Some Big Storage Names at BlueData Board

BlueData, Inc., provider of big data private clouds for enterprises, announced an executive advisory board that will support the company as it prepares to launch its virtualized big data infrastructure offering.

 The company also announces the expansion of its board of directors to include Eric Wolford, venture partner, Accel Partners, and former president of the products group, Riverbed.

The industry team supporting BlueData includes executives who have built critical infrastructure for companies such as Facebook, ServiceNow, NetApp, Netflix and VMware. This group validates BlueData’s approach toward creating a responsive big data infrastructure that will support a new generation of business-critical applications. BlueData reduces big data infrastructure complexities with a purpose-built private cloud platform that allows access to any application on any server or on any storage.

“Unstructured data is growing at unparalleled rates, presenting both an opportunity and a challenge for IT executives who want to assimilate and leverage this information for business advantage. As customers deploy and expand a variety of big data solutions, they inevitably confront the difficulties of management and operational scale-out. BlueData targets this increasingly attractive infrastructure opportunity,” said Wolford.

The BlueData executive advisory board includes the following executives and IT leaders:

• Frank Slootman, president and CEO of ServiceNow and former CEO of Data Domain.
• Steve Kleiman, SVP and chief scientist of NetApp and former CTO of NetApp.
• Mike Nelson, former Fellow at VMware, where he architected vSphere, vMotion and VMFS.
• Dhruba Borthakur, software engineer in the database engineering team at Facebook and an early Hadoop architect at Yahoo!.
• Mike Kail, VP of IT Operations at Netflix.
• Sudhir Ispahani, CEO of Alpha Global Partners LLC.
  Lorrie Norrington, operating partner at Lead Edge Capital and former president of eBay Marketplaces.

“Kumar and Tom have cracked the code on bringing the ben,ts and economics of big data to the broader enterprise market by taking the benefits of virtualization to big data infrastructure. BlueData has an opportunity to transform how enterprises manage their big data infrastructure,” said Slootman.

BlueData founders have careers leading technology innovation at VMware, Agami Systems, Akamai Technologies and Silicon Graphics. co-founder and CEO Kumar Sreekanti was formerly VP of R&D at VMware, where he was responsible for stoage , availability in the cloud infrasructure business unit. co-founder and chief architect Tom Phelan has spent 25 years working on cutting-edge computer storage and virtualization technologies. He was a member of the Silicon Graphics team that developed XFS, the first commercially available 64-bit file system. Most recently at VMware, he was an architect in the storage team that designed and developed the highly extensible ‘pluggable storage architecture’ for ESX.

“By using the power of virtualization, BlueData provide the infrastructure, flexibility and easticity enterprises need. As a result, BlueData enables enterprises to get the same value out of their big data as companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! do, but at a fraction of the cost and with far fewer resources,” said Sreekanti.