2010 Storage Superstars
The storage industry, however, long ago transcended Moore’s Law, with new hardware components, systems, software and services being developed at a pace unmatched in any industry.
/**/ /**/Hard drives with capacities of 3TBs? Storage appliances that can scale capacity to infinity? Good old-fashioned -- and cheap -- IP networks replacing high-speed Fibre Channel and InfiniBand? Things that would have seemed impossible five years ago are now commonplace. None of this would have been possible without the early realization that the cost of raw storage capacity would start approaching free, and the vision that new ways to store, back up, retrieve, archive and, above all, manage users’ and companies’ data would be required.
Enter the storage visionaries. This group of talented individuals -- some of the smartest people on the planet -- live and breathe storage. They protect, nurture and grow the storage on which business, academia, industry and entertainment thrive.
These storage visionaries -- these Storage Superstars -- are an eclectic lot of individuals. They include people like NetApp’s Julie Parrish or EMC’s Gregg Ambulos, who are in customers’ and partners’ faces every day loudly driving and promoting their companies’ visions. Or people like NetApp’s James Lau, who are so shy that just getting a photograph can be a difficult task.
They include the technology developers of brash, young companies like Coraid and Pivot3 with bold new ideas about how to manage storage. Or folks like Holly Frost at Texas Memory Systems, a guy who has been working on SSD technology for 30 years at the company he founded. CRN shines a light on these Storage Superstars. Some were easy to find, while others may not have seen sunlight for years.
2010 Storage Superstars
Gregg Ambulos Vice President, Americas Channel Sales, EMC
Ambulos, a 13-year EMC veteran, serves as the company's storage channel chief. He has held a series of leadership roles in EMC's direct and indirect sales channels.
Rob Beeler Vice President, Engineering, Double-Take
Beeler is the lead developer for replication technology and full server failover at Double-Take, which is in the process of being acquired by Vision Solutions.
Janusz Bak CTO, Open-E; Kristof Franek, President, Open-E
These early developers of software that turned industry-standard servers into storage appliances were among the first to enable system builders to build custom storage appliances.
Mike Andrews Managing Director, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Sales, NovaStor
Andrews created the first backup/data protection software platform that includes both local and online backup in a single software solution and brought it to the channel.
Larry Aszmann, John Guider, Phil Soran Compellent
This automated tiered storage and storage virtualization trio launched Compellent in 2002 by bringing in potential VARs and customers before the product was even developed.
Randall Cochran Vice President, North America Channel Sales, Symantec
Cochran, a six-year Symantec veteran, is the company's storage channel chief. He has been a sales executive for 25-plus years.
Rick Clark CEO, Aptare
Clark is a software engineer and developer of technology that pertains to the transmission, management and storage of large amounts of backup/ recovery metadata online.
Lee Caswell Co-Founder, CMO, Pivot3
Caswell contributed to the FireWire standard and helped define Ultra160 SCSI while at Adaptec. He also was the first storage engineer at VMware and an early developer of realtime video capture products.
John Boyken Co-Founder, President, Channel Chargers
Boyken was the early developer of storage tape technology--from one-quarter-inch tape to LTO and DLT. He currently advises storage vendors on how to work with the channel.
Anil Chakravarthy Senior Vice President, Symantec Storage And Availability Management Group
Chakravarthy oversees product management, engineering and delivery. He was responsible for strategy in Symantec's enterprise product lines.
Chris Farey CTO, StorMagic
Farey developed Adaptec's iSCSI and IP SAN product road maps. In addition, Farey was the chief software architect for IBM iSCSI-Fibre Channel arrays as well as being one of the early developers of iSCSI appliances.
David Farajun CEO, Asigra
Farajun started developing backup software for service providers way back in 1986. He developed multitenant backup and recovery technology and was responsible for bringing enterpriselevel backup to the cloud.
John Crandall Software Engineer, Network Systems Architecture Group, Brocade
Crandall oversees technical work developed for the Distributed Management Task Force Technical Committee and works with standardization bodies such as T11.
Adam Famularo Senior Vice President, GM, Recovery Management, Data Modeling Business Unit, CA
Famularo is CA's storage channel chief. He joined CA in 1998 and served in various positions. He has been the driving force for revamping channel programs.
Brantley Coile Founder, CTO, Coraid
Coile was the man behind the creation of the ATA-over-Ethernet storage protocol at Coraid. Prior to that, Coile invented the PIX firewall appliance for Network Translation, a company that eventually was acquired by Cisco.
