Panasas ActiveStor and Qumulo compete in high-performance data storage solutions. Qumulo often stands out due to its broad feature set and comprehensive approach.
Features: Panasas ActiveStor is characterized by its scalability, reliability, and performance in high-demand environments. It uses PanFS to enhance data workflows. Qumulo offers real-time analytics, virtually limitless scalability, and cloud-native capabilities, focusing on analytics and flexibility suitable for varied environments.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Panasas ActiveStor is known for seamless deployment and proactive customer service. Qumulo's deployment process is quick and intuitive, supported by responsive, personalized customer service. The primary difference is in Panasas's traditional support model compared to Qumulo's agile and personalized offerings.
Pricing and ROI: Panasas ActiveStor provides competitive setup costs with a strong ROI for scalability-focused enterprises, ensuring cost predictability. Qumulo might have a higher initial cost but compensates with advanced features and significant scalability, balancing initial investment with long-term efficiency.
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.
Qumulo is a data storage and management platform that promotes object-based storage for users, backup archives, and surveillance. Its primary use case is to provide a cost-effective and feature-rich solution for managing large data.
Qumulo's data protection algorithm ensures the safety of node data, while its integration with backup platforms like Veeam and Veritas makes it easy to manage backups. The platform offers a good balance between operational cost and complexity versus feature set, making it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes.
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