Quantum chief development officer Brian “Beepy” Pawlowski has joined Hammerspace as VP for Performance Engineering.
Quantum, a company specializing in data management and protection, appointed Pawlowski as its CDO at the end of 2020. He has a storied history in development and engineering. In reverse order, he was CTO at composable systems startup DriveScale, spent three years at Pure Storage as VP and chief architect then advisor, 21 years at NetApp, becoming an SVP and CTO and then a technical staff member, and had seven years as a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems.
A statement from Quantum said: “We wish Brian well on his next adventure. During his time at Quantum, he was an impactful figurehead for the development of Myriad, a market-transforming technology. Now that our talented engineering team has invented and brought Myriad to market, this transition is timely as we shift gears to the execution of our product roadmap and vision. Jeff Mulder, our Senior VP of Product and Engineering, and a 20-year Quantum leader, is leading this charge across our R&D team.”
Pawlowski drove Quantum’s Myriad operating system development, which was announced last year. It is a unified and scale-out file and object storage software stack designed for SSDs, using Kubernetes-orchestrated microservices to lower latency and increase parallelism.
Hammerspace CTO Trond Myklebust is a long-term colleague. He joined Hammerspace in 2018, having been a principal system architect at precursor company Primary Data and a principal engineer at NetApp from 2004 to 2013. Pawlowski’s NetApp years overlapped this, lasting from 1994 to 2015. But he knew Myklebust before then.
A video of a Pawlowski interview about the Computer History Museum has a section mentioning Myklebust starting at the 15 minute, 40 second mark. He tells a story in the video set in 1999, where Pawlowski became involved with Linux and the open source community in Europe where he met Myklebust, who was the Linux client maintainer guy. NetApp subsequently hired Myklebust. Now Hammerspace, where Myklebust works, has hired Pawlowski.
Myklebust has long been involved with the Linux Foundation, being a part-time board member from 2007 to 2015, and has 20 years’ involvement with Linux kernel development. He is still the maintainer and lead developer for the Linux kernel NFS client.
Pawlowski also has a connection with Mark Cree, Hammerspace’s SVP for Strategic Partnerships, dating from the early days of iSCSI.
We understand Pawlowski will be focusing on ways to increase the speed of Hammerspace’s software in data operations within the datacenter, not between datacenters, where Vcinty software has a role.
