Violin Memory expands engineering team

Dalton joins Violin from Intel, where he served as GM of Intel’s Datacenter flash (NVM) Software organization. Schneider was the co-founder of GridIron, which was recently acquired by Violin Memory. Dalton and Schneider will be responsible for driving the next wave of innovation based on the Violin 6000 flash Memory Array. Kevin Rowett, Violin’s senior vice president of engineering, has retired from Violin and remains a strategic advisor to CEO Don Basile.

“Our vision is to make in-memory computing possible for all enterprises,” said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. “Dalton and Schneider both bring significant storage experience from the hardware and software side to help deliver on this promise and aggressively add to our current technology portfolio and talent pool.”

Dalton has more than 30 years of experience in the storage and networking industry, bringing extensive knowledge in compute, storage software and flash infrastructures. At Intel, he was responsible for the enterprise datacenter flash software where he restructured the entire development organization to run more like a ‘start-up’ delivering products at a very rapid pace with very high quality. He established the flash software portfolio by leveraging internal groups as well as key partners to execute very complex products on schedule and within TTM windows. Lastly, he refocused the server-memory tier to focus more on the value-added software such as I/O acceleration, storage/memory virtualization, cache pooling, and distributed NVM environments that helped position Intel as the leader in datacenter SW. Prior to Intel, Dalton served as the GM of FalconStor’s File Storage Division. He also held executive roles at Quantum Corp, Gadzoox Networks (acquired by Broadcom Corp) and Silicon Graphics. Dalton has designed many storage architectures with multiple patents, published articles and co-authored a book on storage computing.

“Violin is redefining the fundamentals of storage-computing in the datacenter. Its flash technology is enabling the most drastic ecosystem shift in decades for optimizing enterprise application workloads,” said Dalton. “With my experience at Intel, I look forward to driving the continuous development of Violin’s flash-optimized software to provide end users with the most advanced, end-to-end memory-optimized solutions in the market.”
Schneider comes to Violin with over 25 years of experience in hardware systems engineering. Prior to Violin, he was the co-founder of GridIron and Extreme Networks. At GridIron, Schneider was responsible for hiring and managing the technical team that delivered hardware and software products to accelerate applications using consumer grade MLC flash. Prior to GridIron, he co-founded Extreme Networks, where he oversaw the development of three generations of networking ASICS, two generations of Network Operations Systems and three generations of industry leading fixed and modular networking platforms that led to a successful public offering and over $2 Billion of products shipped.

“The opportunity to design and develop innovative memory-based storage systems at Violin is very exciting” said Schneider. “ Having built two successful organizations in the past, it is clear to me that Violin has the engineering talent and market leadership to change the storage industry landscape.