Panasas ActiveStor and Hitachi NAS Platform compete in the storage solutions market. Hitachi seems to offer better value due to its robust feature set, although Panasas stands out with its competitive pricing and swift deployment capabilities.
Features: Panasas ActiveStor provides scalable parallel data storage with fast access and large throughput, making it suitable for demanding environments. It emphasizes high performance in data-intensive settings. Hitachi NAS Platform offers file and block storage with advanced data management and notable integration capabilities, focusing on high availability and versatility. It supports comprehensive data handling with its broad feature set.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Panasas ActiveStor allows straightforward deployment with efficient customer support, streamlining the setup process considerably. Hitachi NAS Platform provides extensive documentation and robust support for large enterprises, despite its more complex setup, aiming for thorough integration into existing systems.
Pricing and ROI: Panasas ActiveStor is recognized for its competitive initial costs and effective return on investment in environments that prioritize speed and scalability. Hitachi NAS Platform may have a higher upfront cost, but its comprehensive features provide substantial returns over time, catering to enterprises requiring extensive storage functionalities and integrations.
In our most recent product, the ActiveStor Ultra, Panasas has developed a new approach called Dynamic Data Acceleration Technology. It uses a carefully balanced set of HDDs, SATA SSD, NVMe SSD, NVDIMM, and DRAM to provide a combination of excellent performance and low cost per terabyte.
• HDDs will provide high bandwidth data storage if they are never asked to store anything small and only asked to do large sequential transfers. Therefore, we only store large Component Objects on our low-cost HDDs.
• SATA SSDs provide cost-effective and highbandwidth storage as a result of not having any seek times, so that’s where we keep our small Component Objects.
• NVMe SSDs are built for very low latency accesses, so we store all our metadata in a database and keep that database on an NVMe SSD. Metadata accesses are very sensitive to latency, whether it is POSIX metadata for the files being stored or metadata for the internal operations of the OSD.
• An NVDIMM (a storage class memory device) is the lowest latency type of persistent storage device available, and we use one to store our transaction logs: user data and metadata being written by the application to the OSD, plus our internal metadata. That allows PanFS to provide very low latency commits back to the application.
• We use the DRAM in each OSD as an extremely low latency cache of the most recently read or written data and metadata.
To gain the most benefit from the SATA SSD’s performance, we try to keep the SATA SSD about 80% full. If it falls below that, we will (transparently and in the background) pick the smallest Component Objects in the HDD pool and move them to the SSD until it is about 80% full. If the SSD is too full, we will move the largest Component Objects on the SSD to the HDD pool. Every ActiveStor Ultra Storage Node performs this optimization independently and continuously. It’s easy for an ActiveStor Ultra to pick which Component Objects to move, it just needs to look in its local NVMe-based database.
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