Pankaj Mehra CTO, Fusion-io

Fusion-io, Inc. announced Dr. Pankaj Mehra has joined the company as CTO and SVP.

He has been advising the Fusion-io office of the CTO in recent months, and brings more than 20 years of global experience in developing hardware and software technologies to Fusion-io. He will oversee the research of core technology across the product portfolio and develop strategies for collaborating with partners and industry standards associations.

Mehra succeeds  Neil Carson, who served as CTO since March 2010. Carson is now transitioning to the role of AsiaPac CTO and VP.

 An industry veteran, Mehra directed the development of persistent memory at Compaq, leading to his appointment as a distinguished technologist at Hewlett Packard, and subsequently chief scientist of HP Labs Russia. He previously chaired the InfiniBand Trade Association’s Management Working Group and contributed to the 1.0 specification. He was recently SVP and CTO at Whodini, Inc., a big data engagement analytics company he co-founded in 2010.

Mehra holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, and has held prior academic and research positions at NASA, IIT Delhi, IBM, and University of California.

He also pioneered the design of quantitative self-tuning software for large-scale systems and co-authored 20 patents and three books on storage, load balancing, and machine learning. Mehra currently serves on the editorial board of IEEE Internet Computing magazine and is guest editor of special issues on cloud computing, global deployment of datacenters, and webscale datacenters.

"As worldwide CTO, Pankaj brings extensive global experience to leading the development of solutions in big data, cloud and web 2.0 environments, which he showcased during our SDK Technology Open House in March," said David Flynn, Fusion-io chairman and CEO. "As Fusion-io expands our focus on the evolution of the datacenter, Pankaj and Neil will continue their close collaboration on worldwide R&D."

As CTO of Fusion-io, Mehra will lead the company’s worldwide R&D teams, working with customers to design solutions that accelerate datacenters and applications. Under his direction, the SDK development teams will research the impact of persistent memory and new software capabilities that will help shape the datacenters of the future.

"Fusion-io is delivering unique innovation for today’s datacenters as the industry leader in nonvolatile memory solutions," said Mehra. "Around the world, Fusion-io is known for the quality and sophistication of its products. I am proud to join the team and help continue our market leadership and pace of innovation."