Violin Memory, Inc., provider of one of the world's fastest and most scalable flash Memory Arrays, today welcomes Narayan Venkat as the company's vice president (VP) of product management. With 20 years of expertise in storage, data management and virtualization platforms, Venkat, former VP of cloud infrastructure at VMware, will drive Violin's strategy to build a portfolio of scalable flash storage systems to accelerate the adoption of flash for business critical applications, big data analytics and virtualization.

"Flash is the single most disruptive technology in storage since the advent of virtualization," said Venkat. "Violin Memory is on the leading edge of the trend with its scalable, flash-based storage system for the modern, virtualized data center. I look forward to playing a central role in fulfilling the company's vision to build an all-silicon primary storage powerhouse."

Venkat is the latest in several high profile 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 Corporation.

At VMWare, 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 Corporation, managing the $800 million storage systems product suite. Before Onstor was acquired by LSI Corporation, 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.

"Venkat has the perfect background of storage and software to accelerate Violin's position in the storage ecosystem of database, big data analytics and virtualization," said Donald Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. "He will play a major role in our vision to create a platform consolidating compute and storage for enterprise virtualization."

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.

Violin's flash Memory Arrays are changing the data center for companies like AOL, Revlon, Tagged.com, Oracle, Juniper and HP through its patent-pending flash vRAID technology. Violin recently won AlwaysOn 2011 Company of the Year, SearchDataCenter Product of the Year, Gartner "Cool Vendor" for storage, and was named a Top Startup to Watch by SearchStorage.com.