Technical Council

The SNIA Technical Council is comprised of a total of nine individuals, seven of whom are elected by SNIA members and two of whom are appointed by the SNIA Board. The Technical Council is a select group of acknowledged industry experts who work to guide the SNIA's technical efforts. The Technical Council oversees and manages SNIA Technical Work Groups, reviews architectures submitted by Work Groups, and is the SNIA's technical liaison to standards organizations. The SNIA Technical Council Managing Director serves as an "ex-officio" member of the Council.

Contact Us

Don Deel, Chairman, snia-tc-chair@snia.org
Leah Schoeb, Vice-Chairperson, snia-tc-vicechair@snia.org

Don Deel, Chairman

Don Deel is a Senior Technologist in the Office of the CTO at EMC. Don has over 30 years of industry experience working with the storage, networking, server, and management technologies used in distributed computing environments. He has been active in storage-related standards development activities for many years and has pioneering experience with the HIPPI, Fibre Channel, and SMI-S standards.

Within the SNIA, Don has been active in a number of different positions since the early days of the association, and has been recognized for his contributions several times. He is currently serving in multiple roles, including Technical Council member, Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Chair, and Storage Management Initiative Technical Development Committee Chair.

Leah Schoeb, Vice-Chairperson

Leah Schoeb is a Senior Partner and the Evaluator Group bringing expertise ranging from cloud infrastructure and virtualization to storage performance. She draws from over 20 years of experience in the computer industry helping systems companies with performance optimization, marketing positioning, benchmark evidence creation, and guiding industry standards development for server, virtualized, and storage solutions.

Prior to joining Evaluator Group Leah has served in several leadership roles both on the engineering and marketing sides for performance for companies, such as, VMware, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Intel, and Amdahl. Recently she has developed and executed long-term plans for the generation of new cloud computing performance evidence and used novel means to disseminate it to the industry. Leah has also participated and provided thought leadership for industry groups such as, Transaction Performance Council (TPC), Storage Performance Council (SPC), and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). She currently serves the SNIA as the Vice Chairperson of the Technical Council and the Chair of the Green Storage Initiative.

Duane Baldwin

Duane Baldwin is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM where he is currently a lead architect in the Systems & Technology Group’s Cloud Storage Solutions team. In this role, Duane helps drive the development of storage solutions for cloud and associated management technologies. Duane also has a long history in SNIA, storage management, and standards development - and continues to maintain a balance between internal and industry involvement. Standards development experience includes SNIA: SMI-S, HBA API, Multipath Management API; T11: definition of FC-GS-x and FC-MI management capabilities; IETF: SNMP MIBs for SAN Management. Duane has 12 US patents filed related to storage and/or storage management.

Craig W. Carlson

Craig Carlson is a Technologist with the CTO Office at QLogic Corporation. Craig has over 15 years of experience in Storage Networking technologies. He is currently Chair of ANSI INCITS Task Group T11.3, the committee that defines Fibre Channel protocols. He is also Technical editor for the T11 Standards FC-LS-2, and FC-GS-7, as well as the Chair of T11 Standard FC-SW-7. He is also involved with the IEEE 802.1 Data Center Bridging Task Group and is the editor of the IEEE Draft Standard 802.1Qaz (Enhanced Transmission Selection).

Craig’s background includes many years of development of storage networking products including being on of the team of architects for the first public loop Fibre Channel switch. He also has many years of standards experience within ANSI/INCITS T11, IEEE, and IETF. Also, Craig was one of the key contributors to the SANMark Fibre Channel interoperability compliance program.

Craig has also won numerous industry awards including the INCITS Gene Milligan Award for Effective Committee Management for his role as T11.3 Chair, and most recently an FCIA achievement award for his contributions to the growth of Fibre Channel SAN Storage technology

Mark Carlson

Mark A. Carlson, Principal Cloud Strategist at Oracle, has more than 30 years of experience with Networking and Storage development and more than fifteen year's experience with Java technology. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events. He is the chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage, NDMP and XAM SDK technical working groups, chairs the DMTF Policy working group, serves on the SNIA Technical Council, and represents Oracle on the DMTF Technical Committee and serves as DMTF VP of Alliances.

Gilles Chekroun

Gilles is a Distinguished Engineer with Cisco Systems, Belgium and as a member of the SNIA Europe Board of Directors and its Technical Chairman, has been appointed to the SNIA Technical Council. Gilles joined Cisco 17 years ago. His background is linked to IBM Mainframe networking technologies and he started at Cisco as a Network Design Engineer. Later on, Gilles joined the EMEA Consulting group in the IBM team and led many projects in the financial sector.

