Panasas, HGST Offer iRODS Solution

October 7, 2016

By Bio-IT World Staff

October 7, 2016 | Yesterday Panasas and HGST announced a solution using iRODS to link the Panasas ActiveStor storage system with HGST’s object storage Active Archive System.

iRODS (Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) is an open source data management system that virtualizes data storage resources by putting a unified namespace on files regardless of where they are located, making them appear to the user as one project. By linking the Panasas storage system with HGST’s archive system, the companies hope to create an easily managed, high-performance multi-tier storage infrastructure that accelerates and optimizes data access, simulations and data analysis for research organizations working to improve medical discoveries through bioinformatics.

Panasas ActiveStor Performance Scale-out NAS (network attached storage) combines Parnasas’ DirectFlow high-performance parallel access protocol for life sciences compute grid processing and extremely low opex with high availability via the mature sixth generation PanFS file system. ActiveStor scales from terabytes to more than 45PB in a single namespace and 360GB/s or 2.6M IOPS.

The HGST Active Archive System is simple to deploy and easy to scale. The solution offers end-to-end encryption security for in-flight and data at-rest protection at a low total cost of ownership: low acquisition cost, power/TB, high capacity and density.

Between the two, iRODS will offer easy data discovery with metadata catalog and rules-based storage tiering between Panasas and HGST for efficient data placement. Data workflows can be automated with a rules engine that permits any action to be initiated by any trigger on any server or client in the grid. Collaboration is made secure and easy with configurable user authentication and SSL, users need only to be logged in to their home grid to access data on a remote grid. iRODs also helps control costs by allowing data to be aligned to the right storage technology through rules-based tiering, the companies said in a white paper.