Mark Davis

Mark Davis is the Chief Executive Officer at Virsto Software. He's been at the center of the networked storage and virtualization revolutions since their inception. He launched the industry’s first Fibre Channel disk array in 1994, and was instrumental in growing Sun Microsystems from a non-player to the largest Unix storage vendor within five years. After a stint as VP of marketing at $2B storage vendor StorageTek, Mark repositioned ConvergeNet as the inventor of SAN-based storage virtualization, resulting in a $340M acquisition by Dell. After an instrumental role in the IPO of Evolve Software, Mark returned to the storage industry, working on multiple virtualization projects. Before co-founding Virsto, he was CEO of storage resource management vendor Creekpath, where he engineered its acquisition by Opsware (now HP).

Latest from Mark Davis

Software-Defined Storage is the Missing Link in the Software-Defined Data Center

At this year’s VMworld 2012, held in San Francisco, the “software-defined data center” was a major topic. The idea is appealing: make the entire IT infrastructure completely fluid so that all resources–compute, network, and storage–can be quickly and easily allocated or reclaimed to meet dynamic business requirements, thereby extending the flexibility and cost savings benefits ...

The Missing Link in the Software-Defined Data Center

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about the software-defined data center.  By increasing management flexibility and lowering server costs significantly through increased utilization of existing CPU and memory resources, server virtualization brought significant benefits to IT organizations.  But to complete the vision of the software-defined data center, both storage and networking need to ...

The Importance of Snapshots in Virtualized Environments

Snapshot technologies have been around for a long time. Essentially, they let you quickly make online, disk-based copies of selected data sets that are easily accessed. With virtual computing becoming a mainstream deployment platform, these technologies are taking on a heightened importance. When we refer to “snapshot technology”, there are two objects we have in ...

Exploring the Storage Hypervisor

There’s been a lot of talk lately about storage hypervisors.  Server hypervisors are allowing us to wring a lot more out of our server resources, but the storage in virtual environments is being used even less efficiently than it was when it was attached only to physical servers.  The goal of a storage hypervisor is ...