Panasas

Panasas, Inc.

Type	Private
Industry	Data Storage
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Sunnyvale, California, USA
Key people	Faye Pairman, CEO Jim Donovan, CMO Tom Shea, Chief Operating Officer
Products	ActiveStor
Number of employees	51-200
Website	www.panasas.com

Panasas, Inc. is a privately-held data storage company that specializes in high-performance network-attached storage for technical computing environments.

Founded in 1999 by Garth Gibson and William Courtright, Panasas is a computer data storage product company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company initially started with venture capital funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) and additional investors include the Carlyle Group, Centennial Ventures, Evercore Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and Novak-Biddle Venture Partners. Its first products were shipped in 2004. After an estimated 20 customers, Victor M. Perez became chief executive in August 2004. Faye Pairman (previously of Applied Micro Circuits Corporation's 3ware division) became chief executive in 2011.

Panasas developed an extension for managing parallel file access in the (NFS). This work was later integrated in Parallel NFS (pNFS), part of the NFS version 4.1 specification, published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 5661 in January, 2010. pNFS describes a way for the NFS protocol to process file requests to multiple servers or storage devices at once, instead of handling the requests serially.

Panasas products utilize the proprietary DirectFlow protocol, which is based on the pNFS standard and ideally suited for the high performance Linux clusters commonly found in technical computing environments.

Panasas supports NFS, Parallel NFS and Server Message Block (also known as CIFS) data access protocols to integrate into existing local area networks. Panasas blade servers manage metadata, serving data for NFS and CIFS clients using 10 Gigabit Ethernet.