The clustering capability of the system allows customers to better employ existing capacity. "We've been in customers that have 12 NetApp boxes, and one will be 90 percent utilized and the other will be 8 percent utilized," Schrock says. "We let customers avoid that problem."
The company has ties to Carnegie Mellon University: Co-founder and CTO Garth Gibson created the Parallel Data Laboratory, which studied parallel storage technologies, while he was at CMU. In fact, Panasas's name (pronounced pa-NASS-iss) is an abbreviation of "Pittsburgh Advanced Network Attached Storage."
Besides a heritage of hardcore storage technology, Schrock says Panasas has a business plan that will let it succeed where others have failed. In the past year, startups like Scale8 and Zambeel have closed up shop when their high-end distributed NAS systems failed to find traction.
"Most of the scaleable NAS folks have tended to go into an organization and say, 'We can run all your critical information on our scaleable NAS systems,' " he says. "We're moving to a new compute paradigm with Linux."
Panasas also felt it was necessary to provide high-quality customer support and offer a system with a relatively low initial price point, he says: The starting Panasas configuration costs $25,000 for 1.6 Tbytes, whereas some other startups selling high-scale NAS topped $100,000 starting prices.
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