Western Digital has appointed Phil Bullinger to the position of senior vice president and general manager of its Data Center Systems (DCS) Business Unit.

Bullinger came from Dell EMC, where he was in charge of the scale out network-attached storage platform Isilon.

Storage Wars
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Growing businesses

“Phil brings a 30-year track record of building successful, high growth data center systems businesses,” said Cordano.

“His substantial management and technical expertise will be extremely valuable as we continue to scale this important growth business by building on the strong foundation Dave Tang and others have helped to establish.”

Tang, the previous head of the data center division, will become SVP of marketing at Western Digital. Earlier this week, Tang penned an op-ed for DCD on the importance of data philanthropy.

Bullinger will report to president and chief operating officer Mike Cordan. Before Dell EMC, he worked at Oracle as SVP of SAN/NAS Storage and EVP for LSI’s Engenio Storage Group.

Western Digital said that Bullinger will focus on increasing growth of the company’s disk, flash and hybrid storage platforms, as well as object storage systems for use in cloud-scale data centers.

Last month’s quarterly report revealed that revenue for the data center devices and solutions business - which accounted for 28.5 percent of the company’s total revenue - increased by 9.2 percent year-on-year to $1.39 billion.

Bullinger’s hire is the second major executive hire of the year. In January, Western Digital poached Martin Fink as its chief technology officer. Prior to that, Fink was CTO and director of HP Labs at HPE, and was the ‘father’ of the company’s oft-teased The Machine.