Coraid appoints VP Worldwide Sales

Carpenter is a seasoned sales executive with over 20 years of sales leadership experience in the information technology market, primarily focused on enterprise storage and application delivery. Most recently, he was vice president of sales, Americas for Virident Systems recently acquired by HGST, a Western Digital Company. Before that, Carpenter co-founded and served as vice president of sales at Cache IQ, an early stage start-up developing flash based technologies with sophisticated software for accelerating I/O demanding applications. Cache IQ was acquired by NetApp in November 2012. Prior to Cache IQ, he was the vice president of sales for Storspeed, a private start-up based in Austin, Texas. Before that, Keith had been with NetApp since 2001, most recently as a sales director in the Central United States where he grew the operations from $80M to a $220M business. He has also held sales and leadership positions with Auspex Systems and EMC Corporation.

“Coraid’s scale-out Ethernet storage technology is ideal for enterprise and cloud data centers dealing with the growing challenges of deploying and managing storage at scale. Coraid has a proven track record of helping customers deliver enterprise class storage with a flexible, programmable cloud architecture,” said Carpenter. “I look forward to working with the team to make Coraid the go-to storage platform for customers building the largest private and public cloud infrastructures across the world.”

Further expanding the executive team, Mackey has been delivering or supporting various sectors of enterprise technology for 20 years. Previous to joining Coraid, he sold and deployed application virtualization technology for InstallFree, which was acquired by WatchDox. Before joining InstallFree, Mackey assisted Kidaro (acquired by Microsoft) to establish an early market position in the desktop virtualization sector. Prior to that, Mackey deployed security technology for both Mu Dynamics (acquired by Spirent) and Securify (acquired by Secure Computing). He also previously managed Tier-1 customer support for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Network and Security Operations Center in Quantico, VA.

“I am delighted to welcome both Keith and Brandt to Coraid’s executive team. Keith brings a wealth of deep storage experience that will be invaluable to Coraid as we continue our aggressive push into the enterprise and cloud markets. His proven track record disrupting the industry makes him the ideal person to lead Coraid’s global field organization,” said Dave Kresse, CEO of Coraid. “Brandt has built a world class support team with deep expertise partnering with customers to successfully deploy large, complex clouds. This capability is a core part of the value we deliver to leading enterprise and cloud customers. In recognition of how strategic this organization is within Coraid, I am delighted to promote Brandt to vice president of support.

Coraid’s EtherDrive platform combines enterprise-class storage features with a scale-out architecture running on massively parallel Layer-2 Ethernet, enabling customers to achieve the elasticity and economics of web-scale clouds without trading off performance or resilience. Coraid EtherCloud adds powerful policy-based automation to enable one-click self-service, lower OPEX, rapid service innovation and integration into modern cloud stacks such as OpenStack.

Coraid has enjoyed rapid growth in the past four years driven by successful adoption in the enterprise and cloud markets. More than 1,700 customers worldwide, including Fortune 100 organizations in the automotive, financial services, manufacturing, retail, networking, defense, aerospace and telecommunications sectors, now deploy Coraid storage. In the cloud sector, leading customers including Sony Music, Shutterstock, RackForce, EVault and Tableau have deployed petabytes of Coraid storage to handle massive data growth and millions of customers. Over the past year, The Wall Street Journal named Coraid a Top 50 Startup, and Bloomberg Businessweek highlighted the company as a Hot Enterprise Startup.