Data Center People: New CEO for Extreme Networks

Extreme Networks announces a new CEO, and Violin Memory expands its engineering team.

New Extreme Networks CEO.  Extreme Networks announced that it has appointed Charles W. Berger as its President and Chief Executive Officer, as well as elected him to the Board of Directors, effective immediately.  Mr. Berger will be replacing Oscar Rodriguez who has resigned, effective today, from his position and has resigned from the Board of Directors of Extreme Networks.  Previously Mr. Berger was at ParAccel, and has over 30 years of experience in the technology sector. Prior to ParAccel, Berger served as the CEO of DVDPlay, Nuance Communications, Vicinity Corporation, AdForce, and Radius. "I am honored and delighted to join Extreme Networks, a premier technology company," said Berger. "I look forward to working with our dedicated employees to continue to introduce innovative products, change the dynamics of the switching market with our SDN capabilities and serve our customers globally.  There is a lot to do and I am excited to get started."

Violin Memory adds executives from Intel and GridIron.  Violin Memory announced Stephen Dalton as vice president of software and Herb Schneider as vice president of hardware. 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. “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.”