Flash behemoth Fusion-io has appointed Pankaj Mehra as its new worldwide chief technology officer and senior vice president. Mehra has been advising to Neil Carson, the vendor’s previous CTO and current technology chief of Asia Pacific, for the last few months.

Mehra joins Fusion-io from Whodini, a Big Data analytics firm he co-founded in 2010. He previously served as the chief scientist of HP Labs Russia, head of persistent development at Compaq, and the chair of the InfiniBand Trade Association’s Management Working Group.

Mehra holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois. He co-authored 20 patents and three books on storage, load balancing, and machine learning, contributed to the InfinitiBand 1.0 specification, and invented RDMA-accessible persistent memory.

“As worldwide CTO, Pankaj brings extensive global experience to leading the development of solutions in big data, cloud and web 2.0 environments, which he showcased during our SDK Technology Open House in March,” said David Flynn, Fusion-io Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “As Fusion-io expands our focus on the evolution of the datacenter, Pankaj and Neil will continue their close collaboration on worldwide research and development.”

The hiring of Pankaj comes a few days after Fusion-io disclosed that it’s shelling out $119 million for hybrid storage array startup NexGen Storage. The two year old firm’s flagship product is the midrange n5 Storage System, which sports a combination of low-cost spinning disk and Fusion-io’s speedy SSD drives. The array has become immensely popular among small and medium size enterprise.

The buyout was announced just a few weeks after the acquisition of ID7, a UK-based developer of software-defined storage solutions. Its flagship offering is a storage subsystem known as SCST, which is short for Generic SCSI Target Subsystem for Linux.