DataDirect Networks, maker of big data-driven storage systems, announced that Joseph L. Cowan will be joining its board of directors.

“Joseph Cowan has extraordinary insight into the solutions required by customers in analytics-driven, data-intensive industries including financial services and manufacturing, and we are very pleased to welcome him to DDN’s Board of Directors,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and cofounder, DataDirect Networks.”

The current CEO and president of banking solutions provider Online Resources Corporation and director at Blackboard has an impressive resume extended with his latest position at DDN. Cowan served as the head of a large number of companies including Interwoven, which was acquired by the now HP-owned Autonomy, in addition to the Manugistics Group and a couple of other companies.

The addition of Cowan to DDN’s board will likely prove significant as the company strengthens its business strategy and hopes to achieve its objectives by pursuing expansion. It has evidently struck an agreement with IBM, which is now reselling its SFA 10K Storage Platform as a part of the recently consolidated IBM Intelligent Cluster.  The solution is the predecessor of the SFA 12K series, which includes  three different big data appliances. The SFA12K-40 appliance is the speediest, followed by the SFA12K-20E and SFA12K-20 versions that offer about half as much performance. The emphasis here is faster scaling.

Before the new appliances were introduced, DDN also launched WOS 2.0, the second version of its object-based cloud storage appliance. The product is designed specifically for data analytics and cloud deployments, similarly to the company’s other products, and packs impressive performance at up to 55 billion objects reads and 23 billion object writes per day. Companies are starting to move away from their legacy systems to carry out larger scale and more complex jobs, requiring solutions from vendors including DataDirect and others.