Chad's Story

What technology, business, or product has really wowed, surprised, or delighted you lately? Why?

Commvault’s Simpana family is the latest set of products that focus on backup and disaster recovery solutions with a strong integration with VMware. Commvault has also integrated advanced de-duplication at both the source and target-side.

A technology that I’ve been following for over a year now and is finally receiving the attention it deserves is the CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) standard which was designed to ensure data can be easily migrated between Cloud service providers. This has the potential to provide customers with all of the cost benefits of the cloud without getting trapped in vendor lock-in.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Explain why and what you learned from it.

I think that the most interesting and ambitious project/product I’ve had the satisfaction of leading is Compellent’s introduction of solid state disk drives as Tier 0 within their tiered storage SAN—introducing a level of performance not previously achievable with rotating drives. What was most satisfying about this project was that customers adopted the technology more readily than anyone expected and more importantly, were able to actually demonstrate the performance improvements.

What contributes to you being innovative?

I believe that the most significant contributor to my innovativeness is my engineering approach which is deeply ingrained in me beyond my formal schooling. Growing up the son of an electrical engineer who spent a majority of his career at Control Data, I have always been intrigued by mechanical and electrical things—whether it is a piece of stereo equipment or the engine of a car. I enjoy most working with both our customers and our Development organization to determine truly innovative ways of enhancing and improving storage technologies.

And how do you define innovation?

I define innovation as “the ability to create something both new AND useful to the end user, without regard to existing standards or conventional perception”.

So Cleversafe. What is it about this company that you love?

I absolutely love the creativity, drive and determination exhibited by each and every person working at Cleversafe. The culture is truly reflective of a “highly innovative technology company” and is what I imagine Google’s culture was like back in the beginning years.

What do you predict for Cleversafe’s future?

Cleversafe has already attracted some very prestigious, high profile companies as customers and I believe that more and more companies will join the movement to use Cleversafe’s efficient object storage platform in place of traditional RAID and replicated storage systems. And because companies’ storage requirements continue to increase (in many cases exponentially year-over-year), I believe that Cleversafe’s ability to infinitely scale will continue to transform the storage industry—similar to how solid state disk drives and automated tiering have transformed the SAN market.

What’s your favorite thing about working at Cleversafe?

What I enjoy most about working at Cleversafe is the collaboration that occurs within the company and amongst the different departments. I have the pleasure of working closely with both Sales and Development and consequently, get to experience the customer’s reaction to our products, as well as, engage with our engineers on the latest technologies.

And what cool concept have you been working on at Cleversafe?

Cleversafe is in the process of developing the ability for our appliances to work within a “virtual machine” environment and we expect that this will open up tremendous opportunities both for Cleversafe and also for our customers. By using “virtual machines” for our appliances, customers will have the ability to leverage their existing IT infrastructure—further reducing their storage expenditures.

And, please tell us a little known fact about yourself.

If you saw me in person, you may be able to discern this; I used to have an earring (in my left ear). I got the earring in my senior year of high school, right before our spring break trip to Cancun, Mexico. And as much as I have tried to get the hole to close up, I can still easily place an earring back in—something my kids get a real kick out of (especially when I put in one of my daughters really obnoxious earrings).