First European Office for DriveScale

DriveScale, Inc. opened its first office in Europe and appointed Henk Jan Spanjaard as VP and GM of EMEA to lead growth in the region.

Spanjaard joins DriveScale with more than 20 years of experience in networking, storage, security and encryption. His knowledge of the EMEA market will play an important role in building a regional presence for DriveScale and its Composable Infrastructure platform.

DriveScale unlocks the promise of big data for mainstream enterprises, especially those delivering web-scale applications as a core part of their business.

“We are seeing high demand from Europe and are excited to be opening our first European office. Henk Jan is a strong addition to our growing team. His proven track record leading sales and operations of high tech companies will help us build market awareness and scale across EMEA regions,” said Gene Banman, CEO, DriveScale. “Henk Jan’s deep knowledge of technologies in storage, security and networking will help to strategically drive adoption of Composable Infrastructure and the DriveScale platform.“

Henk Jan Spanjaard joined NetApp, Inc. in 1998 where he held various roles, eventually becoming the regional director for southern Europe, and later became the MD of EMEA for Decru, Inc., a company, in the security market, acquired by NetApp. He then continued his career in security as the VP of EMEA for Mu Dynamics, a company acquired by Spirent Communications in 2012. He later led operations in EMEA for computer networking and security firm Imperva, Inc., followed by a VP role at IT automation and security company Infoblox, Inc. Most recently, he was the VP of EMEA for A10 Networks, Inc..

DriveScale’s SCI Solution Provides Cloud-Like Flexibility at a Fraction of the Cost
Composable Infrastructure platform is designed to better manage compute and storage resources by dis-aggregating them into separate pools and then flexibly binding them together as needed under software control. Performance is equivalent to DAS and no changes are required to the application stack. The solution empowers mainstream enterprises to provision and modify data center infrastructure to match changing application loads. European businesses looking for public-cloud-like elasticity and speed of change at a fraction of the cost can turn to DriveScale to solve the over-provisioning, flexibility and lifecycle management issues that plague IT teams using cloud-native applications and other modern workloads.

Additionally, with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in effect, businesses in the EU and beyond must ensure they comply in order to give citizens control of their own data. DriveScale’s platform includes encryption and key management tools built in to ensure consistent and automatic security and encryption for all application data residing on disks. Encryption gives businesses running modern workloads such as Hadoop, NoSQL, object storage or MPP databases protection of personal information stored in data centers–critical in complex security landscape.

“The time is right and the market is sizeable for Software Composable Infrastructure in Europe. European enterprises are quite advanced and demand a solution to manage their growing modern workloads like Hadoop and Cassandra,” Spanjaard said. “Coming from a career at larger, more established companies, I chose to jump head first into the start-up world because I believe in DriveScale’s elegant solution that solves a problem many people have with modern workloads. With DriveScale, businesses can optimize their big data workloads, build a future-proofed data center and experience higher performance at a much lower cost than public cloud solutions.“