It's splitsville for Panasas' blades: It's better for the metadata, kids

Panasas has separated out its Director blades in its latest ActiveStor iteration and put them in an ActiveStor Director 100 controller component product line to scale performance and capacity separately. Panasas delivers scale-out and parallel file system access for high-performance computing with its ActiveStor nodes. The …

[Anonymous Coward]

blade count incorrect

Panasas uses 11 slot shelves not 12. Just count the number of blades in the picture. Typical build outs as far as I know included 1 director blade + 10 storage blades for each shelf. With the new set up you can have a Director 100 or whatever and multiple 0+11 storage blade shelves.

[Anonymous Coward]

I must have tripped and fallen into a time warp and travelled back 5 years. I wonder if this “Director Box” will get pulled just before launch, like it did back then? At that time, the significant cost increase for just a modest ~2x performance boost made no sense and the product was pulled. They seem to be in the same boat here - "The ASD-100 Director has double the metadata processing performance of the prior generation DB20 Director blade." So, unless the ASD-100 is less than 2x the cost of a Director Blade, for the stated 2x performance, then except for corner cases, it really makes no sense - again.

Unless Panasas can fully decouple their excellent file system from that 15-year old blade hardware architecture, I fear they will continue to plod along as a low volume niche player.