[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Violin Memory, provider of flash Memory Arrays, has hired Narayan Venkat, former VP of cloud infrastructure at VMware, as the company’s vice president of product management. With 20 years of expertise in storage, data management and virtualization platforms.

Mr. Venkat is the latest in several additions to the Violin executive team including Garry Veale, HP’s former VP of EMEA’s StorageWorks Division, Jonathan Goldick, former CTO of OnStor, and Scott Metzger, former SVP of Apigee.

At VMWare, Mr. Venkat led the company’s storage initiatives for the vSphere virtualization platform. Prior to that, he was VP and business line director for the Engenio Storage Group at LSI. Before Onstor was acquired by LSI, Mr. Venkat was instrumental in driving the product and go-to-market strategies for the company’s enterprise NAS solution. He also led product strategy for Netapp’s NAS, SAN and storage management solutions.

Mr. Venkat began his career as an engineer in Microprocessor Research Labs at Intel Corporation working on various technologies including distributed systems, compilers and operating systems. He also held numerous engineering and marketing roles at other Silicon Valley companies including KLA-Tencor and Narus.