Qumulo appoints Michael Cornwell as CTO

Qumulo, the leader in enterprise-proven hybrid cloud file storage, announced that Michael Cornwell has joined the company as its chief technology officer.

Cornwell joins Qumulo from Microsoft, where he served as the general manager of storage technologies for Azure Infrastructure, and led innovation and adoption of new memory and storage across the Azure platform and services.

“From the very beginning, Qumulo has assembled a team of passionate, customer-obsessed people who love data and solving storage challenges with software and the cloud,” said Bill Richter, CEO of Qumulo.

“Michael’s unique technical background in data storage, from the early days of flash to public cloud, combined with his experience building admired companies, makes him an outstanding addition to our leadership team.”

Prior to his time at Microsoft, Cornwell spent eight years at Pure Storage as a founding engineer, and served in key management roles including as vice president and chief technology officer for the Asia Pacific and Japan region (APJ).

Cornwell led the development of Pure’s first all-flash hardware platform, then grew the company’s business in the APJ market from zero to more than $100 million in revenue.

Cornwell also led pioneering storage development at Sun Microsystems and Apple. He was the lead technologist for flash systems at Sun Microsystems, and drove the development of the industry’s first flash platforms designed for enterprise applications that were the underpinning for many Sun/Oracle Exadata products.

Cornwell also oversaw storage engineering at the Apple iPod/iPhone Division, delivering the storage solution for nine iPod and three iPhone generations, including the first adoption of flash memory.

Cornwell holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and has been awarded 68 U.S. patents in storage technologies.