The joint effort was inspired by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which is a customer of both companies. LANL runs one of the world's fastest supercomputers, called Roadrunner. This system, built on an Ethernet-switched backbone network capable of more than 250 gigabits per second, connects a single Panasas storage system at more than 55 gigabits per second in production workloads.

"At LANL, high-performance 10-Gigabit Ethernet access to storage is a critical component of our supercomputer," said Gary Grider, deputy division leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Panasas and massively parallel applications of Ethernet for storage area networks have played an important role at LANL. We expect these technologies to become even more important in the next generation of our systems, which are targeting a 3x increase in performance and a 100x increase in future applications."

"Traditional 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches are optimized for oversubscribed routine backbone data delivery," said Mansour Karam, director of business development at Arista. "Arista sees high-performance storage as a key application for non-blocking, high-performance Ethernet network designs and is working with the leader in that arena, Panasas, to optimize 10-Gigabit Ethernet for technical environments."

"In the past Panasas has had to work around the limitations of conventional oversubscribed Ethernet switches and network designs to deliver the performance customers like LANL expect," said Garth Gibson, chief technical officer at Panasas. "Working with Arista allows us to leverage that experience into the design and deployment of new non-blocking network interconnect fabrics enabled by the powerful new architecture of the industry's most innovative 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches."