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From
about 2012 onwards it became clear that people in the storage industry were
ready and willing to write their own bios on linkedin.com and so from about
2012 upto 2018 I've mostly linked to those detailed self protraits whenever
someone has been mentioned in the
news. Sometimes when
reading the storage
history archive I went back to earlier news stories and added the later
profile links ins too. |
 |
| news, bios
and blogs about key people in the storage market |
Seagate names new VP SSD
Editor:-
July 30, 2012 - After 6 years at other companies Gary Gentry
has rejoined Seagate
to lead its SSD business as senior VP SSD.
He was recently GM
of the Enterprise SSD Division at
Micron.
Editor's
comments:- If you want to see what I've said recently about these 2
companies - from the angle of the SSD market - just click on their profiles.
There are many possible interpretations of what this (and other recent rumors)
mean. The simplest is that Seagate is taking the enterprise SSD market more
seriously.
Skyera increments SSD headcount
Editor:- July 10,
2012 - Skyera
today
announced
that 2 industry veterans have joined the company.
Dr. Alessandro Fin -
Skyera's VP of Product Management was previouslyVP of product development for
PNY Technologies and before
that he was director of solid state storage at
SMART.
Roy DCruz -
Skyera's VP of Array Systems comes to Skyera from iTools. Before that DCruz
was principle engineer at Brocade,
contributing to the architecture of
FCoE and storage
services. His career also spans
Nishan Systems,
Andiamo and
Cisco.
Violin recruits Narayan Venkat as VP of product management
Editor:-
March 28, 2012 -
Violin Memory
today anounced
that Narayan
Venkat, former VP of cloud infrastructure at
VMware, has joined Violin as VP of
product management.
"Flash is the single most disruptive
technology in storage since the advent of virtualization," said Venkat. "Violin
Memory is on the leading edge of the trend with its scalable, flash-based
storage system for the modern, virtualized data center. I look forward to
playing a central role in fulfilling the company's vision to build an
all-silicon primary storage powerhouse."
See also:- Storage
People
STEC gets more serious about developing enterprise business
Editor:- January 17, 2012 - STEC announced that
industry veteran Vaughn Miller has joined the company's Systems and
Software Group as VP of Business Development.
Mr. Miller is
responsible for developing business opportunities with OEMs and ISVs that
focus on enterprise
applications.
During the past 16 years, Mr. Miller held various key
management positions in business development for
Cisco Systems,
NeoPath Networks,
Acopia
Networks (acquired by F5 Networks, Inc.),
NetApp and
Auspex Systems. Prior to
his roles in business development, Mr. Miller served as an engineer for
Landmark
Graphics (a Halliburton company) and
Modcomp.
Editor's
comments:- if you're unfamiliar with the earlier companies in this virtual
cv - before we get to the storage companies - the themes are "real-time"
and "big data analysis", the world's first
NAS company (Auspex) and "virtualization".
I've said for years that STEC didn't put enough effort into
enterprise business development. The company lost market share in the
enterprise SSD market in
2011.
Better late than never to grab a map and shovel in
this year of the
Enterprise SSD Goldrush.
BiTMICRO nurtures microchip design training in Philippines
Editor:-
October 25, 2011 - the Bruce Institute
of Technology is a new training institute in the Philippines - focused
on microchip design - which has been set up in a collaborated effort led by
BiTMICRO in
partnership with Synopsys,
Cadence and
leading universtities.
The name celebrates the family name of the Bruce
brothers - who founded BiTMICRO in
1995 as
an ASIC design consultancy - before embarking on their pioneering market
developments in flash SSDs.
BiTMICRO's Chairman and CEO, Rey Bruce
said "The Philippines' traction in the global microelectronics industry is
almost entirely concentrated in assembly, fabrication and manufacturing.
BiTMICRO is practically the only Filipino founded and owned company engaging
into actual microchip design and engineering. We will do our part in uplifting
the industry to higher valued services and service capabilities with the
technology and products that we develop and produce in the country but this will
be not enough. Our goal with BIT is replicate our success at BiTMICRO in
developing microelectronic design skills."
Rudy Bruce, President of BIT, said "We hope to eventually build a
critical mass of locally developed engineers that can make the Philippines a
favored destination of the world's best microelectronic design companies. We
still believe in the Filipino's ingenuity and their ability to be relevant in
the world stage."
Steve Jobs passed away this week
Editor:- October
6, 2011 - Like most of you - this morning on the tv news I heard that
Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple,
died yesterday.
The outstanding products created by his visionary
ideas affected billions of people in the past 30 years - not just those who
used them or competed with them (or tried to copy them).
Steve Jobs
showed that if you designed digital products which were easy to use, people
would buy them - even if they cost more.
