TRE, established in 2000, is a global expert in data processing services derived from satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Working with its customers TRE is able to detect, measure and monitor geophysical phenomena (e.g. subsidence, uplift, landslides, seismic faults, etc.) and verify the stability of individual buildings. Its customers include government bodies, energy companies, academic research institutes and space agencies.

The increasing global demand for monitoring land surfaces, analysing potential environmental hazards and increasing public safety, has contributed to increased customer demand for TRE's services. This has led to TRE's requirement to increase their processing performance and storage capacity to meet that demand.

"Our previous storage solution was based on a fiber-channel SAN, but it quickly became a bottleneck as we grew the number of compute nodes required to process the growing number of customer jobs and the increasing sizes of the data-sets", stated Alessandro Menegaz, IT & Security Manager, TRE. "Our production capacity is tightly coupled with our hardware performance, so we needed a solution that could scale linearly in terms of capacity and performance as we increased the number of jobs we were processing.

Working closely with Panasas' Italian partner E4 Computer Engineering, TRE focused on identifying the best storage solution. "Given the criticality of the solution to TRE, E4 Computer Engineering simulated a test environment to demonstrate Panasas storage capabilities against other storage solutions in the market", stated Simone Tinti, System Engineer, E4 Computer Engineering, Italy. "The Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage solution excelled in all the competitive tests and was the only solution to exceed the performance, scalability and manageability requirements."

Alessandro Menegaz, TRE, continued: "The Panasas solution has increased our processing capability significantly by providing parallel data paths directly between the server nodes and the storage system. We've literally halved the time that our system spent on processing all the SAR data. Within five minutes of installing the Panasas ActiveStor Storage cluster we could see all clients and all data."

Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage includes the embedded PanFS parallel file system enabling the input and output of data (I/O) to run in parallel across compute nodes and compute jobs. Two different product families are available; the Panasas ActiveStor 5000 for interactive HPC applications and the Panasas ActiveStor 3000 for batch processing environments. Both families utilise a blade-based architecture, enabling simple installation and upgradeability to provide the ideal parallel storage infrastructure for simulation, modelling and analysis applications.

"Parallel storage has become an essential requirement for organisations seeking to increase the productivity of their high-performance computing environments", stated Derek Burke, Marketing Director EMEA, Panasas Inc. "We're delighted that Panasas parallel storage provides such a significant improvement towards TRE's ability to increase its customer satisfaction and ultimately its bottom line."