We're actually in medical imaging rather than genomics, so our data are a bit more irregular, 83;40602;0cranging from large histology and microCT files to smaller MRI and PET/SPECT.
The Panasas is intended for storage consolidation, so it will serve both a large NUMA computer (HPE Superdome Flex with Tesla V100 GPUs) and individual workstations via pNFS/DirectFlow. Will the admin effort be less than for Spectrum Scale or Lustre?
From the discussions we've had with other local Panasas users, we think so but time
will tell. PanFS does do some kind of snapshotting, and unlike some other storage vendors, the base licensing covers the features of interest to us. Panasas has changed its business model. They ported ActiveStore/PanFS from its proprietary custom OS to Linux, and the hardware is now built on standard 2U and 4U rackmounts (they look very much like SuperMicro or Chenbro to me), and are OEM licensing to other vendors to grow their market share. Also Sprach David Simpson:
Yes. With the holding area, no benefit of going to disk for the incrementals. Might as well go to tape also. Currently using an rsync scripted backup for cluster NFS home but limited dirs. Tape library to be commissioned soon. Panasas - will you be writing to that from sequencers or instruments and using it for processing on compute cluster? Interested to know about the admin effort point, also something they mention on their site - perhaps more like effort of looking after an isilon? . Snapshots presumably on it? Are there lots of licenses needed for features?
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