Panasas, Inc. announced that the company increased sales by 48 percent in the first half of 2009, ending June 30th, as compared to the same period in 2008. This compares to an overall decline in the storage industry noted by industry research firm IDC, whose recent report indicated a year-over-year decrease of 18.2 percent in worldwide sales for storage vendors in the first quarter of 2009. Panasas attributes its accelerated growth to a series of new product introductions and enhancements as well as broader customer and channel adoption.

"Panasas has knocked it out of the park during a time of unprecedented global economic stress," said Robin Harris, founder and senior analyst, StorageMojo. "The company's performance leadership provides real business advantage to data intensive enterprises while providing traditional enterprise availability and reliability. Customers are fleeing to value, and Panasas is benefiting handsomely."

New Products and Enhancements
In April the company announced a new family of Panasas ActiveStor high performance storage platforms which offer an unprecedented range of price/performance options and in June began shipping new data protection and performance features that are helping to broaden Panasas' value proposition throughout data-intensive enterprises.

Also in the first half, Panasas announced a new industry-leading 'turbo hybrid' platform - the Panasas ActiveStor Series 9 system - which is scheduled to begin shipping in the second half of 2009. The Series 9 is expected to further expand Panasas' appeal into new markets and applications, as it will be the first product in the market to combine the benefits of high performance throughput and IOPS (I/Os per second) with integrated and automated tiered storage capabilities.

Broader Customer Appeal
Panasas secured the highest quarterly number of new customers in the company's history during the second quarter of 2009. Among those customers, over half came from 'commercial' applications in industries such as manufacturing, consumer goods, energy, finance, and life sciences, with the remainder coming from government and leading research institutions. One third of the overall sales came from international regions.

"We are extremely pleased with the record number of new customers that have chosen to invest in Panasas solutions this year," said Randy Strahan, CEO of Panasas. "The feedback on our new products, pricing, and system quality has been outstanding and we look to build on that as we move into the latter half of the year."

Expanded Partnerships
During the first half of the year, Panasas significantly broadened its solution and reseller partnerships, including relationships with:

• IBM - Power 6 systems compatibility
• Intel - use of Intel solid state drives (SSDs) as part of Panasas' upcoming ActiveStor Series 9 system
• ANSYS - tighter solution integration and leading performance benchmarks with this leading computer aided engineering (CAE) software provider

Over half of Panasas sales in the most recent quarter were transacted via the company's growing reseller partnerships, including both Dell and SGI globally, and regional partnerships that include CSC, Penguin Computing, Verari, Appro, CTCSP, SSTC, ModernTech, BVS, E4, SouthPole, PanAmerica Computers, VX Technologies, and ClusterVision. Panasas also added several new resellers this quarter including JRT, Advanced Technology Group, and Aspen Systems.