Stories about Steve Jobs
kept thousands of journalists busy during his life and there have been many
books
about his achievements. I'm sure - that like Elvis - the media industry will
long continue paying homage to Steve Jobs and future generations will
find it hard to imagine that there ever was a world without irock and
roll.
Here's a link to an
interview
on CBS news - with Steve Wozniak - life-long friend of Steve
Jobs - and the other cofounder of Apple.
SSD Bookmarks - from Foremay's CTO
Editor:-
March 1, 2011 - StorageSearch.com
today published
SSD Bookmarks
- suggested by Jack H
Winters, CTO, Foremay
.
Jack H Winters' suggestions are focused on the topic of
managing data security in flash SSDs (both in working and not working devices).
These links take you on a tour of the published state of the art in fast /
secure SSD data erase and the related issue of SSD encryption.
from the garage to a top 10 SSD company
Editor:-
February 10, 2011 - OCZ's
CEO, Ryan Petersen reveals in a new article on
bnet.com
the difficulties he faced when he decided his business had to get out
of the memory business and focus on SSDs. ...read
the article
See also:-
the top SSD companies,
storage people,
VCs in storage
re multi-million IOPS SSD marketing - new blog from Woody Hutsell
Editor:-
December 22, 2010 - Woody Hutsell
- who for a decade led the enterprise SSD marketing business at Texas Memory Systems
- and who recently joined ViON
has recently started a blog about SSDs.
His first article bemoans the
current trend of marketers to
quote
ever higher millions of IOPS - a marketing tactic - which he freely admits
he started back in his days at TMS.
In this entertaining and thought
provoking article Woody says - "One million IOPS. Yawn! Is that all
you've got! In fact, I would argue if the extent of your marketing message is
your IOPS you don't have enough… marketing talent." ...read
the article
Texas Memory Systems's founder writes about 20 years of DoD SSDs
Editor:-
September 20, 2010 - Holly Frost founder of Texas Memory Systems
has written a
paper (pdf) which
describes how variants of the company's newer SSDs like the
RamSan-630 have been used
recently by the US DoD and Intelligence Community.
In
another article he
describes some features of their 1st DoD SSD in 1988. The company launched its
1st commercial enterprise SSDs in 2001 - but has continued evolving its
defense based array processing capabilities.
the SSD Bookmarks - WhipTail Tech
Editor:-
September 16, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published an update to the
SSD Bookmarks series
(which includes recommended reading from SSD industry thought leaders) -
with
new links for you
to see suggested by James Candelaria,
CTO - WhipTail
Technologies ...read the articles
Viterbi joins Link_A_Media board
Editor:- September
2, 2010 - Link_A_Media
Devices recently announced that Dr. Andrew Viterbi has joined
its
board of directors.
"I
have followed Link_A_Media's progress for some time and find its culture of
innovation compelling. The company has already emerged as the technology leader
in the data storage application with its introduction of Low Density Parity
Check SoC products in the mobile
hard disk market,"
said Dr. Viterbi. "With its strong financial backing, customer traction,
technology leadership and executive team, the company is well positioned to
deliver compelling SoC solutions to the broad data storage market."
The LAMD LDPC data
recovery architecture can tolerate significantly more noise on the recording
medium at the expense of increased complexity relative to
Reed
Solomon decoders. LAMD's current LDPC-based SOC device reduces the number
of errors read from a disk from 1 in 100 to 1 in 100 Million bits of data,
relative to the previously-used concatenated coding schemes. This enables more
efficient utilization of the available disk surface to store more data and
reduce the cost per gigabyte of storage.
pushing the SSD testing rock farther up the hill
Editor:-
August 25, 2010 - I'm mostly resistant to the idea of rehashing recent news
stories - but yesterday while talking about new SSD technologies a reader
asked me to take another look at
SNIA's SSD
performance testing guidelines - which I reported on
a month ago.
I
said I had been surprised it took
ORGs like
SNIA so long to look at
these issues - because I had been aware of "Halo effects" in
flash SSD benchymarks for years - and commented - "But I guess member
led ORGs have a built in lag factor and only move at the speed of the
slowest exec members."
The reader - Neal Ekker -
whom I knew from his time at
Texas Memory Systems -
put up a spirited defense for this particular ORG opus and said...
""...We've
all known about the fishy-ness of SSD performance claims for years. But I'd like
to draw attention to what an impressive accomplishment the SNIA SSS PTS
represents, no matter its technical merits or ramifications. I watched it
happen, and I can tell you it was an amazing POLITICAL achievement. And
I don't mean that in a negative way. Any time there's more than one person in a
room, there's politics. For a collection of engineers representing both their
own egos and the interests of their employers to finally agree on even this
rather bare-bones beginning standard was just remarkable to observe. I can't
begin to give enough credit to some of the chief movers and shakers.
