Management

Ben Golub, CEO

Ben Golub is the President and Chief Executive Officer for Gluster. For five years prior to joining Gluster, Ben served as the President and CEO of Plaxo, a social networking infrastructure pioneer backed by industry luminaries Michael Moritz (Sequoia), Ram Shriram, Globespan Capital, and Cisco. Golub led Plaxo through a complete turnaround, bringing the company to profitability, over 20 million users, and a large and successful acquisition by Comcast Interactive Media. Prior to Plaxo, Golub served in a number of executive roles at VeriSign, including Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President/General Manager of the Enterprise Security, SSL, and Payments divisions. Prior to VeriSign, Ben held a number of product development, operations, and business development roles at companies such as Avid Technology and Sun Microsystems. Ben holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Masters in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He graduated with a B.A. in Public Policy from Princeton University. He serves on a number of for-profit and non-profit boards, including TrustE, BlueSwarm, and Partners for Youth with Disabilities.

Hitesh Chellani, Vice President Operations

Hitesh has been leading overall strategy and business execution for Gluster since co-founding the company with AB. Prior to Gluster he was at California Digital Corporation where his role was business development and systems engineering. During his tenure there Hitesh managed the system integration facility that deployed the ‘Thunder’ supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which at the time was the second fastest supercomputer in the world. Prior to Gluster, he co-founded two trading companies in Dubai UAE where he managed business development and sales. Hitesh began his career as a software engineer for Tata Unisys in India. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Engineering from Bombay University.

Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, CTO

As CTO and Co-founder, AB sets the vision and strategy for the Gluster platform. Prior to Gluster, AB was CTO of California Digital Corporation, where his work led to scaling of the commodity cluster computing to supercomputing class performance. He drove the adoption of cluster computing and GNU/Linux at enterprise data centers and helped close strategic accounts at CDC. In 2004, AB led the development of world's second fastest Supercomputer code named "Thunder" for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. AB also serves on the board of "Free Software Foundation - India". He is the author / contributor of various other Free Software projects like GNU FreeIPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), GNU Garp (Gratuitous ARP Daemon), bios-config (edit/replicate CMOS parameters), librpci/hdb (RPC interpose for GNU Hurd) and Hymn/PlayFair (iTunes ripper), GNU Freetalk (Scheme extensible messenger for Jabber, Google talk), and Freehoo (Scheme extensible messenger for YahooIM). AB holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.

Jack O’Brien, Vice President, Marketing

Jack leads all marketing and product management activities and brings extensive enterprise software and systems marketing experience at both startups and large companies. Prior to Gluster Jack was director of marketing at Gear6, where he introduced the company’s network caching appliances for accelerating storage performance. He also served as director of product marketing at Azul Systems, a pioneer in Java computing appliances. Earlier, Jack managed the Solaris marketing team at Sun Microsystems focusing on x86 platforms, Open Solaris, and Linux strategy. Jack holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.