ACADEMIA

Gnodal named former Cisco and Fortinet marketing veteran Atchison Frazer as its first Chief Marketing Officer. Frazer brings to Gnodal more than 20 years of enterprise-segment strategic marketing experience, most recently as marketing leader for Cisco's Global Enterprise services business.

Frazer will supervise global marketing and communications for the innovative networking start-up, which won Best of Interop in the networking category for its newest addition to the GS-Series, the GS0072 with 72 ports of 40GbE built into a standard 2RU form factor and Gnodal's first multi-ASIC product. Built upon Gnodal's own PETA ASIC chip, the GS-Series provides the highest density, lowest latency top-of-rack 10 and 40 GbE solutions available worldwide.

"Atchison has an impressive track record leading the marketing strategies of technology companies, both global power brands and successful Silicon Valley start-ups, and has driven at the enterprise field level demand for high performance computing solutions in key vertical markets, such as financial services, energy and manufacturing, and emerging trends such as cloud computing and intelligent networks," said Bob Fernander, president and CEO, Gnodal.

Atchison was responsible for services strategy and sales enablement to support Cisco's global enterprise theatre. Atchison also served as the enterprise marketing lead for professional services, solutions architecture consulting, emerging technologies, network optimization, security services and acquisition integration, and led the TelePresence services launch team.

Prior to Cisco, Atchison was Vice President of Marketing for ServGate Technologies, whose Full Context Inspection technology enabled a new enterprise firewall category endorsed by IDC as UTM or unified threat management. Before that, Atchison worked at UTM competitor Fortinet, where he was responsible for corporate marketing, leading the company's outbound messaging and positioning strategies in the enterprise firewall and integrated network services space.

"Gnodal is fundamentally altering the way companies operate in high performance computing environments," said Frazer. "For switches, low latency must combine with bandwidth, scalability and performance advantages to deliver an entirely new value proposition, Gnodal's natural affinity, producing the fastest, highest density switches for predictive, reliable performance."

Gnodal was founded in 2007 by a world-class team of infrastructure design experts with a proven track record of delivering systems to the most demanding IT infrastructure customers. The team's 30 years of experience, working together on design, manufacture and deployment, has led to the definition of a technology that will revolutionize the data center, delivering superior power efficiency, scalability and high performance in a dynamic, adaptive networking fabric.