Intelligent CIO North America Issue 49 | Page 8

VAST Data achieves high-performance storage solution certification
Forcepoint promotes Ryan Windham to CEO
NEWS

VAST Data achieves high-performance storage solution certification

VAST Data Platform has been certified as a high-performance storage solution for NVIDIA Partner Network cloud partners .

This certification underscores VAST ’ s position as a leading data platform provider for AI cloud infrastructure and further strengthens VAST ’ s collaboration with NVIDIA in building out next-generation AI factories .
“ This certification with NVIDIA builds on VAST ’ s already tremendous success with CSPs as the de facto AI data platform solution for large-scale , cloud infrastructure ,” said John Mao , Vice President , Technology Alliances , VAST Data .
Pitching seamless scalability and industryleading uptime , the VAST Data Platform enables service providers with capabilities that span the complete AI pipeline – from multi-protocol data ingest , accelerated data preprocessing for feature engineering , and high-performance storage for model training with fast checkpoints and restores to edge data management for model serving and end-to-end cataloguing to meet audit and compliance requirements .
The VAST Data Platform offers CSPs :
• Service Provider-Grade Reliability – helping observed production systems realise 99.9999 per cent availability .
• Secure Multi-Tenancy – zero-trust framework , per tenant data encryption , flexible network segmentation and robust audit capabilities enable CSPs to deliver secure cloud services at scale .
• Fine-Grained Workload Isolation – granular quality-of-service policies that prevent multi-tenant I / O contention help CSPs ensure numerous customers have the performance and data access they need for AI workloads from a single cluster .
• Infrastructure Cost Savings – service providers and enterprises alike can consolidate storage silos with an affordable single all-flash solution eliminating the overhead of data copies and sprawl .
Improved Operational Efficiency – robust APIs and SDKs and all Day 2 operations ( such as upgrades ) can be performed online , leading to a better customer experience with fewer admins required .

Forcepoint promotes Ryan Windham to CEO

Forcepoint has announced the promotion of Ryan Windham , Chief Customer and Strategy Officer , to CEO – succeeding Manny Rivelo who is retiring .

Windham brings 25 years of innovation and customer-first leadership experience in cybersecurity , automation and AI / ML to his role as CEO .
As Chief Customer and Strategy Officer , he was instrumental in leading critical crossfunctional collaboration across Customer Success , Product Management and Go-to- Market functions to optimally align both the business mission and product roadmap .
Prior to joining Forcepoint in 2023 , Windham was CEO at AppViewX helping to drive a 95 % customer retention rate and 80 % subscription revenue growth year-over-year .
He also served as CEO at Cedexis – acquired by Citrix in 2018 .
Earlier in his career , Windham held senior management positions at industryleading security and infrastructure companies including Imperva , F5 Networks and Websense .
“ Ryan ’ s strategic and innovative mindset will propel Forcepoint company forward through today ’ s exciting shift in business – utilizing and securing AI for competitive advantage ,” said Brian Decker , Partner , Francisco Partners .
“ This is a full circle moment for me , returning to lead Forcepoint after spending nearly a decade of my early career at Websense in corporate and product development roles ,” said Windham . “ I ’ ve worked closely with Manny to advance Forcepoint ’ s engineering in language models and generative AI , pushing data security innovation . I look forward to continuing collaboration across the company to help our customers and partners worldwide securely accelerate their transformation strategies for the future .”
Ryan Windham , CEO , Forcepoint
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