software-defined-storage
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Eliot Johnson Built the Campaign. Now He’s Rewiring the Marketing Machine.
After years inside global companies, a founder’s detour and a fast-moving startup, Eliot Johnson has arrived at DataCore with a sharp thesis: AI may command the spotlight, but data infrastructure decides what actually works.
Paul Speciale Knows the Cloud Still Has a Basement
Before AI could answer a question, Paul Speciale spent decades thinking about where its data would live. His route from C++ developer to Scality's chief marketing officer is a lesson in making invisible infrastructure legible.
Mo Tahmasebi Built a Storage Career on the Things Nobody Notices - Until They Break
For four decades, Mo Tahmasebi has worked in the least glamorous corner of technology: keeping important data available, recoverable and out of trouble. His playbook is equal parts engineering, thrift and the confidence to close a deal before the coffee gets cold.
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.
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.
Leander Yu
Leander Yu is the founder and CEO of Graid Technology Inc., a Sunnyvale-based startup that invented the world's first GPU-accelerated RAID solution for NVMe SSDs - SupremeRAID. With over 25 years in the storage industry and a prior successful exit (Bigtera to Silicon Motion in 2017), Yu built Graid in 2019 to solve a fundamental bottleneck: traditional RAID controllers can't keep up with modern NVMe speeds. By offloading RAID computation to a GPU, SupremeRAID delivers up to 28 million IOPS and 260GB/s throughput from a single card. The company raised a $30M Series B in March 2025 led by Foxconn and CTBC joint venture, and signed a landmark licensing deal with Intel for VROC technology in late 2025.