Cloud Storage Channel Feature

Cloud Storage Provider StorSimple Appoints Senior Director for Community and Customer Programs

By Anshu Shrivastava
TMCnet Contributor

Cloud storage provider StorSimple has announced that Marc Farley has joined the company as senior director of community and customer programs.

In the last year, the company’s business grew “exponentially” because of CIOs, from enterprise companies like BMC Software (News - Alert) to mid-sized customers like the Sundance Institute, rushing to extend their data centers and storage infrastructures to the cloud, company officials said.

Given the benefit that cloud architectures can provide to customers, StorSimple’s focus is on accelerating the growth of this community. Company officials said that to help lead this effort, Farley will join the company.

“Throughout my career I've tried to identify the technologies and companies with the potential to be change agents for the rest of the industry,” Farley said, adding that this included the opportunity with EqualLogic with its Ethernet-based iSCSI storage followed by the “groundbreaking” virtualized utility storage architecture at 3PAR.

Farley said that many believe cloud integration with enterprise storage will bring the next sweeping change to the industry and StorSimple has developed extremely sophisticated and powerful technology to pursue this opportunity.

“More importantly, the StorSimple team is committed to building a customer-centric organization, and I'm extremely excited to join them and put my shoulder to the wheel,” Farley said.

StorSimple is a provider of cloud storage solutions for Windows and VMware environments. The company gains Farley’s deep industry experience, which ranges from authoring early seminal books on storage area networks (SANs), building customer communities in similar positions with HP, 3PAR, Dell (News - Alert) and EqualLogic, and being a passionate industry evangelist through such vehicles as the Infosmack podcast and various video channels.

The company’s business is fueled by two trends,” said Ursheet Parikh, co-founder and CEO of StorSimple. “The first is companies that want to build their own 'iCloud for the enterprise' and need the cloud data controller to do that.”

Parikh said that the second is that for tier 2 and tier 3 primary data, enterprise customers are more than willing to consolidate the different sorts of storage that are used to manage data into a single solution.

“This is cloud integrated enterprise storage, and we will grow the community around this category,” Parikh said. “I'm tremendously excited that we have Marc Farley on our team to lead this charge.”

Recently, StorSimple was selected as finalist for Storage magazine's Product of the Year award in the storage systems category and was the only cloud integrated enterprise storage appliance recognized.

Additionally, the company was also recognized as a 2012 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner. These are the latest of numerous awards achieved on the basis of its innovative products and customer adoption.

This year in January, the Sundance Institute turned to StorSimple’s public cloud storage gateway to keep the data flowing smoothly during the 11-day annual event.