Dana Kammersgard President, CEO, Dot Hill
Kammersgard took over as president in 2004 and CEO in 2006, then engineered a couple of key acquisitions to diversify the company to bring its technology from an OEM-only focus to move into the channel.
Vineet Jain Co-Founder, CEO, Egnyte
Jain has 16 years of software industry experience, including helping develop a solution for local and cloud storage at Egnyte. He also helped develop supply chain visibility solutions for CE and high-tech companies.
ReiJane Huai Chairman, CEO, FalconStor Software
He led R&D and was president and CEO of Cheyenne Software, which developed ARCserve before the company was sold to CA Technologies.
Now he is the force driving strategy at FalconStor.
Jin-Lon Hon Vice President, Engineering, Promise Technology
He is a founder of Promise, whose products are recommended by Apple and used by Intel, NEC and other technology firms. Previously was a senior director of technology at IBM.
Rich Hume General Manager, Global Business Partners, IBM
Hume is the storage channel chief for IBM. A 25-year veteran of IBM, he previously managed the company's x86-based server division and IBM's global business processes for its consulting services.
Dave Hitz Founder, Executive Vice President, NetApp
Hitz sets the strategy at NetApp. He is a NAS pioneer, starting at MIPS Computer and Auspex, where he was responsible for file systems and microkernel design.
Fabrice Helliker CTO, Product Architect, Cofio Software
Helliker turned AT&T Bell Labs software into BakBone's NetVault backup software. He also led the development of the industry's first software virtual tape library.
Manish Goel Executive Vice President, Product Operations, NetApp
Goel oversees product strategy and development across all NetApp product lines, including taking storage to the cloud. He also led a variety of other business units.
Chris Gladwin Founder, CEO, Cleversafe
Gladwin developed the company's "dispersed storage" technology to bypass traditional backup and archiving and add data security. He has more than 200 issued and pending patents.
Pat Hanavan Vice President, Product Management, Backup Exec, Symantec
Hanavan has 20 years of experience focusing on data protection; he is responsible for the direction, strategy and business performance for Backup Exec.
Garth Gibson, Randy Katz, David Patterson Fathers of RAID
The trio co-authored the pioneering 1998 research paper, "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks," setting the stage for the development of RAID storage as we know it.
Praerit Garg, Bassam Tabbara Co-Founders, Symform
They are ex-Microsoft engineers and between them have authored 36 patents. Garg built and managed Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Platform & Tools;Tabbara helped Microsoft's early move to the Internet.
Holly Frost Founder, CEO, Texas Memory Systems
A pioneer in the SSD industry, Frost founded TMS in 1978 to offer high-performance, lowlatency enterprise data storage and digital signal processing systems, and is the architect of the RamSan SSD line.
Martin Fenner Director, Cloud, Co-Founder, CTO, Pranah
Developed ruggedized server and storage systems for commercial, military applications. At Pranah, he developed hardware to increase storage denisty while cutting cooling.
Bill Galloway Co-Founder, CTO Pivot3
Galloway was an early developer of an integrated RAID-on-chip solution and is named on 24 storage-related patents. He has also been actively involved in SAS, SATA, SCSI, Fibre Channel and RAID.
Matt McManus Vice President, Channel Sales, Fujitsu America
McManus is the storage channel chief at Fujitsu America. He has 20 years of channel experience. He previously led channel efforts at Gateway and SimpleTech.
John Matze Vice President, System Storage Products, Exar
Matze is the "Father of iSCSI" and helped architect several other common storage protocols. He founded a number of storage startups including Okapi and Siafu.
Peter Liu Corporate Technology Leader, Syncsort
Liu developed technology that improves backup performance and virtualizes backup images. A 28-year veteran of Syncsort, he has several storagerelated patents and patents pending.
Kai Li Co-founder, Chief Scientist, Data Domain
Li was a pioneer in deduplication. Prior to that, he was a Princeton professor and board member of the Intel Microcomputer Research Lab Advisory council.
Kumar Malavalli Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer, InMage
Malavalli was also a co-founder and CTO of Brocade. He was an early developer of network storage fabric as well and is now working to leverage IP-based storage networking.
