Brian Pawlowski VP of Performance Engineering, Hammerspace

Hammerspace, Inc. appointed Brian Pawlowski, a strategic addition to the engineering leadership team who will help continue to rapidly advance the groundbreaking performance capabilities of its Global Data Environment software and Hyperscale NAS offering. 

 
“Having Brian join our team marks a significant milestone for Hammerspace and the broader technology community,” said Trond Myklebust, CTO and Linux Kernel maintainer for the NFS Client. “Brian’s unparalleled vision and execution at NetApp and Pure Storage, coupled with his substantial contributions to the Linux community, set a remarkable precedent in our industry. His vision and expertise not only reflect his professional excellence but also his dedication to innovation and progress. We are thrilled to welcome Brian to Hammerspace, where his impact will undoubtedly continue to propel our leadership in high-performance NAS and data orchestration capabilities. His work has always been at the forefront of technological advancement, and we look forward to his leadership accelerating our technology endeavors.”
 
Pawlowski joins Hammerspace from Quantum, where he drove the company’s all-flash and object storage offering as chief development officer. Prior to that, he was the VP and chief architect at Pure Storage, focusing on next-gen storage architectures and positioning Pure’s scale-out NAS product with global customers and partners. He also worked at NetApp, joining as employee number 18 and leading the technology vision for more than 21 years as the SVP and CTO. He drove the vision and innovation for NetApp’s storage architecture, leading to industry-leading storage efficiency, performance, and improved usability, resulting in more than 50 fundamental patents.
 
Throughout his career, he has dedicated effort to community engagement and setting standards. As the co-chair of the IETF Network File System Version 4 (NFSv4) working group since 1998, a founding developer of the test suites for the SPECstorage benchmark, and an ongoing active member of the SPECstorage committee, hiss contributions have been pivotal in shaping the landscape of storage technology and benchmarks.
 
“I have long been fascinated by product design and use cases for high-performance NAS access, and Hammerspace’s software is fundamentally unlike any other technology in the market today,” he said. “I am excited to drive continued innovation for Hammerspace’s Global Data Environment and help organizations speed their time-to-market and time-to-insight, and ultimately derive business value from their data, wherever it resides.”
 
He has served on the board of trustees at the global nonprofit AnitaB.org and as a board member for the Linux Foundation.

He studied physics at MIT and the University of Texas at Austin, computer science at Arizona State University, and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fine Arts Photography from the Academy of Art University.