Formation Data Systems Solidifies Visionary Position in Enterprise Storage Industry
Fremont, Calif. (PRWEB) June 26, 2015 -- Formation Data Systems, a disruptive startup revolutionizing enterprise storage, today announced the creation of an advisory council that brings together leading technology experts to provide their unique vision and experience to further Formation’s mission to modernize the industry.
Formation Data Systems Chairman and CEO Mark Lewis, said, “We’ve set course on a once-in-a-era opportunity to completely disrupt a market — today’s antiquated enterprise storage market. The Formation team is taking a new approach we call, Dynamic Storage, which is a modern platform that changes the game compared to today’s inefficient, siloed, costly solutions. To realize this opportunity and ensure we are delivering the best possible platform to meet the needs of today’s enterprise, we have assembled some of the brightest industry minds around to offer their expert counsel and help steer our vision.”
The announcement comes as Formation continues its business expansion, opening up new corporate headquarters in Fremont, California, and more than doubling its space in Boulder, Colorado, to capitalize on the rich engineering and development resources in these areas. More company announcements will be made in the coming months as the business continues to cement its position as the storage solution for the modern data center.
Joining the advisory council are Suman Pain, senior manager, servers & storage infrastructure operations at eBay; Shantanu Sarkar, vice president of engineering at Plantronics; Ryan Granard, vice president of cloud operations at Adobe; Kevin Maher, vice president of technology operations at Prosper Marketplace; Geoff Hendrey, platform architect at Splunk; Joel Gustafson, global IT professional; and Correy Voo technology consultant and business IT specialist.
• Suman Pain is the Senior Manager, Servers & Storage Infrastructure operations at eBay. Suman has deep expertise in very large-scale and critical production systems including servers, Fibre Channel and IP SANs, and storage systems ranging from local SSDs through enterprise arrays. He supports database clusters including Oracle, MySQL and NoSQL. Operating system expertise includes Solaris, Linux and Windows. He has led teams for more than 15 years building, managing, migrating and growing these systems. Suman has the rare gift of seeing the short-term tasks, required technical/business elements and timing that result in long-term success. He lets data dictate the solution. When circumstances change, he leads the work to get the new technology stack scaled and capable of supporting production systems. When new business initiatives are formed, he is the first to ensure the environment is secured and ready on time.
• Shantanu Sarkar is Vice President of Engineering at Plantronics. In this role he leads development for Plantronics products, including software, hardware, mechanical design and program management, and has been instrumental in helping transition the company’s headset technology from standalone devices to intelligent, context-aware wearable technology. Previous to Plantronics, Sarkar led the Advanced Technology, Strategy and Corporate Development team at Polycom. Prior to Polycom he spent 14 years at Cisco and was part of the original internal startup that ultimately became the $3B+ Voice Technology Group. During his tenure he led engineering teams, strategy, worldwide UC standards engagement, M&A, advanced technology for collaboration, and product development, and was named one of Cisco’s best Executive Briefing Center (EBC) presenters. Sarkar has a M.S. in Computer Science from the Ohio State University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Additionally, he holds 100+ U.S. patents (granted and filed), plus others internationally.
• Ryan Granard is the Vice President of Cloud Operations at Adobe. Ryan has been leading talented teams to engineer and deliver robust, scalable platforms and services for more than 20 years. Ryan currently serves as Vice President of Cloud Operations at Adobe, where he is leading delivery of the Creative Cloud experience globally. Prior to Adobe, Ryan was Vice President of Global Cloud Services at eBay / PayPal, where his teams transformed the technology stack, delivering a cloud‐based platform that powers eBay’s production with resilient, elastic infrastructure and provides developers with innovative capabilities to produce products that change the way millions of people shop and pay.
• Kevin Maher is the Vice President Technology Operations at Prosper Marketplace. Prior to Prosper, Kevin was the Director of Global Network Services at eBay, where he was responsible for leading high-performance teams of technical professionals for more than a decade. Kevin’s 20-plus years of experience running mission-critical applications and infrastructure encompasses Unix systems administration, secure software development, and crisis management, with deep experience in network security. Kevin is active in Internet operational security efforts, and serves on advisory boards for early stage companies.
• Geoff Hendrey has been working in mobile location services, big data, and search indexing for more than 15 years. His first startup, Gravitate pioneered local search and mobile-social networking, and created the first application to render a map on a mobile phone. Geoff is currently a platform Architect at Splunk. Prior to that Geoff was the CTO of Vertascale, a startup focused on building a Business Intelligence application for big data. Besides tech stuff, Geoff enjoys skateboarding, snowboarding, and playing with his kids.
• Joel Gustafson is a global IT professional with more than 20 years of experience specializing in creating and setting strategy for all facets of information technology, including infrastructure product road maps, infrastructure design, service delivery, operations, procurement, end user support, and project management at professional service and consumer product organizations ranging in size from 2,000 employees to more than 50,000 employees including firms such as Sidley Austin LLP, Heidrick & Struggles, PC Connection, Inc.
• Correy Voo is a global consultant and business IT specialist with almost 30 years experience in the field. Correy has developed an extensive set of skills and a broad range of practical experience from roles encompassing consultancy, engineering, technical sales, business development, commercial management, product management, and operations management, through to service management, enterprise architecture, innovation officer, chief architect, and chief technology officer across a wide range of industries. Throughout his career Correy has been at the forefront of technology development and application of new solutions. He has specific interests in Cloud Technologies and Services, Connected Technologies, Modern Communications, Advanced Security Solutions, Electronic Vehicle Technologies, Smart Energy, Smart Devices and most recently in promoting and advocating for greater advances in Networked Storage Technologies - specifically the need to achieve true virtualized storage solutions to match advances in adjacent server, compute and platform software domains.
Related Links
• Visit our press room and leadership page
• Follow Formation on our blog, Twitter,LinkedIn and Facebook
• CEO Mark Lewis’ Twitter
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For more information, please contact Ryan Mattison at Eastwick – FDS(at)eastwick(dot)com | 415-820-4484
About Formation Data Systems
Formation Data Systems' mission is to help IT organizations realize the transformative benefits of modern storage technology. Formation has developed the revolutionary FormationOne™ Dynamic Storage Platform that combines the agility, flexibility and simplicity of public cloud web-scale approaches with the control, security and customization capabilities of private datacenter storage. FormationOne has been built for Enterprise IT, SaaS application providers, and service providers, seeking ways to transform the agility and economics of their storage and data management environment. The platform is currently in beta and available by request from customers who are looking for a better approach to today’s enterprise storage offerings. For more information, visit: http://www.formationds.com.
John Vu, Eastwick, +1 (408) 470-4871, [email protected]
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