Deepak Mohan Senior Vice President, Symantec Information Management Group
Mohan is responsible for the strategy, development and delivery of Veritas NetBackup, PureDisk, Symantec Backup Exec, Backup Exec System Recovery and Enterprise Vault.
Alex Miroshnichenko Co-Founder, CTO, Virsto Software
Miroshnichenko was an early developer of the Veritas File System and Veritas Database Edition for Oracle. He later was CTO of PowerFile and of Acronis, and now works with virtual server storage at Virsto.
Mike Mihalik Manager, LaCie
Mihalik developed the first and only Apple branded external hard drive and was an early developer of rugged portable external drives. He has been at LaCie since 1992, when it was part of Quantum, where he was vice president of engineering, operations.
Umesh Maheshwari Co-Founder, CTO, Nimble Storage
Maheshwari helped develop deduplication and other protocols at Data Domain. His 17 years of experience include developing cluster technology for metadata in scalable file servers at Zambeel.
2010 Storage Superstars
Claus Mikkelsen CTO, Storage Architectures, Hitachi Data Systems
Mikkelsen oversees research in storage applications, virtualization and data life-cycle management. He was the former chief architect for IBM's storage replication and disaster recovery products.
James Lau Founder, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer, NetApp
Lau is behind the evolution of NetApp's business strategy. While at NAS pioneer Auspex, he was key in defining high-performance NFS file servers.
Richie Lary Corporate Fellow, Xiotech
Prior to joining Xiotech in 2009, Lary was a consultant to emerging storage companies. He was a key architect for storage at DEC and Compaq, which later formed the base for HP's StorageWorks business.
Konstantin Komarov Founder, CEO, Paragon Software Group
Komarov developed the Universal File System Driver used bySeagate, Cisco/Linksys and EMC/Iomega to access hard disk partitions of all popular file systems.
Oleg Kiselev Chief Architect, ParaScale
Kiselev drives the technical vision and architecture for ParaScale's cloud storage solutions and has 64 patents in storage management and clustering. He also was at Veritas for years.
Gerard Lam Founder, President, CTO, SANpulse Technologies
Lam develops technology for automating SAN discovery, migration and optimization. He also helped establish the Information Storage Consulting practice at Accenture.
Miki Sandorfi Chief Strategist, File And Content Services, Hitachi Data Systems
Sandorfi drives development of HDS' file, content and cloud products. His 18 years in storage includes a decade at EMC where he was a lead architect for Symmetrix.
Jeff Ready Founder, CEO, Scale Computing
Ready developed software to cluster industry-standard servers for midmarket storage applications. IBM uses the technology to compete with Dell EqualLogic and HP LeftHand.
Frank Rauch Vice President, Enterprise Server, Storage And Networking Unit Channel Sales, Hewlett-Packard
Rauch is the storage channel chief at Hewlett- Packard. He came to HP in 2003 with the acquisition of Compaq.
Josef Rabinovitz President, CEO, JMR Electronics
Rabinovitz has been supplying storage OEMs with arrays since 1982. He has developed technologies for, among other things, hot-plugged disk drives, stacking of drive bays and storage cooling.
T.M.Ravi CMO, Iron Mountain Digital
Ravi was an early developer of digital archiving technology for legal discovery, disaster recovery, compliance and proactive content monitoring at Mimosa, which Iron Mountain acquired in 2010.
Steve Sicola CTO, Xiotech
Sicola was the force behind generations of storage arrays and architectures at DEC/Compaq/HP StorageWorks. He has been designing storage hardware and software for nearly 30 years and has 39 patents or patents pending.
Shmuel Shottan CTO, BlueArc
Shottan led the delivery of the industry's first network storage offering that was capable of supporting both Fibre Channel and ATA drives in the same cabinet. He also was the individual behind the world's first hardwarebased file system.
Eric R. Schott Director, Product Management, Dell
Schott was the principal driver in developing the virtualized Peer Storage Architecture in EqualLogic SANs. In addition, he helps with realtime systems, logbased file systems, host volume managers and clusters.
Michael Schnapp Co-Founder, CTO, Infortrend Technology
Schnapp is the chief architect behind Infortrend's storage solutions and leads R&D. He has helped take the company from producing basic RAID systems to virtualization and data services.
Darshan Shah Founder, President, Olixir Technologies
Shah was the pioneer who developed the technology to shockprotect a 3.5-inch hard drive and make the hard drive transportable, as an alternative to tape for disaster-recovery purposes.
