Panasas Welcomes Experienced HPC and AI Finance Executive Paul Hiemstra as CFO

Hiemstra brings over 20 years of expertise in building sustainable profit models in the HPC space.

Panasas, a leading data solutions provider for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), welcomes Paul Hiemstra as its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). With a wealth of experience, including his tenure as HPE’s CFO for the HPC and AI Business Unit, Hiemstra’s strategic insights will enhance Panasas’ financial operations and solidify its competitive edge in the HPC and AI storage sectors.

Hiemstra will play a key role on the leadership team as the company continues to build momentum, providing strategic guidance to the executive team and board of directors and helping to drive profitability, growth, and value creation.

“I am thrilled to join a company that is such a crucial pioneer in the HPC and AI space as we know it today,” said Hiemstra. “This is an incredibly exciting time for the industry overall and for Panasas in particular. I am excited to help lead Panasas into the next frontier as we take advantage of HPC and AI market opportunities. Panasas excels in delivering an industry-leading blend of performance, reliability, and ease of use, and I am ready to work with a best-in-class team.”

With over 15 years of experience, Hiemstra brings a deep understanding of both financial expertise and the intricacies of the HPC market to Panasas. His journey in the financial and HPC realm includes notable positions at Cray Inc. for 11 years, where he started as corporate treasurer and then became head of investor solutions. This was where he also first connected with Ken Claffey, CEO of Panasas. When Cray was acquired by HPE in 2019, Hiemstra played a pivotal role in spearheading the integration of the two companies as CFO of HPE’s HPC and AI division.

Ken Claffey, CEO of Panasas, shared his enthusiasm for the appointment: “I am delighted to work with Paul, as I have watched his career with interest ever since his time at Cray. He brings a unique combination of strategic thought and a deep understanding of the HPC and AI business landscape. If you combine that with his demonstrated financial and risk management expertise, I am confident that he will significantly contribute to our continued success as we drive significant growth."

To learn more about the Panasas, please visit https://www.panasas.com.

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.

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