Mark Lockareff, CEO

Mark Lockareff joined Nexenta in February 2013 as CEO and member of the Board of Directors. He is responsible for setting the strategic direction of the company and leading the executive team across all operational aspects of planning and execution.

Mark has spent the last 25 years growing, leading, and investing in disruptive technology companies during their key growth stages in the enterprise infrastructure, software and internet markets. These companies include: ParAccel, Agiliance, Apptera, Softricity, Model N, Facebook, Riverbed, Quigo, Acopia, ProofPoint, Excite, Classifieds2000 and Echelon.

Mark was most recently the Managing Director at Bridge Advisory Partners, an advisory firm he founded in 2008 that provided CEO, board of director and executive chairman services to high potential, expansion stage venture and private equity backed technology companies. Prior to Bridge, Mark was a Venture Partner at Meritech Capital Partners, a $2.6 billion venture capital firm that funded such companies as: BlueArc, Acopia, Fusion-io, Netezza, Greenplum, Cloudera, Riverbed, Facebook, Salesforce.com and NetSuite. Prior to Meritech, he was a Founder and Managing Director of GameChange Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm affiliated with Accenture that focused on enterprise software investments. Prior to that, he was VP, Corporate Development at Excite@Home and VP & GM of Classified Advertising for Excite. Earlier in his career, he was VP&GM at Classifieds2000, a product manager at Echelon, an investment banker at Salomon Brothers and started his career in sales at IBM.

Mark holds a BAS in Electrical Engineering and Economics from Stanford University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Alex Aizman, CTO, Founder

Alex, along with Nexenta co-founder Dmitry Yusupov, created the iSCSI stack that was accepted into the Linux kernel in mid-2005. (see http://www.open-iscsi.org). They also built the innovative hybrid operating system, Nexenta Core Platform, with an OpenSolaris kernel and a GNU (Ubuntu/Debian) user space (www.nexenta.org).

Prior to founding Nexenta Systems, Alex was Director, Software Architecture at Neterion, Inc., and Director of Software Engineering at Silverback Systems, Inc. (acquired by Brocade). Alex co-invented Large Receive Offload (LRO), the broadly adopted method to improve TCP and UDP performance, with and without assistance in the hardware. He has patents pending in the area of protocol offload and high-speed networking.

Dmitry Yusupov, Chief Systems Architect, Founder

Dmitry, with Nexenta Systems co-founder Alex Aizman, is co-creator of the iSCSI stack that was accepted into the Linux kernel. This same Open-iSCSI project forms the basis of most iSCSI solutions used today. Their experiences attempting to build enterprise-class storage with the Linux kernel encouraged both to create the innovative hybrid operating system, Nexenta Core Platform (www.nexenta.org).

Prior to founding Nexenta Systems, Dmitry was at Neterion, Inc., where he led the development of high performance 10G networking driver architectures for Linux and Solaris operating systems. Prior to Neterion, Dmitry was at Silverback Systems where, with Alex Aizman, he was working on iSCSI and TCP/IP offload driver architecture for Linux and embedded operating systems.

Rick Martig, Chief Financial Officer

Rick Martig joined Nexenta in October 2012 as CFO. Rick brings twenty-six years of senior leadership, finance and accounting experience in public and private companies. Most recently, he was Vice President of File & Content with Hitachi Data Systems after the HDS acquisition of BlueArc in September 2011. Martig served as BlueArc’s Chief Financial Officer from July 2008 until September 2011, and was responsible for Finance, Human Resources and IT. During his tenure, BlueArc registered with the SEC for an IPO prior to the sale to HDS.

Prior to BlueArc, Martig was CFO at Genesis Microchip, a $200 Million public company (acquired by ST Micro) and spent 14 years at Xilinx, with his last role as Sr. Director of Corporate Finance responsible for all SEC public filings, corporate finance and worldwide accounting organization, managing a global organization of 80+ in Asia, Europe and California.

Rick has a Master of Business Administration from St. Mary’s College, Moraga ‘00 and a Bachelor of Science in Commerce-Finance from Santa Clara University ‘84.

Evan Powell, Chief Strategy Officer

Evan was founding CEO of Nexenta Systems. During his five-year tenure, he led Nexenta to the forefront of the software-defined storage market. Also during this time, the company grew to more than 250 people, closed more than 5,000 customers, and launched strategic partnerships and reseller relationships with hundreds of companies, which led to 2012 sales of more than $400 million by partners. In addition, the company received in excess of $55 million from leading venture investors.

Currently, Evan is focused on helping set the strategic direction of Nexenta in alignment with the broader ecosystem of partners, customers, and communities.

Prior to Nexenta Systems, Evan was founding CEO of Clarus Systems and then VP of Sales, BD, and Marketing at Clarus, which eventually was purchased by Opnet, now owned by Riverbed Systems.

Evan’s MBA is from IESE, in Europe, and his BA is from Williams College.

