Meet Sujal Patel: The Newest Member of the Elemental Board

Submitted by MattF on November 13, 2012 - 01:00

Sujal PatelToday, Elemental welcomes Sujal Patel to its board of directors and Elemental leadership team. Sujal is the founder of Isilon Systems, a leader in scale-out storage, where he variously led as president, CEO and chief technology officer since its inception in 2001. Sujal knows rapid business growth in the midst of technological transformation. His vision of network-attached storage (NAS) became the seed of Isilon, which he grew from an innovative startup to a public company and eventually sold to EMC for $2.25 billion. 

Prior to founding Isilon, Sujal acted in various engineering roles at RealNetworks. In addition to serving on the Elemental board, he serves on the board of ExtraHop Networks, a Seattle-based startup that supplies network-based application performance management solutions. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park. He also knows the value of intellectual property and holds a number of patents and pending patents, including those for the Isilon OneFS™ distributed file system. 

When he is not building start-ups into billion dollar enterprises, Sujal spends his time mentoring other entrepreneurs, speaking about startup experiences, and devoting time to his growing family. Elemental is thrilled to have an individual with Sujal's knowledge and passion taking a seat on our board. 

As we welcome Sujal, it is with deep gratitude that we thank Bob Greenberg for his five years of service on the Elemental board of directors. Elemental’s founding team first got to know Bob in 1999 at Pixelworks, where he was a co-founder. After leaving Pixelworks, Bob led the Oregon Angel Fund’s investment in Elemental, representing the company’s first external investor. From there he played a key role in driving Elemental’s Series A financing with Voyager Capital and General Catalyst Partners, and has provided many thoughtful technical insights as a company Director.  We wish him the very best. 

Cloud Computing Professionals Come Together Through PDXCloud Group

Submitted by MattF on November 6, 2012 - 18:22
Elemental Logo

Cloudability logo

While Portland is no stranger to clouds or high tech, the cloud computing field is vast and decentralized; the best way to learn about what’s going on in a rapidly evolving field is to ask the experts. Right now, technical knowledge is spread across more than 90 user groups in the greater Portland area. To build community and connect key learnings, next week we kick off PDXCloud, a monthly meet-up of programmers interested in all aspects of working with cloud-based services. The group helps networking and knowledge transfer in the growing tech community, welcomes developers at all skill levels, and reflects the growing presence of companies in the region that are developing software services for the cloud. Join us at Elemental on November 14 for two great talks: 

  • Jesse Rosenzweig, CTO and Co-founder of Elemental, will talk about leveraging graphics processing units (GPUs) in Amazon Web Services 
  • Jeremy Wagner-Kaiser, Engineering Lead at Cloudability, will give an overview of different cloud service offerings

Future PDXCloud meeting topics include working with vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Rackspace, etc., working with open-source implementations such as OpenStack, and developing cloud-based services, sites, and tools in both vendor-specific and vendor-agnostic ways. Come help shape the conversation; we look forward to seeing you.

RSVP

PDXCloud Group Meeting

Wednesday, November 14
Doors open: 6:30 pm
Presentations: 7:00 pm

Elemental Technologies 
225 SW Broadway, Suite 600
Portland, OR 97205