Ashley Gorakhpurwalla has been appointed as executive vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s HDD business unit
Western Digital Corp. has hired 20-year Dell Technologies veteran, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, as executive vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s HDD business unit. Most recently, Gorakhpurwalla was president and general manager of Servers and Infrastructure Systems at Dell EMC, where he led a $20 billion business that included the company’s PowerEdge Server, Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Extreme Scale Infrastructure business units as well as research and development for its Storage and Data Protection Platform.
“Driving a data storage business focused on product development that consistently delivers industry-leading capacity with cost efficiency and scale requires a strong leader who has decades of technology expertise and a deep understanding of data center architectures. Ashley’s background and proven track-record clearly exceeds this bar. His personal experience engaging directly with many of our important customer segments brings a fresh thought leadership perspective to the team and I’m confident he will make a positive impact on our long-term strategy,” noted said David Goeckeler, CEO, Western Digital.
In his new role leading Western Digital’s HDD franchise, Gorakhpurwalla is responsible for all HDD portfolio strategy, product development and business results and will lead engineering and product management teams focused on delivering the company’s HDD innovation.
30 years of technology industry experience
With almost 30 years of technology industry experience, Gorakhpurwalla spent the majority of his career at Dell Technologies in a variety of engineering and business leadership roles focused on complex data center infrastructure. Prior to leading Dell EMC’s Server and Infrastructure Systems Business, he served as senior vice president of the company’s PowerEdge engineering team. Gorakhpurwalla holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University – Kingsville. He has also worked with Compaq in the workstation development team.
“Western Digital’s customers are no longer just creating, processing and archiving their data. Now they have to manage it across clouds, analyze it in real-time and develop insights quicker and more efficiently than ever before,” said Gorakhpurwalla.
He added, “As our customers continue transforming to take advantage of the explosion of data and information, Western Digital’s innovation, intellectual property and world-class engineering and manufacturing position the company at the very core of this transformation. My role at Western Digital gives me a new opportunity to continue my part in this exciting new era and I look forward to working with David and the team.”
