Ken Claffey

Chief Executive Officer and Member of the Board of Directors

Ken, our visionary CEO, comes to Panasas with a wealth of experience from esteemed tech companies and a deep understanding of the HPC and storage ecosystem. Having served as a key member of the senior executive teams at Seagate, Xyratex, Adaptec, and Eurologic, Ken has played a pivotal role in shaping the storage industry landscape. 

Ken’s strong track record of success across the storage and HPC markets is evident in his executive roles at those companies, where he demonstrated strategic leadership and innovation prowess. During his tenure at Seagate, he led the Enterprise storage division to transformative growth by driving full stack product innovation and market insight, effectively addressing emerging customer needs across Cloud and Enterprise markets. While on the executive team at Xyratex, Ken was integral in scaling the company to become the leading OEM provider of Storage systems. There, he built the ClusterStor HPC storage business from the ground up, a platform which ultimately powered 40% of the top supercomputers in the world and was later acquired by Cray/HPE. Ken played a pivotal role in the subsequent sale of Xyratex to Seagate, and he also held leadership positions across product, operations, sales and engineering at other storage companies, including Adaptec and Eurologic. 

As our new CEO, Ken leverages his diverse experience to guide our company toward unprecedented success. His energy, strategic insight, and ability to translate vision into tangible results redefine our approach to innovation and market leadership. Ken’s passion for innovation-led growth, combined with his hands-on expertise, is propelling us to the forefront of the HPC and AI industry’s evolution. 

Tom Shea

Chief Operating Officer and Member of the Board of Directors

Tom Shea is an experienced executive with more than 20 years of business and engineering leadership in the storage industry and a proven track record of delivering game-changing transformational technologies to the market. He has led software and hardware teams in both public and private companies and has managed teams through periods of transition, exponential growth, and successful public offerings.

Prior to joining Panasas in 2014, Tom was vice president and general manager of software solutions at SanDisk. He also worked as vice president and general manager for WAN optimization at Blue Coat Systems and was president and chief executive officer at Gear6.

Tom holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Bret Costelow

Executive Vice President, Global Sales

Bret Costelow leads sales and business development worldwide, leveraging his more than 25 years of experience to further boost Panasas’ high-performance computing (HPC) storage revenue growth.

Costelow’s experience in HPC storage spans many years at Intel and then DDN Storage, developing the ecosystem and global channel sales for Intel solutions with the open-source Lustre parallel file system.

Costelow holds Bachelor of Science in Marketing Management from Oregon State University.

Ren Del Carlo

Vice President, Operations

Ren Del Carlo heads the operations team responsible for supporting the global Panasas customers base with an efficient, high-quality production environment that meets the dynamic requirements of the HPC storage market. He has more than 20 years of experience in product development, global logistics, as well as supply chain, vendor and service depot management at private and public technology companies.

Prior to joining Panasas, Ren held Director roles in the areas of Engineering, Operations and Manufacturing at Infoblox, Juniper Networks, NetScreen Technologies, and Stanford Applied Engineering.

Ren holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Management from Colorado State University.

Jamal Ramahi

Vice President, Platform Engineering

Jamal Ramahi leads the global cross functional teams responsible for delivering the Panasas high-performance ActiveStor storage system.

Jamal is a veteran technology leader with a unique blend of compute, storage, networking as well as platform hardware and software development experience, spanning Fortune 500, mid-size and start-up companies. He has a track record of successfully delivering new products to Enterprise customers and has recruited and built strong development teams. His experience includes managing large OEM relationships and working on embedded architectures including CPUs, ASICs, Flash/solid-state media, rotating media, board and system level design, characterization, validation and compliance.

Prior to joining Panasas, Jamal held executive and senior-level engineering positions at Brocade, National Semiconductor, Nvidia, Unisys and Violin Memory.

Jeff Whitaker

Vice President, Marketing and Product Management

Jeff Whitaker, former VP of Product at Excelero and a founding member of the cloud team at NetApp, leads the Panasas Marketing and Product Management teams. He is responsible for making inroads into new markets and expanding Panasas’ revenue growth.

Jeff is a veteran technology leader with more than 25 years’ experience developing innovative storage, semiconductor, and networking solutions. For over a decade, he designed products that helped customers around the world transition their complex IT environments to run on the top three public cloud providers.

Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from California State University at Chico.

Ken Claffey

Chief Executive Officer and Member of the Board of Directors

Ken, our visionary CEO, comes to Panasas with a wealth of experience from esteemed tech companies and a deep understanding of the HPC and storage ecosystem. Having served as a key member of the senior executive teams at Seagate, Xyratex, Adaptec, and Eurologic, Ken has played a pivotal role in shaping the storage industry landscape. 

