Flash storage vendor Violin Memory has added former VMware cloud infrastructure czar Narayan Venkat to its executive team. Venkat is now VP of product management at the company which is moving to meet the needs of the expanding virtualization and big data analytics markets.

Venkat is no stranger to the storage industry – he was business line director at LSI Corporation’s Engenio Storage Group and he led business strategy for NetApps’ own NAS, SAN and storage management solutions before he landed at VMware, where he was responsible for vSphere suite storage initiatives.

It was at VMware that Venkat realized there was a distinct need for better, more virtualization-friendly, scalable storage in the data center, he says. Customers were asking if VMware had flash storage plans and eventually he took the hint – customers and cloud service providers alike were looking for a better storage platform on which to build virtualized infrastructure, especially when that infrastructure is built on VMware vCloud Director.

And now that he’s at Violin, Venkat says he sees that the demand for virtualization, big data analytics and mission critical application delivery are evidence of a larger trend.  Compute and storage are converging, and as the modern data center shifts towards solid state drives (SSD) for higher performance, Venkat says he wants Violin to offer the most value when it comes to these high-growth areas.

Services Angle

Big data and virtualization demand higher performance, it’s true. But despite its fast growth, Violin faces stiff competition from the likes of EMC. Service providers have to choose what works best for them, and while Venkat does expect prices to dip on flash memory as adoption increases (and while it has OEM deals with HP and IBM), it’s still more expensive than more traditional storage arrays.

But signing a VMware veteran is a major feather in Violin’s cap, and it’s entirely possible that growing demand for infrastructure-as-a-service, virtual desktop infrastructure, and the whole rest of the range of en vogue IT services will drive adoption of flash memory.