Infinio, a market leader in storage acceleration for virtualized data centers, today announced that Jay Kidd, senior vice president and chief technology officer at NetApp, has joined Infinio’s advisory board. 

“The combination of host-side caching and intelligent back-end storage is compelling for customers deploying shared virtual infrastructure. Infinio has an innovative and easily adopted approach to speeding up virtual machine (VM) storage performance,” said Jay Kidd, senior vice president and chief technology officer, NetApp.

Kidd’s extensive background in storage, networking, software and high-performance systems will assist Infinio as the company continues to grow and expand its product offerings. Kidd holds responsibility for overall technology direction, architecture, advanced development, technology evangelism and technology standards at NetApp, and is a member of the executive staff.

“Our collaboration with NetApp is strategic to Infinio, and we are honored to have Jay Kidd’s support and counsel as we continue to move forward in the fast-growing storage acceleration market segment,” said Arun Agarwal, co-founder and CEO, Infinio. 

Before holding his current role, Kidd was a senior vice president in NetApp product operations with responsibility for engineering of NAS, SAN, data protection, and management products. He was previously chief marketing officer at NetApp and also ran the Emerging Products Group. Prior to joining NetApp, he was chief technology officer and vice president of Product Management at Brocade, where he was vital to developing and implementing the Brocade product road map, including infrastructure and strategic evangelism. He holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University.