Both Fusion-io and SolidFire have expanded their board of directors this week with the additions of industry veterans who will hopefully help bolster growth.

Shane Robison, former executive vice president and CTO for Hewlett-Packard, is joining the Fusion-io board’s Audit Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. He worked at HP since 2002 up until he retired in November this year.

“Shane brings significant expertise and experience to our already very strong board, and in addition to helping us to refine our cloud and R&D strategies, Shane will help us deepen our relationships with server systems vendors and other technology leaders,” said David Flynn, Chairman and CEO of Fusion-io.”

Robison has a career as a technology officer stretching across three decades, well beyond his tenure at HP. He’s been elected to a very important role now that Fusion’s set its eyes on growing its ecosystem. One of these latest partnerships was made with Danish IBM partner Front-safe, which will be using Fusion-io-based IBM products in its backup solution.

Moving on to SolidFire, the storage flash maker and Fusion-io competitor also made a couple of notable additions to its staff.

Ron Bernal, venture partner at NEA, is now a member of its board of advisors. Bernal has been a board member in a long list of companies including Data Domain, several energy firms, the now Logitech-owned LifeSize and others. He’s also the founder of Diligence Technology Advisors.

The second update from SolidFire is that Dave Cahill is joining as director of strategic alliances. The hire follows a month after the company snatched up Mark Glasgow and appointed him as the new vice president of worldwide sales. Xiotech’s former VP of sales has been a tech executive for about two decades.