High capacity storage firm WekaIO has appointed Derek Burke as sales manager for the UK, to help boost sales and manage channel relationships. He has been brought in as part of a wider EMEA expansion by the US-headquartered firm and will report to Richard Dyke, VP of global sales at WekaIO.
WekaIO is looking to grow its presence within high performance computing (HPC), life sciences and artificial intelligence workloads.
Burke comes to WekaIO from Pure Storage, where he had primary responsibility for FlashBlade storage system sales in EMEA. He has also held senior sales and channel positions at Seagate Cloud Systems, DataDirect Networks (DDN), and Panasas where he also oversaw business development and marketing.
He brings with him 18 years of experience in HPC storage, scale-out NAS, parallel file systems, cloud and object storage solutions. Burke has also participated as a board member of the European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing (ETP4HPC), a public/private partnership advising the European Commission on its HPC strategy.
WekaIO has recently signed global partnership announcements with HPE, AWS and Cirrascale as the firm continues its momentum in EMEA. It aims to make its software-defined NVMe-native, shared parallel file system more accessible to organisations that use GPU- and CPU-based clusters for HPC, deep learning, research and analytics workloads.
Burke said: “We have been seeing an increased interest in EMEA for a modern, scalable file system that is optimised for flash and which can support deep learning and analytics at scale. WekaIO has a great solution with Matrix, one that delivers the needed performance, scalability and ease of use that organisations are seeking.”
Dyke added: “Derek has a wealth of experience in HPC storage and file systems. His appointment aligns with our strategy for market expansion and he’ll play an integral role in helping shape our business in EMEA, both for customers and part
