ENGINEERING
Obsidian Strategics Ramps Up as the InfiniBand World Preps for an Intel vs Mellanox Showdown
Metro, Regional and Global Reach are Table Stakes for InfiniBand’s Entry into Big Data markets in both Bio-Science and the Enterprise Marketplace
As a pioneer of “InfiniBand over the WAN”, Obsidian expects explosive growth in the coming years to satisfy industry demand for secure, high-throughput and ultra low-latency direct memory interconnects. Having driven pivotal rack level server and storage innovations such as multi-core processors and flash memory arrays during the last decade, the practitioners of supercomputing, Internet-scale cloud and Enterprise data centers are now turning their attention to scale-out networking.
High performance and scalable standards-based InfiniBand interconnects have come to dominate mainstream high-performance supercomputing, and are aligning for dominance in mega-scale data center applications for the same reasons. Obsidian is uniquely placed to facilitate and accelerate this transition, having pioneered long distance InfiniBand as well as native routing, native cryptography and Enterprise-grade management architectures through the Obsidian Longbow and Crossbow families of devices. Obsidian's technologies complement those of HCA and switch vendors, which while providing essential elements for single-room LAN connectivity, lack the segmentation, survivability and scalability afforded by Longbow and Crossbow.
Today, Obsidian welcomes Hugh Cleland and Walt Wright to the team to consolidate its strategic role in these new markets:
Mr. Hugh Cleland is joining Obsidian's board as an external director to help the company access financial resources for rapid growth. Hugh is an Executive VP and Portfolio Manager at BluMont Capital Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Integrated Asset Management. He manages BluMont’s Innovation mandate, which includes the BluMont Northern Rivers Innovation RSP Fund and the BluMont Innovation PE Strategy Fund I, which applies a venture capital structure and approach to the management of publicly traded small and microcap technology and healthcare stocks. Hugh has managed the Innovation mandate since the inception of its first fund in May 2001 and prior to that worked as an analyst at Interward Capital specializing in technology equities and as research associate to the senior telecom services analyst at Midland Walwyn.
Col. Walter E. Wright III, USAF (Ret) is now President of Obsidian Strategics, Ltd. in Scottsdale, AZ, a new presence for the company with emphasis on establishing a US-based channel network for Obsidian products. Walt brings an impressive track record of leadership, efficiency and execution during a 26-year career in the USAF, culminating as Commander of the 56th Operations Group at Luke AFB, AZ, during which time he was senior leader for 520 personnel with $266M annual operations and assets valued at $7.2B. Following his departure from the USAF in 2005, Walt has engaged in business development/capture activities, garnering over $524M in federal contracts.
“It’s exciting to have Hugh and Walt join our team at this time,” said Bill Halina, Obsidian’s Chairman & CEO, “both are experts in their field and will greatly assist Obsidian as the market for our products grows beyond its military heritage to new markets in the Enterprise, Financial Services, Bio-Science and Healthcare industries – welcome, welcome, welcome!”