Evan Powell, CEO

Evan is an entrepreneur with broad experience in building software and service companies. Most recently, Evan was founding CEO and then VP of Marketing and Business Development at Clarus Systems, the leading provider of IP Communications management software to Global 2000 enterprises. Prior to founding Clarus Systems, Evan was an early employee at ThinkLink, where he was Director of Business Development. ThinkLink was one of the earliest providers of consumer VoIP and messaging services.

Prior to ThinkLink, Evan helped build Working Assets, one of the pioneers in socially responsible business. During Evan's tenure, the company quickly grew into one of the largest telecom service resellers in the United States. Evan attended the European business school, IESE, and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Alex Aizman, CTO, Founder

Alex, along with Nexenta co-founder Dmitry Yusupov, created the iSCSI stack that was accepted into the Linux kernel in mid-2005. (see http://www.open-iscsi.org). They also built the innovative hybrid operating system, Nexenta Core Platform, with an OpenSolaris kernel and a GNU (Ubuntu/Debian) user space (www.nexenta.org).

Prior to founding Nexenta Systems, Alex was Director, Software Architecture at Neterion, Inc., and Director of Software Engineering at Silverback Systems, Inc. (acquired by Brocade). Alex co-invented Large Receive Offload (LRO), the broadly adopted method to improve TCP and UDP performance, with and without assistance in the hardware. He has patents pending in the area of protocol offload and high-speed networking.

Dmitry Yusupov, VP of Software, Founder

Dmitry, with Nexenta Systems co-founder Alex Aizman, is co-creator of the iSCSI stack that was accepted into the Linux kernel. This same Open-iSCSI project forms the basis of most iSCSI solutions used today. Their experiences attempting to build enterprise-class storage with the Linux kernel encouraged both to create the innovative hybrid operating system, Nexenta Core Platform (www.nexenta.org).

Prior to founding Nexenta Systems, Dmitry was at Neterion, Inc., where he led the development of high performance 10G networking driver architectures for Linux and Solaris operating systems. Prior to Neterion, Dmitry was at Silverback Systems where, with Alex Aizman, he was working on iSCSI and TCP/IP offload driver architecture for Linux and embedded operating systems.

Jon Ash, VP of Sales

Jon has been involved in the Sales and Marketing of advanced storage technology for more than 20 years and has experience selling storage systems to enterprises across the globe. Recently, Jon has worked with several startups in the Storage Compression and Virtualization markets. He was VP Sales at Storwize and, prior to that, VP Sales at MaXXan, where he was responsible for building the Sales and Support teams to ensure customer success worldwide.

Jon started his career with Unisys, in the UK, selling to large Financial and Commercial customers. He moved to the United States in 1994 to head up marketing of a Unisys storage product line. He has a degree from the University of Warwick, England.

Rick Hayes, VP of Technical Operations

Rick brings more than two decades of industry experience to Nexenta. Previously, he was the principal consultant for the data center practice at GlassHouse Technologies. At Glasshouse, he developed and managed strategic IT projects focusing on data center consolidations and migrations for enterprises in energy, finance, insurance, and networking markets.

Prior to Glasshouse, Rick was director of global services at MaXXan, a leading innovator of intelligent storage network infrastructure products. Rick also has served as director of global field operations at StorageNetworks, and has held management and leadership positions at Dynegy, Sprint Paranet, Minnesota Department of Military Affairs, and the U.S. Army.

Brad Stone, VP of Product Management

Brad is an experienced veteran of both startups and name-brand companies. Brad has more than 20 years of experience architecting, designing, and implementing enterprise software solutions for small and large companies.

Prior to joining Nexenta, he co-founded MenloWare, where he built a policy-based storage management platform for a large storage-as-a-service provider. He also built a self-healing agent infrastructure for the Air Force. Previously, Brad was CTO at Resonate, where he helped take the company public and transformed the company from Internet traffic management software to active service-level management. Brad also has designed system management products for Symbol and Hewlett-Packard.

Bill Roth, VP of Marketing

Bill is an experienced veteran of both startups and name-brand companies. Bill has more than 25 years of experience architecting, designing, and implementing enterprise software solutions for small and large companies, as well as being a technology journalist and company spokesperson.

Prior to joining Nexenta, he was Chief Marketing Officer at LogLogic, a Sequoia Capital funded startup in the Security and Information Event Management Industry. Prior to that he was Vice President/General Manager of the Tools Business Unit at BEA Systems, and he led that group for 3 years. He also spent time at Sun Microsystems, where he led product management and product marketing for Java 2, Enterprise Edition. He has also worked in organizations as diverse as Morgan Stanley and GSI Commerce. He has a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin. 

Bill Fuller, VP of Engineering

Bill Fuller has been involved in storage industry for over 30 years. He was instrumental in early development of RAID and Fibre Channel. Previously, he has been VP of Engineering at Auspex and MonoSphere with stints at StorageWay (an early Storage Service Provider), Nishan (FC IP bridging and iSCSI), Mendocino (early CDP provider) and Quest (storage management for virtual environments). He has a BSEE degree from the University of Wisconsin, and an MSEE from Stanford University.

Jim Fitzgerald, VP Business Development

Jim is an experienced technology veteran who brings a wealth of industry and business development knowledge to Nexenta. Prior to joining Nexenta, Jim had stints as VP of Sales and Marketing at System Fabric Works, specialists in InfiniBand storage solutions, and Global Bay Technologies. He was also the founder and CEO of SteelEye Technologies, a leader in data application protection technology on Linux. At Steeleye, he lead strategic partnership and reseller agreements with the likes of IBM and HP.

Prior to founding SteelEye, Jim had a successful career at Sun Microsystems in a variety of sales and marketing position ultimately serving as SunSoft’s Senior Director of Business Development where Jim and his team managed key strategic partnerships such as Fujitsu, IBM, NCR and Xerox, and negotiated and closed a wide variety of strategic partnerships, technology and corporate acquisitions and joint ventures. Jim holds a BA in Economics from Boston College and an MBA from New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business.