Ben Golub President and CEO of Gluster

Gluster, Inc. announced that Ben Golub will join the company as president and chief executive officer.

 Golub brings more than 20 years experience in the technology industry and has an outstanding track record of driving rapid top and bottom line growth in multiple businesses. Golub will replace acting CEO, Hitesh Chellani, who will now serve as the company’s vice president of operations.
 
"We are very excited to add Ben to the Gluster team, his experience and leadership will be instrumental in building on existing momentum and growth of the company", said Naren Gupta, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners and chairman of the board at Gluster. “Hitesh and Anand Babu, the founders, have established a strong foundation and we look forward to Ben’s valuable contributions as the Gluster team delivers on the ever-growing market demand for scalable storage."
 
A recognized technologist and business leader, Golub was most recently president and CEO at Plaxo, Inc., a social networking infrastructure pioneer backed by industry luminaries Michael Moritz (Sequoia Capital), Ram Shriram (Sherpalo Ventures), Globespan Capital Partners, and Cisco. Golub led Plaxo through a complete turnaround, bringing the company to profitability, more than 20 million users, and a large and successful acquisition by Comcast. Prior to Plaxo, Golub served in a number of executive roles at VeriSign, including chief marketing officer and senior vice president and general manager of the enterprise Security, SSL, and payments divisions.
 
“Gluster is uniquely positioned at the intersection of key industry trends – open source, the need for scalable storage, the move to fully virtualize the data center, and cloud computing,” said Golub. “Gluster’s talented team and ground-breaking technology are already providing large enterprises and Web 2.0 companies alike an easy, high performance, and cost-efficient way to manage their data. Starting from this strong base, I look forward to building a world-class company to address a truly global data management challenge.”
 
According to IDC, over 1.2 zettabytes of data will be created in 2010, up 150 percent from 2009, and representing an amount of data equal to a stack of DVDs from the Earth to Mars. This massive growth is coming from multiple sources, such as  Web 2.0-driven videos and photos, medical images,  high definition and  on-demand entertainment content, and the an ever-expanding body of seismic, genomic, and nuclear data. The problems and techniques associated with  managing this massive stream of unstructured data are fundamentally different from those addressed by established solutions for structured data (such as financial databases). Gluster was specifically built to address these unique challenges, providing better scalability and performance at a fraction of the cost.
 
“With over 100,000 downloads, a passionate open source community, and a rapidly growing customer base that is using us in petabyte-scale  deployments, Gluster is reshaping how storage is purchased and deployed in the enterprise," said Chellani. "Ben brings proven experience across a number of different roles and the exceptional leadership to capitalize on this momentum.  He will be a great addition to the Gluster executive team and we look forward to working with him.”

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