For the last nine years, Gilles' focus was Storage, SAN extension technologies for designing and implementing Disaster Recovery Centers. He is now dedicated to Data Center Technologies like Unified Fabric, FCoE and Unified Computing System. He is a member of the Cisco European Data Center and Virtualization Team.

Gilles is a SNIA Fibre Channel certified Practitioner and also VMware Certified Professional. He holds a BsC degree in Computer Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

Michael Ko

In 2009, Michael Ko joined Huawei Symantec in the CTO office. Huawei Symantec is a joint venture established by Huawei, a leading telecom solutions provider, and Symantec, a leader in security, storage and systems management solutions. Huawei Symantec is committed to providing customers with end-to-end solutions and services in network security and storage. As the lead in the standards group, Michael has been active in the FC-BB-6 project at T11.3 in INCITS. He also participates, as time permits, in the Solid State Storage TWG and the Cloud Storage TWG in SNIA, the Storage Performance Council (SPC), etc. Before joining Huawei Symantec, he was a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center until 2009, working on storage related research for 25 years. He was issued 16 U.S. patents and has a number of patents pending for his work on using Flash memories as storage cache, wear leveling for storage class memory, memory management for RDMA, conflict resolution in multi-node communication network, RAID storage system architecture based on distributed nodes interconnected by a Torus network, etc. He also has numerous publications in USENIX'09, ICC'08, CommsDesign'07, etc. In 2008 he led the CEE Authors' team (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center_bridging) as co-chair to forge industry consensus on the essential aspects of the Convergence Enhanced Ethernet. In 2002 he led the storage workgroup in the RDMA Consortium (http://www.rdmaconsortium.org) as co-chair to define the specifications for publication by the RDMA Consortium and for considerations as RFC standards at IETF (RFC 5046 et al.). Michael wants to bring his years of storage related experiences and knowledge to SNIA by helping to shape its technical directions in the future. He wants to be able to influence the work performed by the Technical Working Groups and to contribute to key technical topics in the storage and storage networking field.

Doug Voigt

Doug Voigt is a Distinguished Technologist in HP’s StorageWorks division and Chief Technologist of HP’s Disk Array, Storage Networking and Tape organization. With over 30 years experience in HP’s storage business Doug is heavily involved with storage strategy, architecture and intellectual property. In the course of his career Doug has provided technical leadership, organizational guidance and planning for numerous protocol, implementation, architecture and advanced development projects in disk and disk array product lines.

Doug’s career includes 7 years experience in disk controller protocol development, 17 years of experience in disk storage management automation, disk array development and distributed array architecture. Most recently Doug has 7 years experience in storage technology and IP evaluation. Highlights of Doug’s contributions include work on Service Oriented Storage, Quality of Service, IPv6, Storage Utility, Storage Consolidation, Federated Arrays, HP AutoRAID, Attribute Managed Storage, Disk Controller Fault Tolerance, SCSI and other disk protocol standardization and implementation efforts.

Doug holds MS and BS degrees computer science and electrical engineering respectively from Cornell University. He currently has 25 US patents, primarily in the field of virtual arrays with 11 patents pending.

Steve Wilson

Steve Wilson is Director of Technology and Standards at Brocade. Steve’s responsibilities include the development of technologies and architectures for storage networking and storage management. Steve is a principal contributor to the ANSI T11 Fibre Channel standards and SNIA technical activities.

Prior to Brocade, Steve held technical leadership positions with Amdahl, ISS/Sperry Univac, Memorex, and Trilogy Systems. The emphasis of his technical work at these companies was the development and implementation of computer, storage, and systems management technologies.

Steve has been involved with the SNIA since 1998. He established and chaired the SNIA Fibre Channel Work Group in its various forms from June 1998 until April 2002 and now serves on the Technical Council.

Steve serves as chairman of the INCITS T11 committee whose charter is to develop the Fibre Channel Interfaces. Steve continues to contribute to many ANSI Fibre Channel standards including FCoE, Switch Fabric, and Inter-Fabric Routing. In addition, Steve serves on the FCIA Board of Directors.

Steve is the recipient of the INCITS Technical Excellence Award for his work on the Fibre Channel switching standards and received his degree in Computer Science from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in 1978.

Alan Yoder

Alan Yoder, Ph.D. is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at NetApp, Inc., in Sunnyvale, California. Alan has been at NetApp since earning his Ph.D. in distributed systems in 1997, working on protocols, management frameworks, management applications, management partnerships, the Manage ONTAP™ SDK, and other projects. He also has experience in construction and industrial accounting, CAD design and programming, GUI design and development and project management. He holds Bachelors, MSEE and Ph.D. degrees from Goshen College and the University of Notre Dame.