Ken Claffey is the CEO of VDURA, brings extensive experience in high-performance computing (HPC) and storage, having held executive roles at Seagate, Xyratex, Adaptec, and Eurologic. At Seagate, he led the Enterprise storage division, driving product innovation and market growth. At Xyratex, he helped scale the corporate into a number one OEM provider and built the ClusterStor HPC storage business, which powered 40% of the world’s top supercomputers before its acquisition by Cray/HPE. He also played a key role within the sale of Xyratex to Seagate and has held leadership positions across product, operations, sales, and engineering.
As CEO of VDURA, Ken leverages his industry expertise to drive innovation and growth, positioning the corporate on the forefront of the evolving HPC and AI landscape.
VDURA is an information storage and management platform designed to support AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Utilizing a shared-nothing scale-out architecture, it goals to mix high performance with data durability at scale. The platform is adaptable for deployment in on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, offering storage solutions for data-intensive applications while emphasizing reliability and ease of use for enterprise operation.
You’ve had a remarkable profession spanning leadership roles at Seagate, Xyratex, Adaptec, and Eurologic. What are some pivotal moments that shaped your approach to innovation in the information storage industry?
Essentially the most pivotal moment of my profession was starting the HPC business at Xyratex, where we created the world’s first HPC storage appliance optimized from the raw device level to each layer of the software stack. This included the hardware platform, the operating system, the local file system, the parallel file system, networking, and even the client software. That have shaped my belief within the importance of deeply optimizing every layer to maximise infrastructure efficiency. Achieving this requires not only a solid technical understanding of every layer, but additionally a grasp of the underlying business drivers. Throughout my profession, I’ve been constructing and refining this unique combination of technical and business insights, which continues to tell my approach to innovation within the industry.
What inspired the transition from Panasas to VDURA, and the way does the rebranding reflect the corporate’s current vision and goals?
The transition from Panasas to VDURA reflects a natural evolution of our company’s mission to satisfy the changing needs of AI and HPC applications. While we’re pleased with Panasas’ legacy as a pioneer in parallel file systems, it became clear that the longer term of information infrastructure required a brand new approach—one which emphasizes flexibility, durability, and ease. VDURA represents this next chapter. The name itself—combining “velocity” and “durability”—encapsulates our concentrate on delivering fast, reliable, and cost-effective storage solutions which can be critical to modern AI-driven workloads. Our rebranding also marks a strategic shift to a software-first model, allowing VDURA to supply broader hardware decisions and more tailored solutions for our customers. By decoupling our software from proprietary hardware, we’re creating recent opportunities for patrons to attain the best performance and resilience across any deployment.
Are you able to share the story behind the creation of the VDURA Data Platform and the important thing challenges you aimed to handle within the AI and HPC landscape?
The VDURA Data Platform was developed to handle a critical and growing gap in data infrastructure for AI and HPC workloads: balancing high performance with enterprise-grade durability. As AI-driven applications proceed to evolve, data platforms must handle massive volumes of diverse data while ensuring reliability, scalability, and seamless access. Our platform builds on the inspiration of Panasas’ parallel NAS technology, incorporating significant advancements resembling a totally parallel, microservices-based architecture and our proprietary VeLO (Velocity Layered Operations) and VPOD (Virtualized Protected Object Device) technologies. These innovations deliver unmatched efficiency and sturdiness across hybrid, cloud-native, and on-premises environments, supporting diverse workloads from GPU-intensive AI training to billions of small file operations. What sets VDURA apart is our ability to unify multiple storage media inside a single architecture, providing the flexibleness to balance cost and performance based on customer needs. The platform’s emphasis on scalability, durability, and ease ensures organizations can meet the increasingly demanding requirements of contemporary AI and HPC applications while optimizing their data infrastructure investments.
What does “durability” mean within the context of contemporary data storage, and why is it increasingly critical for AI-driven workloads?
Durability in modern data storage ensures that data stays intact, uncorrupted, and retrievable even after unexpected events like outages or hardware failures. For AI-driven workloads, durability is critical attributable to frequent checkpointing, massive data writing, and the reliance on accurate datasets for model training. VDURA prioritizes durability through multi-layered data protection, including erasure coding and hybrid storage architectures that balance performance and sturdiness. This ensures that organizations can maintain data integrity while scaling their infrastructure. Without durability, even the fastest systems risk data loss, which may compromise insights and result in costly disruptions.
The VDURA Data Platform emphasizes scalability and ease for AI and HPC applications. How do you see these elements reshaping the longer term of information infrastructure?
As AI and HPC workloads grow more complex, organizations need scalable solutions that reduce operational overhead without compromising performance or reliability. VDURA’s Data Platform emphasizes simplicity by offering a unified architecture that eliminates the necessity to manage disparate systems. Scalability is equally critical. VDURA enables organizations to tailor their infrastructure to specific workload needs by utilizing a multi-media storage approach—leveraging flash storage for high-speed performance and HDD for cost-effective capability. This flexibility allows businesses to balance performance and value while maintaining durability and data integrity. By providing intuitive and adaptable solutions, VDURA empowers organizations to focus more time and resources on advancing their AI and HPC initiatives, moderately than managing storage complexity.
How does VDURA’s integration with solutions just like the Atlas AI Cluster enhance the capabilities of organizations seeking to scale their AI operations?
VDURA’s integration with the Atlas AI Cluster simplifies and accelerates the deployment of AI factories by providing a totally optimized storage solution tailored to the needs of AI workloads. The Atlas AI Cluster incorporates high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchips, and VDURA’s AI-optimized Data Platform, which offers advanced metadata handling and input/output operations per second (IOPS) for faster data access. For us at VDURA, this partnership reflects our commitment to constructing future-ready data infrastructure that may handle the large data demands of AI applications. By working closely with partners like SourceCode and Eviden, we’re ensuring that organizations can deploy cutting-edge AI infrastructure faster and with greater confidence.
What are the largest challenges organizations face in adopting AI and HPC technologies, and the way is VDURA helping to beat them?
Adopting AI and HPC technologies presents several challenges around scaling infrastructure, managing costs, and ensuring data durability across their environments. Many organizations struggle to balance performance with durability as their workloads grow. VDURA helps address these issues by offering flexible, scalable storage solutions that reduce operational expenses while ensuring data integrity for critical applications.
What trends do you foresee shaping the information storage and HPC markets in the following decade?
In the following decade, data durability will develop into a key focus for organizations, as the associated fee of information loss or corruption takes center stage in evaluating infrastructure investments. Businesses will shift their priorities from availability to making sure data integrity and persistence over time, recognizing the financial risks tied to unreliable systems. VDURA may be very well-positioned to satisfy this demand with durable, scalable storage solutions that help organizations avoid the costly consequences of downtime and data loss.
With VDURA supporting industries like life sciences, energy, and federal applications, how do you tailor your solutions to satisfy the unique demands of those sectors?
VDURA tailors its solutions to the unique demands of those industries by specializing in flexibility, durability, and performance. These sectors generate massive volumes of critical data that require each high-speed access and long-term integrity. Our hybrid storage architecture allows organizations to optimize for each performance and capability—using flash storage for real-time data processing and HDD for cost-effective, durable storage. Our solutions also address key regulatory and operational challenges in these industries by ensuring data stays secure, available, and protected against loss or corruption. As our software is decoupled from hardware, we give organizations the flexibleness to decide on the infrastructure that most closely fits their workload, enabling them to scale and adapt as their needs evolve.
