Panasas Announces Key Leadership Appointments to Drive Global Expansion Across the HPC and AI Storage Markets

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Panasas®, a leading data solutions provider for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), today announced the appointment of four new senior executives to further strengthen its global leadership team. These additions follow the recent appointment of Ken Claffey as Chief Executive Officer and will fuel Panasas’ continued product innovation and go-to-market expansion.

“Panasas is uniquely positioned to have a significant market impact as global enterprises seek modern HPC and AI storage solutions that make it easy to move, protect, and store data at scale to support their business objectives,” said Claffey. “Panasas is at an inflection point as the advent of AI is driving the increasing demand for truly scalable, high-performance storage solutions, and I’m excited to work with these exceptionally talented individuals to achieve our next phase of growth.”

The newly appointed senior executives bring nearly a century of combined industry experience that will help Panasas deliver tangible value to organizations requiring always-on, easy-to-use storage solutions that support diverse HPC and AI workloads. The following join the Panasas executive leadership team:

Hanish Vaghela, Executive Vice President of Sales. Hanish has nearly three decades of experience in OEM, cloud, and channel storage solution sales. His deep roots in HPC stem from his tenure at Xyratex, where he built the Clusterstor HPC storage go-to-market organization from the ground up. Hanish’s most recent position was at Seagate Technology, where he oversaw global sales, sales engineering, and sales operations for the company's systems and solutions business.

Samantha Clarke, Vice President of Channel and Alliances. Samantha is an industry veteran with more than 20 years of storage infrastructure and partner-enablement experience. She joins Panasas from Seagate, where she held sales, partner engagement, and business development leadership roles across device systems, Cloud, and SaaS.

Mike Park, Vice President of Operations. Mike’s successful track record of driving business acceleration and increasing operational efficiencies spans nearly three decades in the industry. Prior to joining Panasas, Mike held leadership roles with Data Domain, EMC, Tintri, and Datrium, where he honed his operational excellence, supply chain management, and process automation expertise.

Peter Maddocks, Vice President of Engineering. Peter has over two decades of experience in software development, including a strong background in storage and SaaS technologies coupled with a deep passion for innovation. He joins Panasas from Seagate, where he was senior director of engineering in storage systems. He also previously spent over a decade at Hewlett-Packard, where he led the enterprise NAS and SAN software design and development teams.

"Panasas has been a pioneer in the storage industry from the beginning, starting with the foundation of RAID to developing the first Linux-based parallel file system. We are committed to driving the next era of innovation to meet the needs of emerging applications, and we will be making Panasas’ cutting-edge technology available to customers in new ways,” added Claffey. “I am confident that this new leadership team has the knowledge, skills, proven experience and passion to drive our vision forward and make Panasas the preferred choice for organizations looking at HPC and AI solutions for their data storage environments."

About Panasas

Panasas delivers software-defined storage solutions that redefine the industry standards for reliability, simplicity, and scalability in AI and HPC storage by eliminating downtime, data loss, and complexity. The self-healing, self-managing architecture of the proven PanFS® parallel file system provides unprecedented data integrity and ease of use to accelerate performance-intensive workloads in academic research, government, energy, life sciences, and manufacturing sectors. As a pioneer in high-performance data storage, Panasas has over two decades of experience helping customers solve their most complex data challenges at scale and is the trusted partner of choice for data-driven research institutes and enterprises across the globe. For more information, visit www.panasas.com or connect on LinkedIn.