Ken’s strong track record of success across the storage and HPC markets is evident in his executive roles at those companies, where he demonstrated strategic leadership and innovation prowess. During his tenure at Seagate, he led the Enterprise storage division to transformative growth by driving full stack product innovation and market insight, effectively addressing emerging customer needs across Cloud and Enterprise markets. While on the executive team at Xyratex, Ken was integral in scaling the company to become the leading OEM provider of Storage systems. There, he built the ClusterStor HPC storage business from the ground up, a platform which ultimately powered 40% of the top supercomputers in the world and was later acquired by Cray/HPE. Ken played a pivotal role in the subsequent sale of Xyratex to Seagate, and he also held leadership positions across product, operations, sales and engineering at other storage companies, including Adaptec and Eurologic. 

As our new CEO, Ken leverages his diverse experience to guide our company toward unprecedented success. His energy, strategic insight, and ability to translate vision into tangible results redefine our approach to innovation and market leadership. Ken’s passion for innovation-led growth, combined with his hands-on expertise, is propelling us to the forefront of the HPC and AI industry’s evolution. 

Tom Shea

Chief Operating Officer and Member of the Board of Directors

Tom Shea is an experienced executive with more than 20 years of business and engineering leadership in the storage industry and a proven track record of delivering game-changing transformational technologies to the market. He has led software and hardware teams in both public and private companies and has managed teams through periods of transition, exponential growth, and successful public offerings.

Prior to joining Panasas in 2014, Tom was vice president and general manager of software solutions at SanDisk. He also worked as vice president and general manager for WAN optimization at Blue Coat Systems and was president and chief executive officer at Gear6.

Tom holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Harry Ault

Chief Revenue Officer, DataStax

Harry has more than 20 years of Silicon Valley field leadership experience and currently is Chief Revenue Officer at DataStax leading Worldwide Field Operations of data architecture, sales, open source consulting, and partner ecosystem development.

Prior to DataStax, Harry held executive positions at Elementum, a Lightspeed backed SaaS company, and also led the Server & Storage division at Broadcom.  Bringing a track record and passion for execution of successful go to market strategies and ecosystem development, he has managed multiple $1 billion+ enterprise revenue engines to growth, repeatability and scale.

Harry holds a graduate degree in Computer Information Systems and Corporate Strategy from the University of Michigan and a B.S. from Pennsylvania State University.  He, his wife and three children reside in San Francisco and are active supporters of the Make-A-Wish foundation.

Robert Cihra

Partner, Dowroc Partners

Rob Cihra has more than 20 years of experience as a senior Wall Street technology analyst and investor focused on the computing and storage markets. Rob was most recently a Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners, previously a Senior Managing Director at Evercore ISI, and partner at Brompton Cross Capital.

Rob earned his BA, Economics and MBA from the University of Western Ontario.

Andre A. Hakkak

Chief Executive Officer, White Oak Global Advisors, LLC

Andre Hakkak has served as co-portfolio manager and investment committee member of White Oak Global Advisors since 2007. He was previously the founder and chief investment officer of Alpine Global, a multistrategy investment management firm that focuses on alternative fixed income and real estate investments. He was also the founder and portfolio manager at Suisse Global Investments, an investment management firm that develops investment strategies customized to meet the risk-adjusted return requirements of bank clients in more than 30 countries.

Andre previously served at Robertson Stephens as an investment banker and principal in its Investment Company Act platform. He has been a co-founder and board member of several financial platforms that facilitate the distribution of philanthropic and financial products, and has served as a limited partner, general partner, or board member of various investment funds and companies.

Andre received a Bachelor of Science degree in finance and marketing from Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, and has held Series 7, 63, and 24 designations from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority since 1991.

Jonathan Lister

Vice President, Global Sales Solutions, LinkedIn

Jonathan Lister’s team works with the world’s most widely recognized brands to help them leverage their vast employee and client networks to build modern selling expertise and dramatically improve how they sell.

Prior to his tenure at LinkedIn, Jonathan worked as Country Manager at Google Canada, responsible for creating and executing the business strategy for the region. Over the course of his career, he has held several executive positions, including roles at AOL, where he was the Senior Vice President of Operations at AOL Europe. He was also the General Manager and Senior Vice President of AOL Canada, overseeing the strategic direction and management of the company.

Jonathan holds a Master’s Degree in business administration from the Rotman School of Management and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto.

Jorge Titinger

Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Titinger Consulting

Jorge Titinger is the chief executive officer and founder of Titinger Consulting, and the former chief executive officer of SGI, a global leader in high-performance computing that was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Jorge has more than 30 years of experience in the technology industry with a focus on strategic development and driving growth.

Prior to his role as CEO at SGI, Jorge served as chief operating officer and then as president and CEO of Verigy, Ltd. Other appointments include several senior executive roles at KLA-Tencor Corporation, Applied Materials, and Insync Systems as well as senior management roles at MIPS and Hewlett Packard.

Jorge holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering Management and Business from Stanford University.