SUNNYVALE, Calif. and LONDON, Dec. 4 – Panasas, Inc., the leader in high performance parallel storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, congratulates Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) on being named the 2012 Public Sector Storage Project of the Year at the Storage, Virtualization and Cloud Computing (SVC) Awards. RAL is one of the U.K.'s largest national scientific research laboratories and part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, focused on weather modeling. The lab relies on Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage for scalable capacity and high performance to accelerate its data-intensive climate research.

"With nearly 8.5 petabytes of ActiveStor storage, the Panasas installation at RAL represents one of the largest multi-location, high-performance computing (HPC) storage deployments in Great Britain," said Barbara Murphy, chief marketing officer at Panasas. "ActiveStor gives RAL a solution that offers extreme scalability and simple storage management capabilities so that scientists can focus on important research, not on cumbersome system administration."

RAL deployed ActiveStor across four sites using a shared resource approach to ensure maximum performance for all researchers regardless of location. Performance and scalability were both critical selection criteria to handle the massive data sets associated with climate modeling and satellite imaging, with ActiveStor delivering twice the performance of the laboratory's legacy, direct-attached storage.

"We're pleased to share this recognition with Panasas," said Dr. Bryan Lawrence, professor of weather and climate computing at the University of Reading and director of models and data for the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS). "We have significantly enhanced our research abilities with Panasas in order to deliver powerful HPC storage capabilities in an easy-to-manage platform, allowing us to focus on the research and science for which we are known."

"The SVC awards are voted for by the readers of our wide range of print and online publications," said Carly Stephens, events manager of award organizers Angel Business Communications. "All finalists did well in making the shortlist but Rutherford Appleton Laboratory supported by Panasas was the clear winner in the 'Public Sector Storage Project of the Year' category."

The SVC Awards recognize the users, manufacturers and suppliers operating in the storage, virtualization and cloud computing fields in the European market. The awards took place Nov. 22 at the Pullman St. Pancras Hotel in London. In each of the end-user project categories, awards were presented for both the user themselves and the supplier. All winners and runners-up are listed here.

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc., the leader in high performance parallel storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, enables customers to rapidly solve complex computing problems, speed innovation and accelerate new product introduction. All Panasas storage products leverage the patented PanFS storage operating system to deliver superior performance, data protection, scalability and manageability. Panasas systems are optimized for demanding storage environments in the bioscience, energy, finance, government, manufacturing, and university markets.

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Source: Panasas