FREMONT, Calif. — April, 25 2006 — Panasas, Inc., today announced that China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) has deployed the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster™ to increase performance, streamline storage management and reduce overall IT costs as CNOOC transitions from mainframes to powerful and cost-effective Linux clusters. Through a partnership with ModernTech Computer & Peripheral Ltd. in Hong Kong, Panasas has now extended its global reach to include Mainland China to serve customers such as CNOOC.

Headquartered in Beijing, CNOOC is one of the three largest state-owned oil and gas exploration and production companies in China. When the CNOOC Research Center began to replace aging UNIX mainframes with Linux clusters to support data processing applications, the company ran into a common challenge. CNOOC achieved more compute power for its Master Production Scheduling (MPS) application and Paradigm Focus™ seismic processing system; however, an existing legacy storage solution created performance bottlenecks and costly IT management problems.

"The Panasas Storage Cluster was deployed after a careful evaluation of competitive high-speed storage alternatives, and we’ve solved the bottleneck problems caused by traditional NAS and SAN devices," said Liu Yongjiang, senior engineer at CNOOC's Research Center. "The Panasas solution has provided us with three times greater cluster performance than with our previous storage system. We have also simplified storage management, improved reliability and increased scalability so that we can take on more processing jobs without increasing IT costs."

Like other Panasas oil and gas customers, CNOOC was able to quickly reap measurable benefits using the Panasas Storage Cluster. Panasas’ combination of object-based storage devices and a parallel file system provides CNOOC with a system that significantly improves cluster performance and seamlessly integrates with both Linux clusters and existing legacy computing environments. The integrated hardware/software solution helped the CNOOC Research Center avoid a costly and time-consuming deployment and reduced many of the storage management burdens faced by IT administrators. From within a single, global namespace, the Panasas Storage Cluster delivers CNOOC both scalable capacity and bandwidth that allows the company to maximize the investment in Linux clusters and reduce the overall cost of ownership.

"We're excited to have CNOOC join our growing family of oil and gas customers around the world whose highly competitive businesses rely on Panasas storage solutions to help drive business efficiencies and profitability," said Victor Perez, president and CEO at Panasas. "With the help of our valued partner ModernTech, we look forward to expanding the deployment of the Panasas Storage Cluster to additional customers throughout Mainland China."

About ModernTech

ModernTech Computer & Peripheral Ltd. was founded in 1985. ModernTech is based in Hong Kong. Over the last 20 years, ModernTech has continued to grow and respond quickly to new opportunities with innovative, high performance computing solutions. Today, ModernTech has expanded operations to various markets in the region, including Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Philippines and Singapore. Additionally, ModernTech has become a leading computer and peripheral products supplier in Hong Kong and Mainland China. ModernTech has been endeavoring to provide customers with the best products and services in the high-performance computing industry ModernTech is Panasas' authorized agent in Mainland China. For more details, please visit www.moderntech.com.hk.

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc., the global leader in parallel storage solutions, helps commercial, government and academic organizations accelerate their time to results leading to real world breakthroughs that improve people’s lives. Panasas’ high-performance storage systems enable customers to maximize the benefits of Linux clusters by eliminating the storage bottleneck created with legacy network storage technologies. Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters, in conjunction with the ActiveScale® Operating Environment and PanFS™ parallel file system, offer the most comprehensive portfolio of storage solutions for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. Panasas is headquartered in Fremont, California. For more information, please visit www.panasas.com.

Panasas, ActiveScale, DirectFLOW and PanFS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Panasas, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.