Today DDN announced the appointment of Bret Costelow as the company’s vice president of global sales. In his new role, Costelow will oversee technical computing sales worldwide, and will leverage more than 25 years of sales and sales leadership experience to further boost visibility of DDN’s deep technical expertise and high-performance computing storage platform offerings, develop new business strategies and drive revenue growth. Costelow’s leadership and experience spans leading technology companies, including Intel and Ricoh Americas.
“Bret Costelow is an inspiring sales leader with a clear understanding of our customers’ needs and a vision of how DDN’s technologies and solutions can best solve their toughest data storage challenges,” said Robert Triendl, senior vice president, global sales, marketing, and field services, DDN. “Bret’s proven success in high-growth business settings, deep knowledge of the Lustre* and HPC market, proven track record for generating traction with innovative, advanced technologies, and his broad experience with software sales make him a great asset to our team and a great resource for our partners and customers around the world.”
Costelow joins DDN from Intel Corporation, where he led a global sales and business development team for Intel’s HPC software business and supported Intel’s 2012 acquisition of Whamcloud, the main development arm for the open source Lustre file system, and its subsequent sales and marketing. Costelow was instrumental in leading the Lustre business unit to expand into adjacent markets, reaching beyond HPC file systems to HPC cluster orchestration software. Under his leadership, the HPC software business unit opened new markets in Asia, launched a comprehensive, global software sales channel program and drove year-over-year revenue growth that averaged more than 30 percent in each of the past five years. Costelow is also on the board of directors of the European Open File Systems (EOFS), a non-profit organization focused on the promotion and support of open scalable file systems for high-performance computing in the technical computing and enterprise computing markets.
“DDN is the uncontested market leader in HPC storage, with a highly differentiated portfolio of solutions for technical computing users in all vertical markets. This portfolio, combined with aggressive investments in new technologies, positions the company incredibly well for continued growth and success as disruptive technologies, such as non-volatile memory (NVM), unsettle the storage market landscape and create exciting new opportunities,” said Bret Costelow, vice president, global sales at DDN. “The current market dynamics and DDN’s agility to respond made this the perfect time to join DDN. I look forward to working with the incredible talent in DDN’s field team, product management, product development and software engineering teams to help drive DDN’s success and growth to new levels, and to help accelerate the success of DDN’s customers and partners around the world.”
