Dave Kresse CEO, Coraid

Coraid, Inc. has appointed Dave Kresse as CEO. 

He will lead the company’s expansion into the enterprise and cloud markets, building on the company’s growth and EtherDrive and EtherCloud platforms. 

Kevin Brown, who has served as the company’s CEO since 2009, has moved to the Coraid board of directors as an independent director, where he will contribute to company strategy and key industry initiatives, including participation in the OpenStack community.

 Kresse brings more than 15 years of executive experience in the technology industry, most recently as CEO of application performance and security vendor Mu Dynamics, which was acquired by Spirent. Prior to that, he served as VP and GM of NetApp’s storage management and application integration business, where he drove revenue growth and led the first solution integration effort between NetApp and VMware. Before that, he held positions at Leapfrog Enterprises, PowerSchool, Inc. (acquired by Apple Computer), and Bain & Company. He will continue to hold a board seat as an independent director at Embrane, the software-defined network services company.

Dave holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in human biology from Stanford University and a Master of Business Administration degree with distinction from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

"Enterprise and cloud datacenters are undergoing a massive shift towards commodity scale-out designs and software-driven automation. Coraid is ideally positioned with top-tier customers and a proven storage platform to help customers deliver enterprise storage within an elastic, programmable cloud architecture," said Kresse. "Coraid has the team and is delivering the right solutions to become the storage platform of choice for the world’s largest private and public cloud infrastructure build-outs."

In recent years, Coraid has gained more than 1,700 customers worldwide, including Fortune 100 organizations in the automotive, financial services, manufacturing, retail, networking, defense, aerospace and telecommunications sectors. In the cloud sector, customers including Sony Music, Shutterstock, RackForce, EVault and Tableau have deployed petabytes of Coraid storage to handle data growth and millions of customers. Over the past year, The Wall Street Journal named Coraid a Top 50 start-up, and Bloomberg Businessweek highlighted the company as a Hot Enterprise start-up.

The company’s EtherDrive platform combines enterprise storage features with a scale-out architecture running on massively parallel Layer-2 Ethernet, enabling customers to achieve the elasticity and economics of web-scale clouds without trading off performance or resilience. EtherCloud adds policy-based automation to enable one-click self-service, lower OPEX, rapid service innovation and integration into cloud stacks such as OpenStack.

"Coraid has a tremendous opportunity to redefine storage in the cloud era. Dave Kresse brings an ideal combination of entrepreneurial and large-scale operational experience in the storage industry, and we’re delighted to have him on board," said John Jarve, MD of Menlo Ventures and member of Coraid’s board of directors. "On behalf of the board and the entire Coraid team, I want to thank Kevin for leading Coraid’s growth to become one of the most exciting next-generation storage companies and positioning us to redefine the $30 billion global storage market. We look forward to his continuing contributions on our board of directors."