STORAGE

Company adds new R&D Center and expands into Asia to drive next wave high performance parallel storage solutions: Panasas, Inc. the leader in parallel clustered storage solutions for the High Performance Computing (HPC) market, announced today it has achieved record revenue growth of 105 percent during the past 12 months, will open its third research and development (R&D) facility and will also expand its presence in Asia. The company’s growth and expansion has been fueled by significant increases in the adoption of its parallel storage solutions by commercial customers, particularly in the energy and manufacturing markets. Parallel storage solutions produced by Panasas enable organizations undertaking complex computer modeling, simulation and other storage-intensive tasks to more rapidly accelerate their time to results. The parallel I/O data access approach driven by Panasas is responsible for the company’s increase in revenue and the increasingly broad array of new customers; strong indicators that the market is gravitating to parallel architecture as the future standard for clustered storage. As a result of this growth, Panasas has added a third research and development (R&D) facility based in Minneapolis, Minn. to further drive technology advances in Panasas Parallel Storage Clusters, which are powered by the Panasas ActiveScale Operating Environment . The new facility, together with R&D centers in Fremont, Calif. and Pittsburgh, Pa. will help the company’s growing worldwide customer base address the performance, scalability, and reliability needed for petabyte-scale storage attached to Linux clusters. Panasas will also add new sales and support facilities in Asia, initially in China and Japan, as a result of recent successful commercial, government and academic deployments in that region. “Our proven parallel clustered storage technology continues to gain widespread global acceptance with users in very demanding applications,” said Victor Perez, president and CEO at Panasas. “The new R&D center, located in an area known for having software engineers with file system expertise, and global sales expansion are important steps in further cementing Panasas as the leading parallel storage solution provider for Linux-based HPC data centers.” Panasas’ customer mix shifted dramatically in 2006. During 2005, the majority of Panasas’ revenues were derived from government and academic customers. During 2006, the majority of revenue came from commercial HPC customers. The three largest market segments, Oil & Gas simulation, Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) and Electronic Design Automation (EDA), now comprise more than 60 percent of Panasas revenue. Today, Panasas has customers across the globe with deployments in 24 countries representing six continents. The recently introduced ActiveStor 5000 Storage Cluster is now shipping to production environments at a number of Fortune 100 sites. The ActiveStor 5000 was designed for commercial HPC users who require a unified storage solution for both their batch and interactive applications to improve overall workflow processes. The ActiveStor 5000 includes a very large data cache and two integrated software products: ActiveGuard High Availability Software , which improves overall data availability through automated failover, and ActiveImage Snapshot, which provides an advanced snapshot capability. All Panasas storage clusters contain the object-based PanFS parallel file system. Using Panasas storage, customers can achieve maximum application performance while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) by driving the cost and complexity out of their storage infrastructure. The fully-parallel Panasas DirectFlow Protocol provides direct access between Linux cluster nodes and Panasas storage to eliminate costly performance bottlenecks that legacy storage systems can create when used with parallel applications. Additionally, a single global namespace dramatically simplifies cluster management. Increasingly, as organizations embrace HPC clustered computing for their business requirements, Panasas is helping them accelerate meaningful results with scalable and easy-to-deploy parallel storage solutions. Panasas is the only object-based, parallel storage system designed to accelerate HPC application performance. In delivering an integrated software and hardware solution, the Panasas Storage Cluster seamlessly integrates into existing environments, is up and running in less than 15 minutes, and allows companies to immediately maximize the return on their investment. Panasas offers aggregate bandwidth demonstrated in production at over 15 GB/s and designed to exceed 100 GB/s. Moreover, Panasas continues to add patented storage technology to its industry-leading parallel storage offerings. Last month, the company was awarded a ninth patent for an advanced file system check and recovery mechanism that enables object-based storage systems to further increase data availability.