Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Flash Start-Up Violin Poaches VP From VMware

Remember the Flash Madness club? One of its members, Violin Memory, just hired a new vice president away from virtualization software company VMware.

Narayan Venkat has joined Violin as VP of product management. He spent just a bit more than a year at VMware, where he led its storage initiatives. His resume includes time at chip companies including LSI and Intel.

At Violin, he’ll be in charge of pushing Violin’s flash technology into the data center. As I told you last summer, when Violin raised $40 million from Toshiba and Juniper Networks and several individuals, its flash arrays run faster than old-school storage arrays, while reducing both the physical footprint needed for the hardware and the power consumption. Hewlett-Packard resells its gear, and AOL is a big customer.

“Flash is the biggest disruption in the data center to come along in years,” Venkat told me. Violin’s last big hire was its CTO, Jonathan Goldick, who also came from LSI.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

I’m a giant vat of creative juices.

— David Pogue on why he’s joining Yahoo