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 company into a leading 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 in 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 company at the forefront of the evolving HPC and AI landscape.
VDURA is a data storage and management platform designed to support AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Utilizing a shared-nothing scale-out architecture, it aims to combine 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 career spanning leadership roles at Seagate, Xyratex, Adaptec, and Eurologic. What are some pivotal moments that shaped your approach to innovation in the data storage industry?
The most pivotal moment of my career was starting the HPC business at Xyratex, where we created the world’s first HPC storage appliance optimized from the raw device level to every 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 experience shaped my belief in the importance of deeply optimizing every layer to maximize infrastructure efficiency. Achieving this requires not only a solid technical understanding of each layer, but also a grasp of the underlying business drivers. Throughout my career, I’ve been building and refining this unique combination of technical and business insights, which continues to inform my approach to innovation in the industry.
What inspired the transition from Panasas to VDURA, and how does the rebranding reflect the company's current vision and goals?
The transition from Panasas to VDURA reflects a natural evolution of our company’s mission to meet the changing needs of AI and HPC applications. While we’re proud of Panasas’ legacy as a pioneer in parallel file systems, it became clear that the future of data infrastructure required a new approach—one that emphasizes flexibility, durability, and simplicity. VDURA represents this next chapter. The name itself—combining “velocity” and “durability”—encapsulates our focus on delivering fast, reliable, and cost-effective storage solutions that are critical to modern AI-driven workloads. Our rebranding also marks a strategic shift to a software-first model, allowing VDURA to offer broader hardware choices and more tailored solutions for our customers. By decoupling our software from proprietary hardware, we’re creating new opportunities for customers to achieve the highest performance and resilience across any deployment.
Can you share the story behind the creation of the VDURA Data Platform and the key challenges you aimed to address in the AI and HPC landscape?
The VDURA Data Platform was developed to address a critical and growing gap in data infrastructure for AI and HPC workloads: balancing high performance with enterprise-grade durability. As AI-driven applications continue to evolve, data platforms must handle massive volumes of diverse data while ensuring reliability, scalability, and seamless access. Our platform builds on the foundation of Panasas’ parallel NAS technology, incorporating significant advancements such as a fully parallel, microservices-based architecture and our proprietary VeLO (Velocity Layered Operations) and VPOD (Virtualized Protected Object Device) technologies. These innovations deliver unmatched efficiency and durability 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 within a single architecture, providing the flexibility to balance cost and performance based on customer needs. The platform’s emphasis on scalability, durability, and simplicity ensures organizations can meet the increasingly demanding requirements of modern AI and HPC applications while optimizing their data infrastructure investments.
What does “durability” mean in the context of modern data storage, and why is it increasingly critical for AI-driven workloads?
Durability in modern data storage ensures that data remains intact, uncorrupted, and retrievable even after unexpected events like outages or hardware failures. For AI-driven workloads, durability is critical due 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 durability. This ensures that organizations can maintain data integrity while scaling their infrastructure. Without durability, even the fastest systems risk data loss, which can compromise insights and lead to costly disruptions.
The VDURA Data Platform emphasizes scalability and simplicity for AI and HPC applications. How do you see these elements reshaping the future of data 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 need 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 capacity. This flexibility allows businesses to balance performance and cost 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, rather than managing storage complexity.
How does VDURA’s integration with solutions like the Atlas AI Cluster enhance the capabilities of organizations looking to scale their AI operations?
VDURA’s integration with the Atlas AI Cluster simplifies and accelerates the deployment of AI factories by providing a fully 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 building future-ready data infrastructure that can handle the massive 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 biggest challenges organizations face in adopting AI and HPC technologies, and how is VDURA helping to overcome 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 data storage and HPC markets in the next decade?
In the next decade, data durability will become a key focus for organizations, as the cost of data loss or corruption takes center stage in evaluating infrastructure investments. Businesses will shift their priorities from availability to ensuring data integrity and persistence over time, recognizing the financial risks tied to unreliable systems. VDURA is very well-positioned to meet 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 meet the unique demands of these sectors?
VDURA tailors its solutions to the unique demands of these industries by focusing on flexibility, durability, and performance. These sectors generate massive volumes of critical data that require both high-speed access and long-term integrity. Our hybrid storage architecture allows organizations to optimize for both performance and capacity—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 remains secure, available, and protected from loss or corruption. As our software is decoupled from hardware, we give organizations the flexibility to choose the infrastructure that best fits their workload, enabling them to scale and adapt as their needs evolve.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit VDURA.
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