13-year relationship with the University of Minnesota’s Supercomputing Institute (MSI) to supply a new generation of parallel storage systems.
Jim Wigenbusch, Director of Research Computing at UMN said: ‘The Panasas partnership gives us access to the kind of high-performance computing technology that is critical to tackle an increasing variety of sophisticated use cases with MSI’s `Agate’ cluster. This long-term partnership has provided our researchers with the top-flight technology and technical support they need.’
As its researchers push further into the fields of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, MSI plans to upgrade both the capacity and the performance of its cluster storage systems. To achieve this goal, the university is starting by updating the existing Panasas parallel storage system to the next-generation Panasas Ultra hardware. This will deliver approximately 10 Petabytes of new capacity, representing a net increase of 5 PB that will better support a variety of data-intensive research initiatives. Alongside the Panasas storage upgrades, the capacity of MSI’s ceph-based tier 2 storage, built using HPE hardware, will also be increased by 5 PB.
‘MSI/UMN has bought and installed every generation of Panasas ActveStor over the 13 years that we’ve worked together,’ said Panasas chief operating officer Brian Peterson. ‘I’m very proud of this agreement — a testament to our long-term partnership. We are fully committed to helping the university by supporting their efforts with the technology they need to advance research.’
