According to the latest news we hear from the industry, the high performance computing storage specialist Panasas is going to enter into the Windows market. The company in their latest blog post announced that their PanFS 5.5 operating system for high performance computers would now support enterprise grade Windows operating systems. The earlier versions of the PanFS operating system that runs on Panasas ActiveStor scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) appliances has support for Linux, Oracle Solaris, and IBM AIX operating systems. However, with the new update in place, they now have support for Windows servers too.
Even though most of the high performance computing systems mainly use Linux operating systems, with Windows support from Panasas in place, all that is to change. We say this as working with Windows operating system gives the files system’s storage better interoperability. The senior director of product marketing at Panasas Geoffrey Noer commented about the new support for enterprise grade Windows operating systems by saying the following.
"The biggest step is Panasas has become a Microsoft licensee, with access to the source code and technical documents. Most IT environments have different compute servers with different OSes. The 5.5 version is for mixed-workload environments. It's typical that high-performance applications work on Linux, but the researchers have laptops and workstations that often run on Windows. "When Windows clients talk to storage, they need to communicate with the Windows protocol. Now, with a commercial implementation, we can be up-to-date with Microsoft. Samba was close, but not 100% there."
Being a Linux customer, if this addition of Windows support for Panasas bothers you, Steve Conway of Framingham cajoles you with the good news. Steve sates that this news is done for merely expanding the service horizon of the company and it does not mean that Panasas is changing their focus. He commented about the issue in his latest blog post saying, "Microsoft is a relatively small piece of it. But there are some segments like finance and life sciences that use Microsoft software. Panasas is not moving out of what they do. They are just adding to it. If you can access 10% more of the market, that's important."
Since most HPC file systems are based on Linux, there is no need to worry for Linux customers, as they will always be the primary customers. However, with the addition of support for Windows operating system, people may find porting to Windows a much better option due to better interoperability and other features.
Even though most of the high performance computing systems mainly use Linux operating systems, with Windows support from Panasas in place, all that is to change. We say this as working with Windows operating system gives the files system’s storage better interoperability. The senior director of product marketing at Panasas Geoffrey Noer commented about the new support for enterprise grade Windows operating systems by saying the following.
"The biggest step is Panasas has become a Microsoft licensee, with access to the source code and technical documents. Most IT environments have different compute servers with different OSes. The 5.5 version is for mixed-workload environments. It's typical that high-performance applications work on Linux, but the researchers have laptops and workstations that often run on Windows. "When Windows clients talk to storage, they need to communicate with the Windows protocol. Now, with a commercial implementation, we can be up-to-date with Microsoft. Samba was close, but not 100% there."
Being a Linux customer, if this addition of Windows support for Panasas bothers you, Steve Conway of Framingham cajoles you with the good news. Steve sates that this news is done for merely expanding the service horizon of the company and it does not mean that Panasas is changing their focus. He commented about the issue in his latest blog post saying, "Microsoft is a relatively small piece of it. But there are some segments like finance and life sciences that use Microsoft software. Panasas is not moving out of what they do. They are just adding to it. If you can access 10% more of the market, that's important."
Since most HPC file systems are based on Linux, there is no need to worry for Linux customers, as they will always be the primary customers. However, with the addition of support for Windows operating system, people may find porting to Windows a much better option due to better interoperability and other features.
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