Eric Barton
Today DDN appointed Eric Barton as the company’s chief technology officer for software-defined storage. In this role, Barton will lead the company’s strategic roadmap, technology architecture and product design for DDN’s newly created Infinite Memory Engine business unit. Barton brings with him more than 30 years of technology innovation, entrepreneurship and expertise in networking, distributed systems and storage software.
Eric Barton is a visionary with a proven track record and deep understanding of data-intensive computing and complex distributed storage systems. As we expand our customer base into cloud, AI, machine learning and rack-scale SSD environments, we are excited to have Eric lead our next wave of technological innovation,” said Alex Bouzari, chief executive officer, chairman and co-founder, DDN. “The rapid growth of our Software-Defined Storage business and Eric’s appointment as CTO reflect DDN’s commitment and leadership in developing innovative solutions for the world’s most demanding data intensive environments.”
Prior to DDN, Barton was lead architect for the High Performance Data Division (HPDD) at Intel Corporation, where he created some of the world’s most innovative storage architectures, leveraging object storage, NVMe, distributed file systems, multi-core processors and 3D XPoint. Before Intel, Barton was co-founder and CTO of Whamcloud, the main development arm behind the open-source Lustre file system, which was acquired by Intel Corporation in 2012. Prior to that Barton designed and built one of the first commercially available distributed file systems, actively contributed to the development of advanced networking protocols for technical computing, and implemented the Lustre Networking Layer (LNET).
Eric is a true thought leader in distributed and high-performance storage, one of the very finest in the industry, and we are fortunate to have him join the team,” said Robert Triendl, SVP for sales, marketing and field services. “With the advent of technologies such as NVMe and 3D XPoint, and innovations in device technologies and storage fabrics, the market for elastic storage solutions is undergoing dramatic changes. As the leader in scalable storage systems with thousands of mission critical customers, DDN is uniquely positioned for a significant expansion of our addressable market.”
DDN’s appointment of Barton and other recent initiatives aimed at accelerating the expansion of its IME software-defined storage product family exemplify the company’s long-term commitment to lead in the creation and delivery of innovative storage solutions for AI, Machine Learning, Enterprise, Cloud and Technical Computing. Available today as both software-only and appliance servers, IME is a scale-out, flash-native storage solution that solves I/O bottlenecks and accelerates applications and workflows in a reliable and cost-effective fashion. IME provides predictable, scalable performance at a fraction of the cost of conventional storage solutions.
During the past years, DDN has developed a remarkable set of core technologies for scalable storage systems based on flash and non-volatile memory (NVM),” Barton said. “I am excited to join the extremely talented team at DDN and help drive the company’s efforts in building a family of elastic, NVM-based storage products that will bring these technologies to a broader enterprise and cloud market.”
