Greg Bruno Chief Architect, SoftIron

SoftIron Ltd. continues on its growth trajectory in technical and geographic reach with the opening of 2 new offices, and the appointment of Greg Bruno to the role of chief architect.

He joins SoftIron from Teradata: will lead the company’s software and hardware integration strategy, bringing more than 2 decades of engineering experience to the rapidly growing team. he is best known for his role in helping to develop the Rocks cluster toolkit at the San Diego HPC Center, as well as his role as VP of engineering and co-founder of StackIQ, which was acquired by Teradata in 2017.

Already operating (pre-Covid) under a global, distributed organization model, the firm have recently established three new facilities in San Diego, CA, Dallas, TX, and Berlin, Germany. This has allowed them to attract the global engineering talent, and also further its strategy to build out global manufacturing and operations expertise closer to centers of customer concentration in the US, Europe and beyond.

“Silicon Valley is no longer the single epicenter of exceptional engineering talent. We’re finding that good candidates are less prepared to relocate and Covid has only accelerated this,” said Phil Straw, CEO. “At the same time, as a manufacturer as well as a developer, we want to grow in a distributed manner, leveraging the best talent and the latest technologies in what we call our “edge manufacturing” strategy: enabling us to deliver globally, but respond locally. We’ve spent the better part of a decade building an innovative technology platform that we believe will fundamentally re-define the data center. In adding the considerable talents of Greg Bruno, as well as the team he brings with him, to the mix, we’re demonstrating our ongoing commitment to be one of the most strategic computer companies in the world.”

“There has been a certain level of stagnation in the data center and server industry when it comes to the way that hardware is designed and sourced which has, disappointingly, become an almost acceptable status quo,” said Bruno. “SoftIron embodies true, grass-roots innovation in their approach to design and manufacturing, which is rare in an age of prevalent commodity hardware, and the performance outcomes speak for themselves. The opportunity to contribute to SoftIron’s ambitious quest to redesign the datacenter in this manner is an exceptional one, and I look forward to working with the team to deliver outstanding solutions for the enterprise.”

Bruno will be joined at SoftIron by:

Mason Katz, systems architect who was also a co-founder of StackIQ and the Rocks cluster project, and

Anoop Rajendra, senior architect, previously a core developer at StackIQ and with the Rocks cluster project) in the new San Diego office.

Prior to joining SoftIron, Bruno was an engineering fellow in the technical and innovation office research team at Teradata. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2008 at UCSD, where he focused on parallel storage systems and helped develop Rocks, an open-source HPC cluster software distribution at SDSC.