Virident Systems

Founded in June 2006 by Kumar Ganapathy, Vijay Karamcheti, and Raj Parekh, Virident Systems carved out a significant space in the enterprise storage market by focusing on server-side flash storage solutions. The founding team brought together extensive experience from prominent tech firms like Google, Sun Microsystems, and Intel. Dr. Ganapathy, prior to co-founding Virident, was an executive at Artiman Ventures and co-founded VxTel, a VoIP technology firm acquired by Intel. Dr. Karamcheti served as a tenured associate professor at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and was a visiting research scientist at Google. This deep expertise in parallel and distributed computer systems directly shaped Virident's direction.

The company's core business was providing high-performance Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) based flash storage solutions designed for enterprise clients. These solutions catered to performance-intensive applications in sectors such as virtualization, database management, cloud computing, and webscale operations. Virident's business model revolved around the sale of its hardware and accompanying intelligent software, targeting enterprises looking to overcome poor application performance and boost I/O efficiency.

Virident's flagship product line included the FlashMAX PCIe cards. The initial product, tachIOn, was a NAND flash-based PCIe card announced in 2010. This was followed by the FlashMAX II, a second-generation PCIe application accelerator notable for offering up to 2.2TB of capacity in a low-profile, half-height, half-length form factor. A key differentiator was the company's vFAS (Virident Flash management with Adaptive Scheduler) software, which virtualized the underlying flash memory and provided enterprise-grade features like flash-aware RAID, wear leveling, and garbage collection. Another significant offering was FlashMAX Connect, a software suite that created a shared server-side flash storage tier, enhancing management with features like replication and storage pooling. These products were designed to be installed in any server, helping organizations maximize datacenter space and performance.

A major milestone for Virident was its acquisition by Western Digital's subsidiary, HGST, in a deal announced in September 2013 and completed in October 2013 for approximately $685 million in cash. At the time of the acquisition, Mike Gustafson was the CEO, and he subsequently joined HGST as a senior vice president to continue leading the Virident team. The acquisition was a strategic move by Western Digital to strengthen its position in the rapidly growing enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) market.

Keywords: server-side flash storage, PCIe SSD, application accelerator, enterprise storage, data-intensive applications, FlashMAX, vFAS software, storage class memory, datacenter solutions, high-performance computing, virtualization storage, cloud computing storage, webscale infrastructure, database acceleration, flash management software, solid-state storage, Western Digital acquisition, HGST, Kumar Ganapathy, Vijay Karamcheti, Raj Parekh.