Jessica Popp GM of New Infinite Memory Engine Business Unit, DDN

DataDirect Networks, Inc. announced Jessica Popp as the company’s GM of the newly-created Infinite Memory Engine (IME) business unit.

In this new role, she will leverage more than 20 years of experience in storage software and engineering management to build a development organization for DDN’s IME business. In addition, she will oversee the growth of the IME development and quality assurance teams, advance the IME feature set, and accelerate customer acquisition and revenue growth.

“Jessica Popp is an execution-focused engineering executive with a proven track record in managing highly specialized development organizations that build complex, system-level software products,” said Robert Triendl, SVP, global sales, marketing, and field services, DDN. “As customer requirements evolve in both the technical computing and the enterprise big data markets, elastic storage solutions built from the ground up for non-volatile memory will become the norm for enterprise and cloud data centers. Jessica’s leadership skills, her experience in managing distributed development teams, and her relentless focus on execution will be extremely valuable to DDN as we advance the IME product to meet broader market requirements.”

Prior to joining DDN, Popp was the engineering director of the high performance data division at Intel Corporation, where she managed the development and support of the Lustre parallel file system and related products. In this role, she led a globally-distributed engineering division that provided end-to-end R&D, quality assurance, production support and product management for storage software products. She joined Intel in 2012 through its acquisition of Whamcloud, the main development arm for the open-source Lustre file system, where she played a vital role in the development and growth of the Lustre open-source file system software business.

DDN has maintained its commitment to lead innovation in storage performance and scalability for the technical computing and enterprise big data markets. IME business unit reflects this dedication and will drive the development, evolution and maturity of IME software-defined storage product. Available as software-only or as an appliance server, IME is a flash-native data cache that scales out to solve I/O scale and bottleneck challenges cost-effectively. It provides predictable, fast application performance with one-tenth to one-hundredth the storage hardware as compared with conventional storage solutions.

“With the growing challenge of I/O bottlenecks and achieving high performance at scale, DDN’s IME scale-out, flash-native data caching solution, while still in its early stages, will undoubtedly play a major role for technical computing and enterprise big data environments in the future – and drive significant growth for DDN,” Popp said. “I am excited to work with the high-caliber engineering team at DDN, to position the organization to seize the exciting market challenges and opportunities of the future, and to advance DDN’s IME technology radically to meet and exceed the demanding requirements of our worldwide customers and partners, now and well into the future.”