VMware co-founder Diane Greene has a stealthy new startup. Here are the details

SUMMARY:

We’ve all heard about the brain drain at VMware. Now we know where some of those brains are headed — to Datrium, the startup funded and founded by VMware co-founder Diane Greene.

Everyone who is in the know knows that VMware former CEO Diane Greene is working on something. Now we know its name: Datrium Storage. Oh, and it’s attacking virtualized storage — an interesting choice for someone deposed from the company she co-founded by Joe Tucci, the chief exeuctive of EMC and the undisputed king of storage.

Other than a passing comment in arecent Wall Street Journal story about her investment in Cumulus Networks, Greene and everyone else has been tight-lipped about Datrium.

The 56-year old Greene is part of the Silicon Valley elite and is close to investors such as A16z, the venture firm co-founded by Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. She has been an active angel investor. Before starting VMware in 1998, Greene held technical leadership positions at Silicon Graphics, Tandem Computers, and Sybase, and was Chief Executive Officer of VXtreme. She sits on the board of Intuit. In January 2012 joinedGoogle’s board of directors, a perch that gives her good view into the technology and infrastructure trends.

What we know is that the new company is quietly pilfering VMware and is picking off key talent. Talent like former VMware SVP of cloud infrastructure Bogomil Balkansky, who recently left the mothership to join Datrium. Other high-profile defectors includeMike Nelson, one of the key technologists behind VMware’s VMotion and who was named one of two inaugural VMware Fellows last year.

Other former VMware hands — including Matt Ginzton, a former senior staff engineer, and Patrick Lin, a senior product manager who left VMware a few years ago for Jive Software — are also at the startup.  A quick check of LinkedIn shows that Brian Biles,VP and co-founder of Data Domain and once the VP of product management at EMC, is also a co-founder of Datrium Inc., which we’re betting is one and the same as Datrium Storage.

If Datrium Storage is indeed what it seems — a startup dedicated to virtualized storage — it could be seen as big-time payback by Greene, who in a stunning move was ousted from VMware, the  company she co-founded, and replaced by Paul Maritz. Word is that Greene is funding Datrium.