Press Release 841 Published by

A press release from Panasas, Inc.:

FREMONT, Calif. (July 18, 2005) – Panasas, Inc. today announced the company recently completed the most successful half year in company history. Revenues grew more than 500 percent between 1H2004 and 1H2005, based on significant wins across all key vertical markets including government, oil & gas, life sciences, digital media and computer-aided engineering. The company is also successfully driving revenue growth from its installed base, with substantial repeat business generated from existing customers. As a result of this growth and the company’s market expansion plans, Panasas announced the addition of Glen T. Haubl as chief financial officer.

“We are hitting on all of our business metrics as we continue to establish Panasas as the industry standard in high-performance storage for Linux clusters,” said Victor Perez, president and CEO at Panasas. “We have worked hard to increase our customer base, expand our sales and marketing efforts, enhance our product capabilities and drive towards operational efficiency. In doing so we have created a strong, sustainable business built to serve the long term needs of our customers.”



Customers, Partnerships Fuel Momentum

Panasas is helping to drive Linux cluster computing into the mainstream with scalable, simple to implement network storage solutions. More and more companies are using high performance computing (HPC) to simulate the real world, enabling breakthroughs in genomic research, oil exploration, digital animation and computer aided engineering. The success in the first half of 2005 is exemplified by the following:

· Customer Success – Panasas added new customers and extended existing relationships with customers at organizations such as Geophysical Development Corporation (GDC), the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, Stanford University’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which includes support for Thunder, the number seven supercomputer in the world.

· New and Expanded Partnerships – Panasas announced a worldwide distribution agreement with Verari Systems, Inc. where Verari will co-brand and sell the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster™ in conjunction with the company’s platform-independent blade computing systems. Panasas further 7strengthened its relationship with AMD, announcing ongoing support of the AMD64 platform and its innovative new Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ processors.

· Global Expansion – Executing on its global expansion strategy, the company achieved wins in each major theater around the world – North America; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and Asia Pacific.

According to a May 2005 IDC report(1) total HPC revenue will grow to $10.1 billion by 2009. The report noted that clusters have gained significant momentum, and IDC expects clusters to continue to capture share in the HPC market throughout the forecast period. Clusters currently account for about half of all revenue in the HPC market. The report also notes that national and global issues, such as national security and homeland defense, and increasing costs of energy, will drive growth in the overall market. Clusters are sold into all segments of the HPC market, with applications ranging from support of general engineering workload in throughput environments, to high-end capability applications in such areas as seismic analysis and nuclear physics.

“By its nature, technical computing generates significant requirements for data storage systems in terms of volume, scalability and performance,” said Addison Snell, research director at IDC’s workstations and high-performance systems program. “Adoption of clustered storage systems that meet these technical computing requirements will most likely grow in parallel with cluster deployments.”

Haubl To Lead Panasas Corporate Finance

Haubl joins Panasas from Maxtor where he most recently held the position of treasurer at the $4B manufacturer of hard disk drives. He played an instrumental role as part of a team that quadrupled revenue through the combination of internal growth and acquisitions. Haubl served as lead business negotiator for Maxtor’s $2B merger with Quantum in 2001, working to complete the merger in less than nine months, a record at the time. He was also a pivotal member of the Maxtor finance team that executed a successful initial public offering in 1998 and secondary offering in 1999.
“Victor and the Panasas team have done a tremendous job in building an organization that has all of the attributes for long term success. I view this as an opportunity to help a promising organization reach its full potential,” said Haubl. “We will continue to build value through responsible business practices, selective and strategic expansion and forward-thinking planning to capitalize on our global market opportunity.”

About Panasas
Panasas, Inc. helps companies accelerate the speed and accuracy of their business decisions, leading to real world breakthroughs that improve people’s lives. Panasas enables customers to maximize the benefits of Linux clusters by breaking down the storage bottleneck created by legacy network storage technologies. Through the delivery of the company’s Storage Cluster Platform, which combines industry-standard hardware with the company’s ActiveScale File System and professional services, the company has become the established leader in object-based, clustered storage. Panasas’ headquarters are in Fremont, CA with devlopment facilities in Pittsburgh, PA and Houston, TX. For more information, please visit www.panasas.com.

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1 – IDC report #33358 - Worldwide High-Performance Technical Computer Server 2005 - 2009 Forecast