Neal Ekker added - "This is why I want more attention focused on
the SSS PTS right now, so we don't lose momentum entirely. There's still plenty
of work to be done. We need additional companies and fresh faces and energies to
step up and push this rock a little farther up the hill."
Editor's comments:- During the majority of the SSS PTS development Neal
Ekker served as the SNIA SSSI Education Committee Chair. He's now a for-hire
independent SSD marketing consultant. ...Neal's bio,
...SSS
PTS (pdf), Storage
People
Pliant nabs Dot Hill's VP software engineering
Editor:-
August 3, 2010 - Pliant
Technology today
announced
the appointment of Mark
Delsman as VP of engineering.
Prior to joining Pliant, Delsman was VP of software engineering for
Dot Hill. Before
that, he was the senior director of software engineering for
NetApp and the CTO
and VP of engineering at Adaptec.
Additional storage industry experience includes
Seagate,
Conner Peripherals
and Maxtor.
In his new role, Delsman will manage the software, hardware and
ASIC development
organizations to expand Pliant's position in the enterprise storage market for
solid state based
technologies. See also:-
Storage People
StorageSearch talks SSD with David Flynn, CEO Fusion-io
Editor:- July 23, 2010 - I've been speaking to
Fusion-io
since May
2007 - and I
thought I already knew a lot about the company.
But I was surprised to
learn a lot of new things - which you might be interested to read about too -
in a long talk I had with Fusion-io's CEO David Flynn, yesterday.
...read
the article
SSD Bookmarks - from SandForce's CEO
Editor:-
July 14, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published
SSD Bookmarks
- suggested by Michael Raam,
CEO SandForce.
It
seems like nearly everyone in the
SSD industry wants to know
what SandForce is doing and thinking.
Michael Raam's suggestions
include some great SSD resources which I had never seen before - which is why
the SSD Bookmarks
Series was created.
Do you want to understand more about the
issues that drive SandForce's thinking? If so - read the article
NetApp's Jay Kidd joins board at ProStor
Editor:-
June 29, 2010 - ProStor
Systems announced today the appointment of Jay Kidd to its Board
of Directors.
Mr. Kidd's accomplishments span over 30 years in key leadership roles
at many high profile multi-national storage, networking, and computing companies
with a strong emphasis in product strategy and development, marketing, and
business operations. Mr. Kidd is currently serving as senior VP, Storage
Solutions Group and Product Strategy and Development at
Network Appliance.
Prior to joining NetApp, he held the position of CTO and VP of product
management at Brocade,
where he played a key role in developing and implementing the Brocade product
road map, including infrastructure and strategic evangelism.
Storage Superstars
Editor:- June 21, 2010 - CRN published an article called -
Storage
Superstars which is like a who's who in the storage industry.
Pliant names former Google exec as VP Ops
Editor:-
April 20, 2010 - Pliant
Technology today
announced the
appointment of Frank
Kull as VP of operations.
He brings more than 15 years of
experience in operations management for Google, Cisco and other leading
technology companies.
ECC Tek seeks high integrity acquirer
Editor:-
April 14, 2010 - Phil White, President of ECC Technologies said
today he's looking for a suitable company to possibly acquire ECC Tek (and its
patent portfolio).
The company has IP which can increase the
data integrity
in mission critical SSDs.
Web-Feet tallies SSD numbers for 2009
Editor:- March
8, 2010 -
Web-Feet Research
has just published a quarterly update to its 7th
annual
report on SSD Markets and Applications (annual price $9,000).
This
update focuses on the SSD
market dynamics for the year ending
2009 covering
the Client, Enterprise, and Commercial markets.
Addressed in each of
these markets are the drivers of
SSD adoption,
price points, and
issues associated with SSD adoption. Web-Feet Research has compiled aggregate
SSD shipments and revenue by form factor and application markets covering 2009.
SSD market
research & analysts
Sun's Famous Personalities Beam Down to Earth
Editor:-
January 27, 2010 - as previously speculated last summer - many top people at Sun
Microsystems will not be retained to continue Oracle's new
SPARC / Solaris server
business.
Here are some articles about the departing.
New Book - Oracle Performance Tuning with SSDs
Editor:-
October 10, 2009 - some of the technical folks at Texas Memory Systems
have contributed to a new book called -
Oracle
Performance Tuning with SSDs - written by Oracle expert, Mike Ault.
This
is part of an august collection of Oracle tuning books published by
Rampant
Press.
