Evan Powell Chairman, CloudByte

CloudByte Inc. announced the appointment of Evan Powell as its new chairman.

He is a serial entrepreneur and builder of open source communities with successes at Clarus Systems, Nexenta and recently StackStorm.

Since its inception in 2011, CloudByte has delivered storage solutions to service providers and enterprises deploying private clouds.

Its flagship product ElastiStor’s capabilities include per volume QoS management, enabling it to eliminate the noisy neighbor problem. A free 25TB edition of the ElastiStor virtual storage appliance is available on the web site of the company; all flash hardware solutions are also available as are other solutions from partners including Q5 and Wipro.
 
CloudByte recently released an early version of OpenEBS, an Apache Licensed 100% open source storage project addressing the needs of today’s DevOps environments with native container integration and other capabilities. The OpenEBS project leverages some of the technology developed by CloudByte including the ability to control QoS from and for containerized storage controllers.
 
Powell said: “The next wave of storage disruption is upon us and over the months and years to come you’ll see CloudByte and the OpenEBS project delivering a new combination of technology, business model, and community to improve the lives of DevOps architects and operators. I’m already enjoying working with the CloudByte team and the growing OpenEBS community.“

“We are excited to have Evan join us as chairman,” said Uma Mukkara, co-founder and CEO, CloudByte. “Storage requirements have changed with containers reaching mainstream. I am looking forward to working with Evan in building CloudByte and specifically in growing the OpenEBS community.”  

Powell has been the founding CEO of three enterprise infrastructure software companies, Clarus Systems, Nexenta Systems, and most recently StackStorm.
 
As founding CEO of Nexenta Systems, he helped to reimagine the storage industry as one in which the value of software and freedom from vendor lock-in would predominate. Under his leadership, Nexenta became the leader of the OpenStorage movement and the software-defined storage sector, with thousands of customers and hundreds of millions of dollars of annual partner sales.
 
As founding CEO of StackStorm, he helped to create the event driven automation category, building a vibrant open source community leveraging and improving upon approaches used by the largest operators such as Facebook. StackStorm users include Netflix, Cisco, and Dimension Data. Brocade purchased StackStorm in early 2016.
 
Currently he serves as an advisor and investor in a number of start-ups, including Cloudian, Keewi, TextIQ, Journey Software and others.