Fast growing cloud storage startup Nirvanix this morning announced that Dave Barr, HP’s ace engineering director for the LeftHand Storage Group—a $350M business—had left the company to join Nirvanix.  This is a very interesting move as it marks the second HP storage exec to leave the company in the past 2 weeks.

The first departure was by Emil Sayegh, the VP of Marketing and visible public blogging persona of the OpenStack-based HP Public Cloud Group who left the company to become a CEO of an as-yet-unnamed company. Sayegh was a big proponent of the HP OpenStack cloud so this brings into question the internal politics and technical challenges surrounding this service as it tries to makes its way from beta to full production scale.

Then we have HP’s Dave Barr who joins enterprise cloud heavyweight Nirvanix, a pure play cloud storage startup that’s been racking up multi-petabyte wins like USC, Cerner, IBM, Relativity Media and DRFortress in recent months. Barr’s quote from the company release reveals that he’s not interested in “primitive cloud storage offerings” (read: whatever HP had to offer) and was drawn to the enterprise cloud capabilities that Nirvanix is currently selling.

Barr will head up global engineering at Nirvanix and is tasked with delivering its next gen cloud storage solutions. According to the release the LeftHand products developed under his management grew 2000% in under 4 years so this will be a potent addition to the already strong Nirvanix management team led by Scott Genereux.

It appears the cloud is having a disruptive effect on not just the enterprise technology landscape but the corporate workforce as well.

We’re deep into the first quarter of the new year and cloud continues to be scorching hot. Lots of additional industry disruptions and technology changes are sure to come. Tune in for our coverage of cloud and big data from the Strata Conference all this week.