Ken Claffey is Vdura CEO with extensive experience in high performance computing (HPC) and storage, and has held executive roles at Seagate, Xyratex, Adaptec, and Eurologic. At Seagate, he leads the enterprise storage division, driving product innovation and market growth. At Xyratex, he helped the company expand its company to a leading OEM provider and built HPC’s cluster storage business that powered 40% of the world’s largest supercomputers before the Cray/HPE acquisition. He also played a key role in selling Xyratex to Seagate and held leadership positions in product, operations, sales and engineering.
As CEO of Vdura, Ken leverages his industry expertise to drive innovation and growth, positioning the company at the forefront of the ever-evolving HPC and AI landscape.
Vdura is a data storage and management platform designed to support AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. It utilizes a shared scale architecture designed to combine high performance with data durability. Suitable for deployment in on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments, the platform provides storage solutions for data-intensive applications while emphasizing reliability and ease of use of enterprise operations.
You have had an outstanding career in Seagate, Xyratex, Adaptec and Eurologic. What are the critical moments that shape your innovative approach in the data storage industry?
The most critical moment in my career was opening an HPC business at Xyratex, where we created the world’s first HPC storage device from raw device level optimization to software stack. These include hardware platforms, operating systems, local file systems, parallel file systems, network and even client software. This experience shapes my belief in the importance of deeply optimizing each layer to maximize infrastructure efficiency. To achieve this requires not only a solid technical understanding of each layer, but also a mastery of the basic business driving forces. Throughout my career, I have been building and refining a unique combination of technology and business insights that continue to inform my innovative approach in the industry.
What inspired the transition from Panasas to Vdura, how rebranding the brand reflects the company’s current vision and goals?
The transition from PANASA to Vdura reflects our company’s mission to meet the ever-changing needs of AI and HPC applications. While we are proud of Panasas as a pioneer in parallel file systems, it is clear that the future of data infrastructure requires a new approach, an emphasis on flexibility, durability, and simplicity. Vdura stands for the next chapter. The name itself (combining “speed” and “durability” together) can include our fast, reliable and cost-effective storage solutions that are critical to modern AI-powered workloads. Our rebranding also marks a strategic shift with the software-first model, allowing Vdura to provide our customers with a wider range of hardware options and more tailored solutions. By separating our software from proprietary hardware, we will create new opportunities for customers to achieve the highest performance and resilience of any deployment.
Can you share the story of creating the Vdura data platform and the key challenges you aim to solve in the AI and HPC landscape?
The VDURA data platform is designed to address the critical and growing gap in data infrastructure for AI and HPC workloads: balancing high performance with enterprise-grade durability. As AI-powered applications continue to evolve, data platforms must process large amounts of different data while ensuring reliability, scalability and seamless access. Our platform is built on Panasas parallel NAS technology and combines completely parallel microservice-based architectures with significant advancements such as our proprietary Velo (speed layered operation) and VPOD (virtualized object device) technologies. These innovations provide unparalleled efficiency and durability in hybrid, cloud-on-native and on-premises environments, supporting a wide range of workloads from GPU-intensive AI training to billions of small file operations. What sets Vdura apart is our ability to unify multiple storage media in a single architecture, providing flexibility to balance costs and performance based on customer needs. The platform’s emphasis on scalability, durability, and simplicity ensures that organizations can meet the increasingly demanding requirements of modern AI and HPC applications while optimizing their investment in data infrastructure.
What does “durability” mean in the context of modern data storage? Why is it crucial for AI-driven workloads?
Durability in modern data storage ensures that data remains intact, undecayed and retrievalable even when unexpected events such as failure or hardware failure occur. For AI-driven workloads, durability is critical due to frequent checkpointing, large amounts of data writing, and dependency on accurate datasets for model training. Vdura prioritizes durability with multi-layer data protection, including erasing encoding and a hybrid storage architecture that balances performance and durability. This ensures that organizations maintain data integrity while scaling their infrastructure. Without durability, even the fastest system risk data loss, which can damage insights and lead to expensive disruption.
The Vdura data platform emphasizes the scalability and simplicity of AI and HPC applications. How do you view these elements in reshaping the future of data infrastructure?
As AI and HPC workloads grow more complex, organizations need scalable solutions to reduce operational overhead without compromising performance or reliability. Vdura’s data platform emphasizes simplicity by providing a unified architecture that eliminates the management of different systems. Scalability is also crucial. VDURA enables organizations to leverage multimedia storage methods to customize their infrastructure to suit specific workload needs – using flash storage for high-speed performance, while HDDs have cost-effective capacity. This flexibility allows businesses to balance performance and cost while maintaining durability and data integrity. By providing intuitive and adaptable solutions, Vdura gives organizations more time and resources to advance their AI and HPC plans rather than managing storage complexity.
How does integration of Vdura with solutions like Atlas AI cluster enhance the functionality of organizations that want to scale their AI operations?
Vdura’s integration with Atlas AI clusters simplifies and accelerates deployment of AI factories by providing a fully optimized storage solution that meets AI workload needs. Atlas AI cluster combines high bandwidth, low latency networks, NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchips and Vdura’s AI-Optimiendatizeation data platform, which provides advanced metadata processing and input/output/output operations per second (IOPS) for more information. Fast data access. For us at Vdura, this partnership reflects our commitment to a future employment data infrastructure that can cope with the massive data needs of AI applications. By working closely with partners like Sourcecode and Eviden, we ensure that organizations can deploy cutting-edge AI infrastructure faster and more confidently.
What are the biggest challenges organizations face in adopting AI and HPC technologies, and how can Vdura help overcome them?
Adopting AI and HPC technologies presents some challenges in scaling infrastructure, managing costs, and ensuring data durability between their environments. As workloads grow, many organizations work hard to balance performance with durability. Vdura helps solve these problems by providing flexible scalable storage solutions, reducing operational expenses while ensuring data integrity for critical applications.
What trends do you expect to shape the data storage and HPC markets in the next decade?
Data persistence will become an organization’s focus over the next decade, as the cost of data loss or corruption is the central stage in evaluating infrastructure investment. Businesses will shift their priorities from availability to ensuring data integrity and durability over time and recognize the financial risks associated with unreliable systems. Vdura is in a very good location to meet this need with durable, scalable storage solutions that help organizations avoid the expensive consequences of downtime and data loss.
Supporting industries such as life sciences, energy and federal applications with Vdura, how do you tailor solutions to meet the unique needs of these sectors?
Vdura customizes solutions for these industries’ unique needs by focusing on flexibility, durability and performance. These departments generate a large amount of critical data that requires high-speed access and long-term integrity. Our hybrid storage architecture enables organizations to optimize for performance and capacity – using flash storage for real-time data processing, while HDDs provide cost-effective, durable storage. Our solutions also address critical regulatory and operational challenges in these industries by ensuring data remains secure, available and protected from loss or corruption. Due to our software separation from hardware, we provide organizations with the flexibility to choose the infrastructure that best suits their workload, allowing them to scale and adapt as their needs evolve.
Thanks for your excellent interview, and readers who hope to learn more should visit Vdura.
