REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – February 21, 2001 – Panasas, Inc., the pioneering leader in smart and infinitely scalable storage networks, today announced the appointment of Rodney W. Schrock as President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and also announced the addition of several new executives to round out its management team. Formed in April 1999, Panasas received $10 Million in funding from early-stage venture capital firm Mohr, Davidow Ventures in September 2000.

Schrock brings nearly 20 years of operations and technology leadership to Panasas. He recently served as President and CEO of AltaVista where he transformed the company from a research and development project into a global top ten Internet business. Prior to that, Schrock spent 12 years at Compaq Computer Corporation where he helped pioneer the company’s development of advanced network servers ultimately becoming senior vice president and group general manager of Compaq’s consumer products responsible for a $4+ Billion global business. Schrock obtained an MBA from Harvard University and also holds a B.S. in industrial management from Purdue University.

"I'm joining a visionary team pioneering breakthrough technology to meet the explosive demands for managing business-critical data. The Panasas system is simply without precedent," said Schrock. "We intend to delight our customers with a network-centric architecture that moves data securely in lightening speed directly between application servers and storage devices. Soon, the bottlenecks of traditional file systems can be avoided for good."

Also joining Panasas are proven industry executives including: Paul Gottsegen, newly named Vice President of Marketing, who was most recently Vice President of North American industry standard servers at Compaq; Michael Heald, Vice President of Sales and Support, who most recently served as an enterprise sales vice president at Compaq; and Lewie Newcomb, Vice President of Product Development and Operations, who joins from Compaq where he was Director of Consumer Products Engineering.

Industry-leading Storage Technology

Panasas intends to be the first company to develop and offer groundbreaking smart and infinitely scalable storage networks to answer the needs of a projected $26 Billion market by 2003, as estimated by the Gartner Group. Fully compatible with existing storage products, Panasas technology will offer data security, performance, scalability and management capabilities that leapfrog what’s currently available.

Leading technical development out of Panasas’ software technology center in Pittsburgh is Chief Technology Officer Garth Gibson, who while a professor at Carnegie Mellon University built the largest academic lab for storage systems research. Gibson earned a bachelor of mathematics from the University of Waterloo, and M.Sc. and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. His ground-breaking work on Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), first published in 1988, now provides the organizing principles for all reliable networked attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN) and direct-attached storage products. Gibson is also an elected member of the technical council of the Storage Networking Industry Association.

"Rod immediately understood what Panasas offers, laid out a clear plan of attack and assembled an impressive team," said Gibson, also a Panasas founder. "What we have here is a beautiful marriage of technology and business execution."

About Panasas, Inc.

Panasas, Inc. (www.panasas.com) is the pioneering leader in smart and infinitely scalable storage networks. Formed in April 1999, Panasas received $10 Million in financing led by Mohr, Davidow Ventures in September 2000. The company has operations in Redwood City, CA and Pittsburgh, PA.