Ashley Gorakhpurwalla EVP and GM, HDD Business, Western Digital

Western Digital Corp. hired 20-year Dell Technologies veteran, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, as EVP and GM of its HDD business unit.

Most recently, he was president and GM of servers and infrastructure systems at Dell EMC, where he led a $20 billion business that included the company’s PowerEdge Server, hyperconverged infrastructure and extreme scale infrastructure business units as well as R&D for its storage and data protection platform.

In his new role, he is responsible for all HDD portfolio strategy, product development and business results and will lead engineering and product management teams focused on delivering the company’s HDD innovation.

“HDD innovation is critical to achieving the enormous storage capacity demands for the segment of the market that provides public cloud infrastructure through a development process that maintains disciplined line-of-sight on supporting an aggressive growth trajectory,” said David Goeckeler, CEO. “Driving a storage business focused on product development that consistently delivers industry-leading capacity with cost efficiency and scale requires a strong leader who has decades of technology expertise and a deep understanding of data center architectures. Ashley’s background and proven track-record clearly exceeds this bar. His personal experience engaging directly with many of our important customer segments brings a fresh thought leadership perspective to the team and I’m confident he will make a positive impact on our long-term strategy.”  

With almost 30 years of technology industry experience, Gorakhpurwalla spent the majority of his career at Dell Technologies in a variety of engineering and business leadership roles focused on complex data center infrastructure. Prior to leading Dell EMC’s server and infrastructure systems business, he served as SVP of the PowerEdge engineering team.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University – Kingsville.
 
“Western Digital’s customers are no longer just creating, processing and archiving their data. Now they have to manage it across clouds, analyze it in real-time and develop insights quicker and more efficiently than ever before,” he said. “As our customers continue transforming to take advantage of the explosion of data and information, Western Digital’s innovation, IP and world-class engineering and manufacturing position the company at the very core of this transformation. My role at Western Digital gives me a new opportunity to continue my part in this exciting new era and I look forward to working with David and the team.”
  
Gorakhpurwalla’s appointment marks the next step in Western Digital’s ongoing implementation of its diversified storage portfolio strategy. Last month, the company announced it was forming separate product business units for its flash and HDD technology assets with each business led by an experienced GM. Rob Soderbery joined the company at that time to lead the flash business unit. With both GMs now in place, the company continues making progress in driving an acceleration strategy designed for growth, profitability and development agility. By delivering both flash and HDD innovation through focused product development organizations, the company can further leverage its go-to-market engine including customer relationships across web scale, channel partners, device manufacturers and retailers. This strategy positions the company to target the portion of the cloud infrastructure market that deploys both technologies.

“Our unique ability to deliver flash and HDD innovation is a strong and differentiated value proposition,” added Goeckeler. “All of our top 20 customers deploy both flash and HDD storage from Western Digital and I’m happy with the new direction of our organization and the leaders we have in place to drive these businesses.”

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