Panasas ActiveStor and Huawei OceanStor 9000 compete in scalable storage solutions. Panasas is often preferred for its simplicity and cost-efficiency, while Huawei is noted for its advanced capabilities and scalability despite a higher price point.
Features: Panasas ActiveStor is valued for ease of scalability, high performance in diverse workloads, and seamless integration with different environments. Huawei OceanStor 9000 is recognized for data protection, advanced distributed architecture, and customizable configurations. The difference lies in Panasas’s straightforward approach versus Huawei's comprehensive features for complex solutions.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Panasas ActiveStor offers simple deployment with quick setup and responsive customer service. Huawei OceanStor 9000 requires detailed planning for deployment but provides extensive documentation and robust support. Panasas is easier to deploy, while Huawei compensates with strong support.
Pricing and ROI: Panasas provides competitive pricing with attractive ROI due to lower initial costs and minimal maintenance. Huawei OceanStor 9000 requires higher upfront investment but offers potent capabilities and reduced operational expenses over time, contrasting Panasas’s affordability with Huawei's long-term value.
OceanStor 9000 is a scale-out NAS storage system specifically designed for massive data storage.
It employs a fully symmetric distributed architecture, supports either file or object storage, and delivers superior performance, extensive scale-out capabilities, and super-large single file system for unstructured data storage.
It is widely applied in media, satellite mapping, gene sequencing, energy exploration, scientific research, education, backup and archiving.
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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