Panasas ActiveStor and HPE StoreEasy compete in the storage technology sector, each offering unique strengths adapted to different business needs. Panasas ActiveStor often surpasses in high-performance environments due to its scalability and parallel data access, while HPE StoreEasy is preferred for data protection and compliance, thanks to its integration and security features.
Features: Panasas ActiveStor provides a parallel file system for enhanced performance, robust data management tools for complex workloads, and high scalability. HPE StoreEasy offers advanced security features, seamless Windows environment integration, and strong data protection capabilities. The distinction lies in Panasas’ performance-oriented approach against HPE's focus on integration and security.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Panasas ActiveStor offers straightforward deployment with an emphasis on performance optimization and responsive customer service, while HPE StoreEasy is known for easy installation and strong support in integrating with existing IT infrastructures. The contrast is in Panasas’ performance focus versus HPE’s streamlined integration support.
Pricing and ROI: Panasas ActiveStor requires significant initial investment, justified by its performance ROI in demanding settings. HPE StoreEasy is more cost-effective upfront, with its ROI enhanced by lower maintenance costs and integration efficiencies. Both have unique pricing models, with Panasas catering to high-performance needs and HPE appealing to budget-conscious businesses with integration needs.
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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