Panasas is leading a new wave of intelligent storage. The Object-based architecture has many inherent benefits to traditional network storage. The core principle of the Object-based architecture is managing data as large virtual objects in contrast with traditional storage systems that manage data in small blocks.

Managing data as objects means parsing files into separate virtual data objects that are striped across smart physical storage media (known as object storage devices). Objects have three characteristic elements:

1. A large variably sized data "payload."
2. Metadata unique to each data object and its corresponding object storage device. This metadata allows each storage device to dynamically resize the data payload as needed
3. Object-based attributes for performance, data integrity and security.

An object-based design alters the storage landscape by delivering these inherent benefits:

• Data objects can be written to smart object storage devices in massively parallel scale to remove the performance bottlenecks of traditional designs.
• Data objects can be resized without limitation and independently from other storage system activity, allowing the management of all data within a single seamless virtual namespace and providing independent and parallel growth properties
• Data objects can be dynamically rebalanced across the object storage devices for continual ongoing performance optimization
• Attributes for data objects can be fine tuned to suit individual application needs. For example, objects can be tuned for differing levels of performance, data integrity and security
• Data objects inject intelligence into all storage functions. For example, data reconstruction in the event of a drive failure can be faster because object storage devices have the intelligence to reconstruct data objects only, not unused sectors on a drive.

Panasas is committed to drive the development of standards for object-based storage. Through the recently ratified ANSI T10 standard, Panasas is working with industry leaders including EMC, IBM, Intel, and Seagate to ensure that open-source, reference implementations of object-based storage designs are available and driven through an open standards process.