David Peterson Software Engineer And Senior Adviser, Network Systems Architecture Group, Brocade
Peterson is heavily involved with the T11 as well as a host of other storage networking organizations.
Anand Babu"AB" Periasamy Co-Founder, CTO, Gluster
Periasamy is a leading figure in opensource storage. He worked on scaling commodity clusters to supercomputer-class performance, among other storage projects.
Sujal Patel President, CEO, Isilon
Patel founded Isilon at 28 years old. He invented the company's OneFS operating system for scaling NAS to the enterprise. Prior to Isilon, he was the chief architect for RealNetworks' core media delivery system.
Julie Parrish Vice President, Global Partner Sales, NetApp
Parrish is the storage channel chief at NetApp. Her career spans 24 years in the channel, which includes a long stint as channel chief at Veritas and Symantec, as well as time at Nokia and 3Com.
Rob Peglar Storage Fellow, Xiotech
Peglar has extensive experience with storage virtualization, large heterogeneous SAN architecture, replication and archiving. He is a leader with SNIA and the GreenStorage Initiative and Blade Alliance.
Mark Watkins HP Fellow, StorageWorks, Hewlett-Packard
Watkins has 20-plus years of experience in storage and developed several tape formats. He is now driving scale-out storage and converged infrastructure.
Dan Warmenhoven Chairman, Executive Chairman, Former CEO, NetApp
Warmenhoven led NetApp for 11 years, growing it from a startup to challenge EMC and open up the NAS market.
Tom Wagner Group Vice President, N.A. America Channel Sales, Oracle/Sun
Wagner is the storage channel chief at Oracle/ Sun. He joined Oracle this year after a stint with Agilysys, and before that was Sun's point man on channel issues.
Ramana Venkata President, Iron Mountain Digital
Venkata founded Stratify (acquired by Iron Mountain in 2007), where he developed technology related to eDiscovery and making data actionable for compliance, legal apps.
Mike Walkey Senior Vice President, Global Channels, Hitachi Data Systems
Walkey is the storage channel chief at Hitachi Data Systems. Prior to 2008, he led the company's global reach to the small and medium enterprise market.
Hu Yoshida Vice President, CTO, Hitachi Data Systems
Yoshida defines the technical direction for HDS, was responsible for evangelizing HDS' storage virtualization approach and helps develop open standards for storage management. He spent 25 years with IBM's storage division.
Moshe Yanai IBM Fellow, Researcher, IBM
Yanai developed mainframe storage, created EMC's Symmetrix systems, helped multiple open system servers connect to iSCSI, and developed grid storage for XIV, which was acquired by IBM.
Steven Wilson Director, Technology And Standards, Brocade, and INCITS TC T11 Chairman
Wilson represents Brocade in the Storage Networking Industry Association Technical Committee. He is also chairman of the T11 committee that defines Fibre Channel standards.
Gary Watson Co-Founder, CTO, Nexsan
Watson spearheaded the release of the first data center ATA storage arrays. He was responsible for developing the first ATA-based disk storage systems, which started the move toward diskbased backup.
Alex Winokur Axxana
Winokur is an IBM Master Inventor and has authored/co-authored more than 15 patents in storage, network management and telecommunications. Prior to Axxanna, he was CTO at XIV (acquired by IBM) and the founder of Sepaton.
Jeff Tofano CTO, Quantum
Tofano was the man responsible for integrating disk and tape platforms. He also developed dedupe, scalable file management, as well as intelligent tape automation technologies.
David Sun, John Tu Co-Founders, Kingston
Their work in SIMM memory modules led to the memory industry. They sold Kingston in 1996, gave a $100M bonus to employees, and then bought the company back in 1999.-
Bob Solomon Vice President, Storage Technology, EMC Fellow, EMC
Solomon was one of the original creators of the Clariion line. When the Clariion arrived in the mid-90s, it was a pioneer in networked storage and the reason EMC acquired Data General.
Bob Skelley Director, Global Enterprise Architecture, Global Commercial Channels, Dell
Skelley is the storage channel chief at Dell. As the former channel chief of EqualLogic, which Dell acquired, he ensured a smooth transition for partners.
Matt Starr CTO, Spectra Logic
Starr holds 25 patents, mainly for tape libraries. He was an earlier developer of what became iSCSI. A 19-year Spectra Logic veteran, Starr is the company's first CTO and continues to focus on library engineering.
