Steve Wakefield VP Sales, SoftIron

SoftIron Limited added two new executives to its team, Steve Wakefield as VP sales, and Matt Tangvald as senior director of product management.

Steve Wakefield brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise storage and software defined storage (SDS) on hardware, open source software, and storage appliance solutions. He joins SoftIron from Red Hat, where he managed strategic alliances for Ceph and Gluster. He was one of the original InkTank employees for Ceph, and moved to Red Hat with the InkTank acquisition.  

“Steve is well-known in the storage industry, and industry insiders recognize his name as synonymous with Ceph storage,” says Tim Massey, SoftIron CEO. “Steve’s deep industry expertise will accelerate adoption of our zero-risk solutions for data centers.“

“I’m excited to join the amazing team SoftIron has created to offer the first Ceph appliance that takes the risk out of ‘build it yourself’ SDS open source software and commodity harwdare,” says Wakefield. “SoftIron utilizes hardware that is fully optimized for Ceph performance, and its energy savings help data centers realize the lowest TCO.”  

Matt Tangvald has over 15 years of storage experience and has been granted two patents for storage-related technologies. Prior to joining SoftIron, he held key roles in product management and engineering at NetApp, Microsoft, and Intel.

“Matt’s extensive experience will help drive the development and management of SoftIron’s HyperDrive portfolio of SDS products,” says Massey. “Every piece of HyperDrive, including the motherboard and chassis, is purpose-built to do one thing really well and that is scale-out storage.”

“I’m thrilled to lead the development of SoftIron’s tuned, Ceph-based, software defined storage appliances,” says Tangvald. “Joining the company at this key stage in its growth is exciting, because we have massive opportunities to develop solutions for data centers that are truly zero-risk.”