Flash storage startup Virident just appointed Mike Gustafsonas as its new chief executive, right on the heels of a massive Series D funding round.

Gustafsonas was the head of BlueArc until it was acquired by Hitachi, where he served as senior vice president of its file and content business before joining Virident. He has just over two decades of experience running companies, and is replacing co-founder Kumar Ganapathy, who will now serve as his company’s CTO.

“The storage industry is experiencing a large disruptive market shift. Flash storage is in the infancy of its growth, and it’s only a matter of time before it will be commonplace in the datacenter,” said Gustafson. “Virident is well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity with its world-class technology, solid backing by top investors and datacenter leaders, and our employee experience and commitment to win.”

Virident makes PCIe flash cards that offer enterprises a very big bang for their buck. Its newest product is the FlashMAX II, which boasts the capability of providing consistent performance (sitting at an impressive 1.5 IOPS) for years – longer than most of the rivaling flash cards out today.  This technology earned the company a total of  $76 million in financing to date, including this week’s $26 million Series D funding round. Mitsui Global Investments led the round, and existing investors Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Venture also chipped in.

Vendors are coming up with new ways of making flash viable in  the enterprise. While Virident focuses on making its products durable, QLogic’s Mt. Rainer adapter centralizes SSDs across severs.  The hardware makes it so flash cards installed in individual servers are accessible from a single QLogic driver instead of their respective ones. The adapter facilitates the creation of an SSD-powered SAN that delivers higher utilization and less latency.