data-storage
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Jeff Denworth Spent Twenty Years Learning How to Sell the Invisible
Before VAST Data became a $30 billion company, its lone go-to-market founder spent three years asking hundreds of customers to imagine a machine he could not yet show them. Jeff Denworth’s real product has always been the bridge between difficult architecture and a reason to care.
Alon Horev and the Memory Beneath the Machine
The VAST Data co-founder built his career below the fashionable layers of technology. Now the self-taught engineer is betting that AI's future will be decided by memory, movement and the architecture nobody sees.
Shachar Fienblit Put the Hardest Part of AI Where Nobody Looks
Long before AI made infrastructure fashionable, Fienblit was studying how data survives failure, scale and human impatience. At VAST Data, those quiet lessons became the architecture beneath a much louder revolution.
Renen Hallak Saw the Bottleneck Before the Boom
A computer scientist who was taught neural networks did not work built VAST Data for the moment they would. Ten years later, his storage company is trying to become the operating system beneath artificial intelligence.
JPR Communications makes the server room worth talking about
Storage arrays rarely sell themselves. JPR Communications has built a specialist PR business around explaining why the technology behind the scenes deserves a place in the buying conversation.
CMS Distribution sells what the box can’t do
A technology distributor that started with floppy disks now helps sell everything from storage to managed cybersecurity. Its real product is the work between a vendor’s promise and a customer’s purchase.
Erik Frieberg’s Long Game: Make the Infrastructure Legible
From Oracle applications to MongoDB communities and MinIO’s exabyte pitch, Erik Frieberg has built a career translating the machinery beneath modern software into reasons for people to care.
Mitch Seigle Is Making the Case for Tape in an AI-Hungry World
After four decades marketing storage, Mitch Seigle has found his sharpest argument in an old medium: when data becomes permanent, the future may depend on knowing what can safely go offline.
The 47-Year-Old Bet That Tape Would Outlive the Cloud
Spectra Logic built a durable business around an unfashionable truth: most data does not need to be instantly online, but some of it must survive for decades. Its answer combines robotic tape libraries, object interfaces and archive software - with economics that become persuasive at petabyte scale.
B. Scott Davis and the Long Memory of Technology
He joined Western Digital when storage was measured in megabytes. Thirty-eight years later, B. Scott Davis is selling the overlooked layer of the AI economy: somewhere for all that intelligence to live.
Björn Kolbeck Built for the Moment the Hardware Fails
A childhood programmer turned distributed-systems researcher learned at Google that small teams could run immense infrastructure. Quobyte is his decade-long attempt to bring that operating model to everyone else.
Seagate Technology
The AI boom has made an old piece of machinery newly strategic. Inside Seagate's wager that microscopic lasers, denser disks and brutally practical economics will keep the hard drive at the center of the cloud.
Western Digital
The 55-year-old hard-drive maker bet its whole future on the spinning platter - right as the AI boom made cheap, bottomless storage the most valuable thing in the data center.
StorONE
StorONE is a New York-based enterprise storage software company founded in 2011 by Gal Naor and Raz Gordon. Its ONE Storage Platform separates storage services from hardware, delivering block, file and object storage from a single, hardware-agnostic engine. By rewriting the storage stack from scratch, StorONE combines high performance, real-time auto-tiering across flash and HDD, immutable-snapshot ransomware recovery and per-drive licensing to help enterprises cut storage costs while running on commodity servers.
Gal Naor
Gal Naor is the co-founder and CEO of StorONE, a New York based enterprise storage company built on the idea that software, not more hardware, is the real bottleneck in data storage. He first made his mark in 2004 as co-founder of Storwize, which pioneered real-time enterprise storage compression and was acquired by IBM in 2010 for $140 million. Naor spent roughly six years and dozens of patents building StorONE's unified S1 storage engine, which provisions block, file and object storage from the same commodity drives at a fraction of legacy cost. He is known for a contrarian, efficiency-first philosophy and for steering StorONE to cash-flow positivity with an eye toward an eventual IPO.
Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies is a multinational technology company headquartered in Round Rock, Texas, that designs, sells, and supports personal computers, servers, data storage, networking, and IT services. Founded by Michael Dell in 1984, it pioneered the direct-to-customer, build-to-order sales model and grew into one of the world's largest infrastructure and PC vendors. Following its 2016 merger with EMC, Dell now spans consumer laptops, workstations, and a fast-growing AI-optimized server business serving customers in more than 180 countries.
Graid Technology Inc.
Graid Technology is a Silicon Valley and Taiwan storage startup that builds SupremeRAID, the first GPU-based RAID solution for NVMe and NVMe-over-Fabrics SSDs. By moving RAID processing off the CPU and onto an NVIDIA GPU sitting out of the data path, the company unlocks the full performance of modern flash-delivering millions of IOPS and tens of gigabytes per second of throughput-while protecting data for AI, HPC, cloud, and enterprise workloads.
Sihua Technologies Inc
Sihua Technologies Inc is a Cupertino, California enterprise-infrastructure software company that helps organizations build private and hybrid clouds inside their own data centers. Its software-defined stack - the ExpressVM virtualization engine, the MegaBric hyper-converged storage suite, and the XOS operating layer - collapses compute, virtualization, and storage onto standard x86 servers, aiming for enterprise-class performance and high availability without the price of proprietary appliances. Founded in 2000 and paired with its Shanghai-based sibling company KXTech, Sihua also ships media-streaming (XView) and AI data-acceleration (NeuADC) products for telecom and enterprise customers.
StoneFly, Inc.
StoneFly, Inc. is a Castro Valley, California enterprise storage company founded in 1996 that helped turn iSCSI into an industry standard - it registered iSCSI.com in March 1996 and shipped one of the first iSCSI storage appliances in 2002. Today it builds NAS, SAN, unified scale-out (USO), backup and disaster-recovery appliances, and cloud storage, all powered by its patented StoneFusion operating system and Air-Gapped Vault immutable, ransomware-resistant technology. A subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory (DNF), StoneFly serves 10,000+ customers from SMBs to Fortune 500 and government - including deployments aboard US Navy Littoral Combat Ships and Virginia-class submarines.
NetApp
NetApp is a San Jose-based data infrastructure company that helps enterprises store, manage, protect and move their data across on-premises systems and every major public cloud. Founded in 1992 as Network Appliance, it built its business on the ONTAP data management operating system and today sells all-flash storage arrays, cloud storage services and software that increasingly targets AI and machine-learning workloads. A Fortune 500 company trading on the Nasdaq as NTAP, it reported record fiscal-2026 revenue of roughly $6.93 billion.
Nimbus Data
Nimbus Data is a privately held, largely self-funded American flash storage company founded in 2003 by Thomas Isakovich. It designs all-flash arrays and solid state drives - most famously the ExaDrive DC100, the 100-terabyte SSD it introduced in 2018 that remained the world's largest for years. Rather than chase venture money, the company built a profitable business selling high-capacity, power-efficient storage to enterprises, cloud providers, and AI and edge workloads, backed by its HALO/AFX software and a flat-rate support model.
Thomas Isakovich
Thomas Isakovich is the founder and CEO of Nimbus Data, the flash-storage company behind the ExaDrive DC100 - the 100-terabyte solid state drive that, years after its 2018 debut, still has no equal in capacity. He built and sold his first storage system as a teenager, launched TrueSAN Networks from his Stanford dorm room, watched it collapse in the dot-com bust at age 26, then started over with Nimbus Data and self-funded more than 90% of its growth into a profitable global business spanning 200 customers in 12 countries. He is a rare bird in Silicon Valley: a hardware founder who turned down the venture-capital playbook, kept the company his own, and went back to finish his Stanford degree purely because he missed thinking.
George Kurian
George Kurian is the Chief Executive Officer of NetApp, the $20B+ enterprise data storage and cloud infrastructure company, where he has led a decade-long transformation from legacy storage vendor to AI-ready data platform. Born in Pampady, Kerala, he arrived at Princeton at 17 with a partial scholarship and a twin brother — Thomas Kurian, now CEO of Google Cloud — making them one of the rarest pairs in tech: identical twins who both run major Fortune 500 companies. Under his tenure since 2015, NetApp has posted record revenues of $6.57B in FY2025 and positioned itself as critical backbone for enterprise AI workloads.