VDURA, which rebranded from Panasas earlier this year, has boosted its board and formed a technical advisory board to drive its AI and HPC data infrastructure software efforts.
It has named former Cray president and CEO Peter Ungaro as a board director, and has added Panasas founder Garth Gibson, and Datrium co-founder Hugo Patterson, to the technical advisory board.
“Peter’s deep expertise in AI and HPC applications, ecosystems, and business models will be invaluable as VDURA builds out its SaaS business model,” said VDURA. It added that Hugo Patterson was known for his “groundbreaking” work in data deduplication and virtualization at Data Domain, which was acquired by EMC in 2009. He co-founded Datrium, where he was chief scientist, which was bought by VMware in 2020.
At Cray, Ungaro collaborated with the likes of AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Nvidia. He spearheaded the development of the Cray XC series supercomputers, the Cray Urika-GX analytics platform, and YARC Data. After HPE acquired Cray for $1.3 billion in 2019, Ungaro became senior vice president and general manager at HPE. He later left HPE in 2021.
“I have always recognized the impressive capabilities of Panasas’ PanFS technology, and I join the board at a time when the company is transitioning to a SaaS business model,” said Ungaro. “I see great potential for VDURA to innovate and lead in the era of AI data infrastructure.”
Gibson’s return is a blend of the past and its “exciting future”, said VDURA. He is the co-author of the “pNFS IETF rationale,” VDURA said, covering parallel file systems. Most recently, Gibson served as the president and CEO of the Vector Institute, an AI institute that supports researchers, businesses, and governments to responsibly develop and adopt AI.
“When I founded Panasas, I set out to build a software platform that would serve as a parallel file system with enterprise attributes, and I look forward to helping VDURA evolve the platform to meet the needs of tomorrow’s AI and HPC markets,” said Gibson.
“Pete is one of the most respected leaders in HPC and AI, and I’m pleased to have his insights shape our strategy and direction. And having Garth and Hugo work with our architecture team is critical, as their expertise will ensure we adopt the right architectural approach for long-term success,” said VDURA CEO Ken Claffey.
He added: “We have big plans in the coming months, as VDURA is positioning itself to become the leading data infrastructure software platform for AI and HPC applications.”
To support growth, VDURA recently launched its Velocity Partner Program.
