Panasas Grows 25% in 2009

Panasas, Inc. increased sales by 25 percent in a year of economic decline for the rest of the storage industry. With widespread adoption of its products across many industries, Panasas doubled the number of new customers in 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. In Q4 Panasas also achieved the highest revenue quarter in company history. Panasas attributes its significant growth in 2009 to new products offering high ROI and broader customer appeal, as well as expanded partnerships.

New Products
In Q2 2009 the company launched a new family of Panasas ActiveStor solutions with a comprehensive range of attractive price/performance options that can fit any IT budget while doubling the disk drive storage capacity to provide greater customer value. All Panasas storage includes the company’s unique enterprise-class Tiered Parity architecture, which protects against all levels of media errors to deliver superior reliability and data integrity.

In the second half of 2009, the company began shipping the Panasas ActiveStor (PAS) Series 9 system, the first cost-effective hybrid storage platform providing the world’s highest performance for all customer workloads and automated data management of tiered storage. Panasas’ innovative design with solid state disks (SSDs), DRAM, and rotational disk drives enables customers to optimize performance regardless of application workload or file size. For enhanced business continuity, Panasas also launched its ActiveStor Replicator solution, which delivers continuous data replication and recovery across a range of locations, platforms, and backup systems.

New Customers
Because its solutions enable faster time to results, enterprise-class availability, seamless scalability, and dramatic cost savings, Panasas set a record in the number of new customers it acquired in a single year. The company continued to expand across a wide range of markets, with new customers in aerospace, climate modeling, cloud computing, energy exploration, financial services, government, higher education, life sciences, manufacturing design, and genetic research.

Panasas storage powers global corporations, major educational institutions, and government agencies around the world to meet the rigorous demands of today’s market.

Panasas solutions:

• Consolidate storage for major cost savings
• Provide enterprise-class reliability for data archiving, backup and recovery
• Scale out NAS environments to petabytes of storage without disrupting users
• Manage huge file directories under a single global namespace
• Offer the flexibility to operate in multiprotocol environments such as Linux, CIFS (Common Internet File System), and NFS (Network File System) for smooth integration

Panasas solutions have been deployed in a wide range of customer projects such as gas exploration on boats, running automotive simulations for racetracks, doing real-time portfolio analysis, processing gene sequencing data, and archiving petabytes of data for business continuity.

"The operational costs of storing and managing data with traditional scale-up systems have spiraled, driving users to look for more cost-efficient architectures. IT purchases have come under closer scrutiny, and users are demanding more performance, reliability, scalability, and ROI from their storage systems," said Terri McClure, senior analyst at analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group. "Panasas’ increasing customer traction is validation that the company excels in these areas and has profited by meeting higher customer expectations."

"Although we evaluated many storage vendors, Panasas offered the only solution that met all our stringent requirements for reliability, scalability, ease of management, and low total cost of ownership," said Dr. Maldonado, CEO, Connect For Education. "We gained all these benefits at an affordable price while avoiding the need to hire additional IT resources."

"2009 was especially rewarding because in a year of economic downturn, Panasas saw an upturn with a healthy growth rate," said Randy Strahan, CEO of Panasas. "Our value proposition really resonated with end users. We provide solid cost savings, simplify IT, and accelerate time to results while providing high availability and outstanding support – a compelling combination for any corporation."

New Partnerships
Over the last year Panasas has expanded its ecosystem and market reach with strategic technology partners and resellers. To provide a complete solution for customers, Panasas has partnered with technology leaders in their respective fields including IBM, Cray, Intel, ANSYS, Arista Networks, BakBone and Penguin Computing.

These solution partnerships have enabled:

• Smooth integration of Panasas solutions in IBM and Cray supercomputer environments
• Innovative use of SSDs in blazing-fast Panasas storage architecture
• Optimized performance for the computer-aided engineering (CAE) market
• Closer coupling with 10-Gigabit Ethernet for maximum performance and reliability
• Enhanced backup and disaster recovery
• Seamless interoperability with cloud services

Panasas channel partners worldwide contributed 50 percent of the company’s 2009 revenues, compared to 35 percent in 2008. The growth in channel sales can be attributed to close partnerships with worldwide channel partners such as Dell and SGI; regional resellers around the world; and leading cluster computing providers such as Penguin Computing, which offers a broad range of hardware and software solutions, as well as cloud services.

"Panasas is an exceptional vendor in terms of product quality, performance, and reliability. We share a common vision about cloud computing and delivering a great customer experience," said Charles Wuischpard, CEO, Penguin Computing. "2010 should be another great year for both companies."

Panasas’ worldwide reach includes 33 countries, with installations ranging from a single server with 20 terabytes of storage to a single customer with over 4 petabytes of storage in a single Panasas file system handling more than 14,000 server nodes and 28,000 processors.