Virident Hires New CEO After Series D Funding
Flash storage startup Virident just appointed Mike Gustafsonas as its new chief executive, right on the heels of a massive Series D funding round.
Gustafsonas was the head of BlueArc until it was acquired by Hitachi, where he served as senior vice president of its file and content business before joining Virident. He has just over two decades of experience running companies, and is replacing co-founder Kumar Ganapathy, who will now serve as his company’s CTO.
“The storage industry is experiencing a large disruptive market shift. Flash storage is in the infancy of its growth, and it’s only a matter of time before it will be commonplace in the datacenter,” said Gustafson. “Virident is well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity with its world-class technology, solid backing by top investors and datacenter leaders, and our employee experience and commitment to win.”
Virident makes PCIe flash cards that offer enterprises a very big bang for their buck. Its newest product is the FlashMAX II, which boasts the capability of providing consistent performance (sitting at an impressive 1.5 IOPS) for years – longer than most of the rivaling flash cards out today. This technology earned the company a total of $76 million in financing to date, including this week’s $26 million Series D funding round. Mitsui Global Investments led the round, and existing investors Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Venture also chipped in.
Vendors are coming up with new ways of making flash viable in the enterprise. While Virident focuses on making its products durable, QLogic’s Mt. Rainer adapter centralizes SSDs across severs. The hardware makes it so flash cards installed in individual servers are accessible from a single QLogic driver instead of their respective ones. The adapter facilitates the creation of an SSD-powered SAN that delivers higher utilization and less latency.
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
