eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Coraid, an ahead-of-the-curve new-gen scaleout storage provider, is making a switch at the top, but not because there are any problems with how the company is performing.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based company, which has built a loyal installed base of more than 1,700 customers worldwide since it started selling products in 2004, on Sept. 12 introduced former Mu Dynamics CEO Dave Kresse as its new chief executive, replacing Kevin Brown.
Brown, who has served as the company’s CEO since 2009, has moved to the Coraid board of directors as an independent director, where he will contribute to company strategy and key industry initiatives–including participation in the OpenStack community.
Kresse has been asked to lead the company’s continued expansion into the enterprise and cloud markets, building on the company’s popular EtherDrive and EtherCloud storage platforms.
Kresse brings more than 15 years of executive experience in the IT industry, most recently at application performance and security vendor Mu Dynamics, which was acquired by Spirent. Prior to that, he served as vice president and general manager of NetApp’s storage management and application integration business, where he worked with Brown and drove revenue growth that led to the first solution integration effort between NetApp and VMware.
Kresse will continue to hold a board seat as an independent director at Embrane, the software-defined network services company.
“Enterprise and cloud data centers are undergoing a massive shift towards commodity scale-out designs and software-driven automation. Coraid is ideally positioned with top-tier customers and a proven storage platform to help customers deliver enterprise-class storage within an elastic, programmable cloud architecture,” Kresse said.
“Coraid has the team and is delivering the right solutions to become the storage platform of choice for the world’s largest private and public cloud infrastructure buildouts,” he said.
In recent years, Coraid has gained more than 1,700 customers worldwide, including Fortune 100 organizations in the automotive, financial services, manufacturing, retail, networking, defense, aerospace and telecommunications sectors. In the cloud sector, leading customers including Sony Music, Shutterstock, RackForce, EVault and Tableau have deployed petabytes of Coraid storage to handle massive data growth and millions of customers.
Over the past year, The Wall Street Journal named Coraid a Top 50 Startup, and Bloomberg Businessweek highlighted the company as a Hot Enterprise Startup.
The company’s EtherDrive platform combines enterprise-class storage features with a scale-out architecture running on massively parallel Layer-2 Ethernet, enabling customers to achieve the elasticity and economics of web-scale clouds without trading off performance or resilience, Brown said.
Coraid EtherCloud adds powerful policy-based automation to enable one-click self-service, lower OPEX, rapid service innovation and integration into modern cloud stacks such as OpenStack.