April 2, 2008 -- 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) silicon provider Solarflare Communications recently announced several additions to its upper management team. The company has promoted Martin Porter to vice president of software development, and appointed Danny Shamlou as vice president of VLSI design.
As vice president of software development, Porter is responsible for the team developing and managing all software for Solarflare's Solarstorm 10-GbE controllers. Demonstrating outstanding leadership in his prior position as software director, he and his team successfully delivered software drivers for Solarflare's SFC4000 10-GbE controller with support for Windows, Linux and OpenSolaris operating systems. In addition, Porter led the implementation of accelerated performance on VMware and Xen virtualization platforms, iSCSI protocol acceleration and advanced NIC teaming features.
Prior to Porter's positions with Solarflare, he served as software director for three years at Level 5 Networks, which merged with Solarflare in 2006. Porter spent the five previous years in the same role at Conexant, where he oversaw the protocol stack development group for ADSL silicon. He holds a First Class degree in mathematics from Nottingham University and a Master's with distinction from York University.
As vice president of VLSI design, Danny Shamlou will focus on strengthening and growing Solarflare's mixed signal organization. He will also bring discipline and experience to focus on the timely development of Solarflare's growing family of PHY and controller silicon products.
Shamlou joins Solarflare with over 15 years of senior level engineering management experience. Prior positions include general management and engineering vice president roles at Mindspeed and Conexant where he was responsible for timely execution and production release of several mixed signal Systems-on-Chip (SoC) products. Most recently, Shamlou worked for Starport Systems as vice president of engineering where he led the development of ultra high-frequency radio frequency identification SoC and a 65-nm XFI SERDES IP core. He has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee and a Master's degree from Georgia Tech.
With the addition of these executives, Solarflare says it expects to lead the market with its high-performance, low-power 10-GbE silicon for switch and server solutions, ultimately providing data centers and enterprises with the network infrastructure required to handle bandwidth-intensive applications.
"We are delighted to welcome both Porter and Shamlou to the Solarflare team," comments Russell Stern, CEO of Solarflare. "Their experience and leadership will continue to solidify and propel Solarflare as an innovator and leader of both 10GBASE-T PHY and 10-GbE controller technology for next generation networks that support trends such as virtualization for advanced applications and iSCSI for SAN/LAN convergence."