Don Basile CEO of Violin

Violin Memory, Inc., provider of fast and scalable memory appliances, announced that Donald Basile has been named Chief Executive Officer to address the multi-billion dollar opportunity in enterprise silicon storage.

  Dr. Basile brings over 20 years of proven leadership experience with both public and private companies including financing and building high growth products in the storage, data networking, cable, telecommunications, computing and semiconductor industries.

Dr. Basile most recently served as the CEO of Fusion-io and pioneered the use of PCIe flash cards 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 one year.

Dr. Basile previously served as Vice President of United Health Group, the nation’s largest healthcare company and member of the Fortune 50. United’s commercial software division, which sells software and related services to the entire healthcare industry, grew from $560 Million to $1.2 Billion revenue during his tenure. He also served four years as Vice President and Managing Director of Raza Foundries, a Silicon Valley broadband networking and communications investment firm, investing in companies in the process of transforming the data center. Notable successes included semiconductor, systems and software companies such as Mellanox, Nishan, Intruvert, Yuni, Pacific Broadband and RMI. He began his career serving in both technical and management roles at AT&T Bell Labs, IBM and LCI.

"Don Basile recognized in Violin Memory the opportunity to build the first appliance architected to deal with the kind of sustained IO rates that the Cloud combined with 10GbE and 8G FC can bring to storage. Violin Memory is uniquely positioned to benefit from the increasingly rapid displacement of magnetic media by silicon media at both the top end of the market and in the consumer space, driven by accelerating improvements in price, performance and reliability," noted Steve O’Donnell, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG.) "Don has an impressive record of building both value and market footprint rapidly as was shown in his time as CEO at Fusion-io. He possesses the unique combination of operational, technical, managerial and marketing skills that will have an immediate positive impact on Violin Memory."

"Mechanical disk arrays with their high relative latency, high cost per IO and significant maintenance will hold back further expansion of the data center. We have performed extensive testing with various SSD and enterprise flash technologies and feel Violin Memory is well positioned to be the first true enterprise grade silicon storage offering," said Scott Metzger CTO TransUnion Interactive. "I look forward to helping Violin’s adoption in the industry through my role as an Industry Advisor for the Credit Reporting Industry."

"Violin’s technology has already earned high praise from some of the top CIOs in industries as varied as telecommunications, electronic design automation, semiconductor and consumer products and a significant number of them are joining our advisory board," Dr. Basile said. "This third party validation of our products and technology from CIOs with these major vertical industries is a great indicator of Violin’s significant commercial opportunity."

Violin appliances are specifically designed for scalable, reliable and sustainable use in the data center. These silicon storage appliances scale to millions of IOs per second and tens of terabytes of capacity. In 2010, Violin will deliver density, reliability and per terabyte pricing competitive with Enterprise-class performance hard disk drive storage thus transforming the entire pricing structure of the Performance Storage market.