FREMONT, Calif. — November 27, 2002 — Panasas, Inc., a pioneering company delivering the world's most scalable and agile storage network, announced today that Paul Mitalas, former Senior Vice President at Ciena Corporation, has joined Panasas as Senior Vice President of Engineering. In this newly created position, Mitalas will oversee software engineering, hardware engineering and technology & architecture design. In addition, Panasas founder and CTO Garth Gibson has been appointed to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Technical Council. The Technical Council is a select group of storage industry experts guiding SNIA's technical agenda.
Mitalas brings nearly 20 years of experience building and managing distributed hardware and software systems through their entire lifecycle in both startup and Fortune 500 companies. While at Ciena, he was responsible for developing the flagship LightWorks operating system and managing the integration of Ciena's entire product line. Prior to Ciena, Mitalas served as Vice President of Engineering at ONI Systems, where he built a team of 12 engineers to over 250 in developing ONI's first family of metro transport products. He has also held multiple senior development and management positions at Nortel Networks.
"Paul's extensive track record delivering breakthrough technology will be an essential asset as we prepare to launch our system next year," said Rod Schrock, Panasas president and CEO. "To gain such a capable leader is testament to the potential at Panasas."
"I am thrilled to join such a world-class organization," said Mitalas. "The team has made great progress toward developing the leading next-generation storage system. The Panasas architecture is poised to deliver exceptional scaling in an easy-to-manage storage solution."
Gibson, originally appointed an inaugural member of SNIA's Technical Council in 1999, has been re-appointed to a two-year term. He joins a select group of acknowledged industry experts that guide SNIA's technical efforts, create high level roadmaps for the industry and work closely with standards organizations. Gibson's 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 the founder of Carnegie Mellon University's Parallel Data Lab (PDL) and an IEEE award winner.
Gibson joins a distinguished group of storage industry luminaries on the Technical Council, including: Wayne Rickard (Technical Council Chair); David Black, Ph.D, EMC Corporation; Jim Carlson, IBM; Mark A. Carlson, Sun Microsystems; Roger Cummings; Harald Skardal, Network Appliance; Dave Thiel, HP; and John Wilkes, HP.
About Panasas
Formed in 2000, Panasas, Inc. (www.panasas.com) is the pioneering leader in developing highly scalable and agile storage networks. Panasas is developing a network storage solution that eliminates the inherent scalability bottlenecks in capacity and performance experienced by traditional network storage systems. The system, based on industry standards, is designed to easily and cost-effectively integrate into existing IT environments. The company's headquarters are in Fremont, CA with a development facility in Pittsburgh, PA.
About SNIA
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit organization, made up of over 300 companies and individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA members share a common goal: to set the pace of the industry by ensuring that storage networks become efficient, complete and trusted solutions across the IT community. To this end the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For information, contact the SNIA at 650-949-6720 or via e-mail at executivedirector@snia.org, or visit the SNIA web site at http://www.snia.org.
