Panasas ActiveStor and HPE Sonexion are top contenders in storage solutions. Panasas ActiveStor seems to lead in terms of ease of deployment and customer support, while HPE Sonexion shines in advanced features for performance-driven environments.
Features: Panasas ActiveStor provides scalability, management simplicity, and reliability. It emphasizes linear performance growth and is easy to deploy. HPE Sonexion features an integrated Lustre file system, delivers high performance in throughput-heavy environments, and offers extensive configuration options. The core difference is Panasas's focus on simplicity, whereas Sonexion targets high-performance use cases with rich functionalities.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Panasas ActiveStor is known for quick setup and superior customer support, making it appealing for organizations seeking quick integration. HPE Sonexion often requires more complex initial configuration but provides extensive support through specific service agreements. While Panasas favors simplicity in deployment, Sonexion offers detailed configuration options tailored for specific needs.
Pricing and ROI: Panasas ActiveStor is noted for its transparent pricing and tends to offer good ROI due to lower operational costs over time. HPE Sonexion, often starting at a higher price, is justified by advanced features and performance, potentially offering significant ROI for leveraging environments. The main variation is between Panasas’s lower initial costs and HPE's premium investment for performance needs.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| HPE Sonexion | 1.3% |
| Panasas ActiveStor | 1.1% |
| Other | 97.6% |
HPE Sonexion is a flexible storage solution designed for high-performance computing environments, delivering efficient data management and rapid access in demanding scenarios.
HPE Sonexion provides scalable storage solutions with seamless integration and robust data management capabilities, perfect for users looking to optimize compute performance. Designed to tackle large datasets, it is ideal for industries requiring reliable and fast data access. Leveraging Lustre file systems, it ensures efficient throughput and bandwidth necessary for computational workloads.
What are the key features of HPE Sonexion?HPE Sonexion sees widespread adoption in sectors such as research, financial services, and healthcare, where quick access to vast amounts of data is critical. Its robust features make it a preferred choice for organizations focusing on scientific simulations, real-time data analysis, and other intensive computational tasks.
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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