Did you ever wonder what happened to those 4.0 GPA guys in your Engineering class?  I always thought they would flame out in some sort of crazy Dungeons and Dragons love fest.  However one guy I know actually really did something with his 4.0, and that is Bret Weber.  And DDN just hired him!!!

A few months ago I wrote a piece that DDN had hired Rich Pappas, ex LSI sales extraordinare.  Now they have hired one of their brightest technical minds.  Bret leaves LSI as their Chief Architect and Fellow.

Bret is not a household name to a lot of storage folks, but I assure you, storage architects worth their salts  are familiar with Bret.  He is the guy that helped make LSI Storage (aka Engenio, aka Symbios, aka NCR) what they were in the heyday.  Walk the halls at LSI in Wichita, KS and you’ll see photos of Brett and all his patents.  Its as impressive as walking the halls of Almaden Research for IBM in San Jose.  Brett was “the” guy that pitched their technical know-how to CTO’s and architects, and was able to convince them at any level such that they wanted to buy him steaks at Ruth’s Chris.  He showed OEM’s how to take advantage of LSI’s technology, and if the feature wasn’t quite right, he had the ability to show LSI Engineering what needed to be done to meet OEM requirements.  Brett was LSI’s go-to guy when others couldn’t figure it out.

No doubt he was Abhi’s go-to guy as well.  Bret has one of the unique skill of knowing how to distill down technical problems in ways that Executives can understand, and then help them make the right business decisions.  He is perfect for that.   He understands the inner workings of storage hardware, of course, but he also understands storage software, optimized storage, RAS, disk drives, servers, hypervisors, applications, and how to tie them all together.  Bret knows how to get from here to there, and for a company like DDN who is well establish in HPC (here), he will help them leverage everything they have learned over the past 10 years to apply those technologies to new big data problems (there).  Nice move DDN!  Just remember to follow his lead and he’ll make you some dough.

The point is that DDN is starting to clean house gathering up storage talent.  Up until 6 months ago people would say, “DD Who?”  Now they have some of the best sales and now technical people in the storage business.  I guess seeing 3Par go for $2B has gotten a lot of storage hardware folks excited.  Data Domain could have been a fluke at over $2B but now, with two hardware companies going for north of $2B, its no longer a question, storage hardware is cool.  Bret has  storage cred that is hard to find, just like those 4.0’s that used to skew the grading curves.  Bret is the guy that bummed you out because your grades went down, but you loved so much because he not only helped you with your homework, he also was a cool guy to grab a beer with…my kind of guy!