Mike Gustafson, Former Chief of BluArc, Becomes CEO of Virident

Virident Systems, Inc. announced the appointment of Mike Gustafson as CEO and a member of its Board of Directors.

The company also announced it has raised an additional $26 million in a Series D round of funding.

Former CEO and co-founder Kumar Ganapathy will remain with the company and work closely with the executive team on business strategy, new product development and strategic partnerships.

Mitsui Global Investments was the lead investor in the current round of funding, joined by existing investors Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures, bringing total financing to $76 million. Virident is also backed by Intel, Cisco Systems and a storage solution provider and Artiman Ventures.

The investment will be used to fuel the company’s growth by expanding in the areas of sales and marketing as well as new software and solutions development to capitalize on the market disruption caused by server-attached flash, which is leading to software-defined storage in data centers.
 
"The flash storage market is predicted to grow to $4 billion by 2015, and this investment only strengthens our conviction that Virident will become the primary industry provider of the fastest storage class memory solutions to the world’s leading enterprise datacenters," said Sanjay Pichaiah, investment director at Mitsui Global Investment.
 
Gustafson brings more than 23 years of experience and leadership in the storage, computer and IT industries. He was most recently with Hitachi Data Systems, where he served as SVP and GM of the File and Content Business. He served as president and CEO of BlueArc from 2005 until the acquisition of the company by Hitachi in September 2011. At BlueArc, he led a team that built the company over seven years into a top-three market-share player in enterprise NAS.

Prior to BlueArc, Gustafson was at McData, a storage area network
company, for six years, where he helped drive the company’s revenue
growth in the SAN market while holding positions as SVP of sales and
services, as well as of marketing. He was on the team that helped lead
anl IPO in late 2000; following the IPO, he helped drive the company to
$440 million in revenues and established successful OEM relationships
and strategic partnerships with companies such as EMC, IBM, HDS, HP and
Dell.
 
"The storage industry is experiencing a large disruptive market shift. Flash storage is in the infancy of its growth, and it’s only a matter of time before it will be commonplace in the datacenter," said Gustafson. "Virident is well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity with its world-class technology, solid backing by top investors and datacenter leaders, and our employee experience and commitment to win."
 
This news comes on the heels of Virident’s announcement of FlashMAX II, the second generation of the company’s PCIe flash-based SCM solution for enterprise environments. It provides performance and capacity than in a single low-profile card, enabling organizations to make the most of crowded data center space and control sprawl. New to the product is its support of VMware ESXi and VDI environments for performance of virtualized desktops and applications.