Bridget Warwick, Chief Marketing Officer

Bridget Warwick joined Nexenta in February 2013 as CMO, bringing over 16 years of experience in the storage industry . Most recently, she was CMO of StorSimple which was acquired by Microsoft in October 2012.

Prior to StorSimple, Warwick was Vice President of NAS Marketing & Business Development with Hitachi Data Systems after the HDS acquisition of BlueArc in September 2011. Warwick served as BlueArc’s Senior Vice President of Marketing & Business Development from February 2009 until September 2011, and was responsible for Product Management in addition to Marketing and Business Development.

Prior to BlueArc, Warwick spent 10 years at NetApp in several roles including vice president of business operations, vice president of technical marketing and senior director of engineering. During her time there, Ms. Warwick helped the company establish deep product integration with partners, including Microsoft, and was a chief proponent of the company's growth in the Windows file services and applications market. Prior to her time at NetApp, she held various positions in IT. She is a graduate of Sheffield University in the UK with a BA (with honors) in French.

Jon Ash, VP of Sales

Jon has been involved in the Sales and Marketing of advanced storage technology for more than 20 years and has experience selling storage systems to enterprises across the globe. Recently, Jon has worked with several startups in the Storage Compression and Virtualization markets. He was VP Sales at Storwize and, prior to that, VP Sales at MaXXan, where he was responsible for building the Sales and Support teams to ensure customer success worldwide.

Jon started his career with Unisys, in the UK, selling to large Financial and Commercial customers. He moved to the United States in 1994 to head up marketing of a Unisys storage product line. He has a degree from the University of Warwick, England.

Rick Hayes, VP of Technical Operations

Rick brings more than two decades of industry experience to Nexenta. Previously, he was the principal consultant for the data center practice at GlassHouse Technologies. At Glasshouse, he developed and managed strategic IT projects focusing on data center consolidations and migrations for enterprises in energy, finance, insurance, and networking markets.

Prior to Glasshouse, Rick was director of global services at MaXXan, a leading innovator of intelligent storage network infrastructure products. Rick also has served as director of global field operations at StorageNetworks, and has held management and leadership positions at Dynegy, Sprint Paranet, Minnesota Department of Military Affairs, and the U.S. Army.

Brad Stone, General Manager, Nexenta Greater China

Brad is an experienced veteran of both startups and name-brand companies. Brad has more than 20 years of experience architecting, designing, and implementing enterprise software solutions for small and large companies.

Prior to joining Nexenta, he co-founded MenloWare, where he built a policy-based storage management platform for a large storage-as-a-service provider. He also built a self-healing agent infrastructure for the Air Force. Previously, Brad was CTO at Resonate, where he helped take the company public and transformed the company from Internet traffic management software to active service-level management. Brad also has designed system management products for Symbol and Hewlett-Packard.

Bill Fuller, VP of Engineering

Bill Fuller has been involved in storage industry for over 30 years. He was instrumental in early development of RAID and Fibre Channel. Previously, he has been VP of Engineering at Auspex and MonoSphere with stints at StorageWay (an early Storage Service Provider), Nishan (FC IP bridging and iSCSI), Mendocino (early CDP provider) and Quest (storage management for virtual environments). He has a BSEE degree from the University of Wisconsin, and an MSEE from Stanford University.

Jim Fitzgerald, VP of Business Development

Jim is an experienced technology veteran who brings a wealth of industry and business development knowledge to Nexenta. Prior to joining Nexenta, Jim had stints as VP of Sales and Marketing at System Fabric Works, specialists in InfiniBand storage solutions, and Global Bay Technologies. He was also the founder and CEO of SteelEye Technologies, a leader in data application protection technology on Linux. At Steeleye, he lead strategic partnership and reseller agreements with the likes of IBM and HP.

Prior to founding SteelEye, Jim had a successful career at Sun Microsystems in a variety of sales and marketing position ultimately serving as SunSoft’s Senior Director of Business Development where Jim and his team managed key strategic partnerships such as Fujitsu, IBM, NCR and Xerox, and negotiated and closed a wide variety of strategic partnerships, technology and corporate acquisitions and joint ventures. Jim holds a BA in Economics from Boston College and an MBA from New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

Monica Walls, VP of Human Resources

Monica is a proven leader in Human Resources with 15 years of experience and serves as Vice President of Human Resources. She is responsible for development and implementation of people strategy and world class HR programs to attract and retain top talent in an environment that proactively addresses the professional and organizational needs of the company and its employees. Monica is responsible for all aspects of HR, driving global recruitment efforts, foreign subsidiary setup and company culture. Her knowledge of HR and organizational operations, ability to lead change, strategic thinking and global mindset has made Nexenta a great place to work.

Prior to joining Nexenta, she worked for fast growth start-ups and major Silicon Valley companies like Applied Materials. Her experiences include being a senior leader in developing and implementing HR strategies for small companies, managing recruiting, employee relations and organizational effectiveness.

A California native, Monica holds a Master of Arts in Organizational Management and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from the University of Phoenix and has certificates in Executive, Proactive and Business Leadership from Cornell and is a member of SHRM.