"Solid State Disk storage is changing the game for
Oracle databases, and how we think about performance tuning," said Mike
Ault. "Whereas in the past a poorly-designed database might take 6 months
and $500,000 in consulting costs to repair, simply installing an SSD can mean
the database immediately runs more than 10x faster for a fraction of
the cost of repairing the source code. We wrote the book specifically for DBAs
so that they could easily understand the benefits and limitations of SSD in
their specific circumstances, and have all the tools they need to benchmark
effectively. Any DBA who wants to keep their performance tuning skills relevant
will read this book."
Rambus Fellow Named Inventor of the Year
Editor:-
October 1, 2009 - Rambus
today
announced
that Craig Hampel, a Rambus Fellow, has been named Inventor of the
Year by the Silicon Valley Intellectual
Property Law Association.
During his distinguished career, Mr.
Hampel has received 134 U.S. patents. These inventions and associated memory
solutions have played a fundamental role in advancements in 3D realism across a
number of gaming platforms, including the
Nintendo
64, Sony
PlayStation 2 and
3 game consoles.
"I am proud to work alongside some of the best minds in the
industry at Rambus," said Craig Hampel, Fellow at Rambus. "Together,
we have designed 3 generations of
memory architectures that
increased bandwidth nearly 100x and helped enable the rapid rise in
performance of computing and consumer products." See also:-
Storage People.
Former Fusion-io CEO Encores at Violin
Editor:-
September 15, 2009 -
Violin Memory
today announced that Donald Basile has been named CEO.
Dr.
Basile (with over 20 years of leadership experience) most recently served as the
CEO of Fusion-io
which evangelized the use of
PCIe flash SSDs for
servers and workstations. Under his leadership, the company concluded agreements
with HP, IBM and Dell. He also led sales growth that generated over 300 global
enterprise customers in less than 1 year.
"Don has an impressive record of building both value and market
footprint rapidly as was shown in his time as CEO at Fusion-io" said Steve
O'Donnell, Senior Analyst at Enterprise
Strategy Group. "He possesses the unique combination of operational,
technical, managerial and marketing skills that will have an immediate positive
impact on Violin Memory."
NextIO Names New VP Sales
Editor:- September 15, 2009
-
NextIO has named DaWane
Wanek as VP of world wide sales.
Prior to joining NextIO, Wanek
served as a member of the executive team at
Dell, where he was a
director of the Advanced Systems Group. Wanek has also held senior sales
leadership positions with companies such as
RLX Technologies,
Scalable Software,
BMC Software and
Data General.
NetApp's Revenue Dips, Names New CEO
Editor:- August
19, 2009 - Network
Appliance today
named
a new CEO.
Tom Georgens is the company's new president and CEO,
succeeding Dan Warmenhoven, who led the company as CEO for the past 15 years.
The transition in leadership, which is effective immediately, is the result of a
management succession process. Georgens, 49, joined NetApp in October 2005 as
executive vp and general manager of Enterprise Storage Systems.
NetApp also
reported
that revenue for the quarter ended July 31, 2009 declined 4% compared
to a year ago.
Editor's comments:- 2 years ago NetApp was one
of the world's fastest
growing storage companies and you might have expected that its leading
position in the analyst
reported fast growing storage
iSCSI market (at that
time) would have protected its revenue growth - even in the adverse market
which followed. But the company has become a laggardly follower rather than a
leader in the critical iSCSI SSD
market. That's clear to potential buyers - even if they aren't buying too many
of those products right now.
Naming a new CEO now - at a low dip in
the company's fortunes - means the new guy will look good when growth comes
back. (If it does.)
Overland's New Marketing VP
Editor:- July 22, 2009 -
Overland Storage
today announced the
appointment
of Jillian Mansolf as VP of worldwide sales and marketing.
Previously,
Mansolf served as senior VP of sales and marketing at
Data Robotics.
Prior to that, she held various executive positions at
Motion
Computing, Maxtor
and Dell. At
Snap Appliance, Mansolf
played a pivotal role in doubling sales and establishing the company as the
worldwide NAS volume market
leader.
New Disk Backup Article
Editor:- July 14, 2009 - a
new article is published today on StorageSearch.com
called -
"Aspects of
Disk Backup".
Written by Andrew Brewerton -
Technical Director (Europe) - BakBone Software - the
new article comprehensively reviews the why? how? and where?
of today's modern enterprise disk backup techniques.
StorageSearch.com has had a decade
long affinity with enterprise
disk backup - tracking changes in the market since the concept 1st began.
This overview article brings that coverage right up to date - from the
perspective of a leading company in the
backup software market.
...read the
article |
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| If you're researching
storage history
and want to see this storage people page as it looked in past years -
click on these links which take you to the relevant pages in the internet
archive.
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Pioneers from early
storage history
- Richard
J. Egan - cofounder of EMC. EMC led the trend to convince enterprise
buyers of open servers to believe it was safe to buy
RAID storage arrays from a
different company than the one which made their servers.
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