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

Dave Thiel, Chairman, snia-tc-chair@snia.org
Alan Yoder, Vice-Chairman, snia-tc-vicechair@snia.org

Dave Thiel, Chairman

David Thiel is Technical Director and Staff Fellow in HP’s StorageWorks Division. David has been employed by HP, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corporation since 1980. Since 1991, David has worked in the area of computer storage leading distributed storage system, storage virtualization, storage area network architecture, RAID, storage management software, standards, patent, and technical staff development activities. Previously, he was with the OpenVMS Operating System development organization where he was the lead architect and designer of OpenVMS Cluster systems.

David has long been active in the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), where he has been an elected member of the Technical Council since 1999, including serving as chair for 2 years and vice-chair for 4 years. Dave has served as an ex-officio member of the Board of Directors and has participated in many other SNIA activities.

David earned 3 degrees in Electrical Engineering at MIT and holds 20 U.S. patents. He resides in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA.

Alan Yoder, Vice Chairman

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.

Alan co-chairs the Disk Resource Management TWG at SNIA, chairs the Enterprise Grid Alliance Data Provisioning Working Group and participates actively in several other Working Groups in the SNIA and DMTF.

Duane Baldwin

Duane is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM and is on the Systems & Technology Group’s Storage Software Architecture & Standards team. In this role, Duane helps set standards & architecture strategies for IBM’s storage devices and software, while maintaining a balance between internal and industry involvement. With over 25 years at IBM, Duane has extensive experience in software & hardware development, as well as a long history in storage and standards development. Duane’s 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 holds 2 issued and 10 pending US patents related to storage and/or storage network management.

Within the SNIA, Duane co-chairs the Management Applications TWG and Host TWG, and participates regularly in several other SMI TWGs and committees. Duane also helped launch an ongoing joint MAP/SMI-Lab interlock, which is focused on identifying and resolving issues affecting SMI-S developers as they attempt to deploy SMI-S based management solutions. By taking ownership of these ‘deployment issues’, and by working with other TWGs and SMI committees, the MAP TWG has been a primary force behind addressing the technical issues that inhibit the deployment of SMI-S. Duane also leads the MAP TWG in periodic interlocks with DMTF workgroups to ensure consistent approaches to common technical objectives.

Duane’s high-level focus in the SNIA is to help build key technical alliances and to provide technical guidance in the areas of open and interoperable storage management and industry adoption of open standards. Duane was a recipient of the SMI Architect Award in 2006.

Mark Carlson

Mark A. Carlson, Senior Architect at Sun Microsystems' Storage Group, has more than 25 years of experience with Networking and Storage development and more than ten year's experience with Java technology. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events. He is a co-chair of the SNIA Policy working group, chairs the DMTF Policy working group, serves on the SNIA Technical Council, and represents Sun Microsystems on the DMTF Technical Committee as well as the DMTF Board of Directors where he serves as VP of Alliances. Mark was one of the original developers at Redcape Policy Software, Inc., a small, Boulder, CO, startup that was acquired by Sun Microsystems in June 1998.
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Erik Riedel

Erik Riedel, Ph.D. is the Department Head for Interfaces & Architecture at Seagate Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His group focusses on novel storage devices and systems with increased intelligence to optimize performance, improve security, improve reliability, automate management, and enable smarter organization of data. The group's work targets Seagate products in enterprise, personal, consumer, and mobile storage. A basic requirement for such systems is new interfaces to storage as the current ones are quite outdated. His work includes basic research, coordination with advanced development and business teams, university collaborations and input to corporate strategy.

Erik is a long-serving co-chair of the OSD Technical Work Group (OSD TWG) and an active member of the Storage Security Industry Forum (SSIF).

Before joining Seagate, Erik was a researcher in the storage program at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California working on networked storage, distributed storage and security. He has authored and co-authored a number of granted patents and several pending patent applications, as well as numerous technical publications on a range of storage-related topics.

Erik holds B.S., M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. His thesis work was on Active Disks as an extension to Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD).

Jim Williams

Jim Williams is a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the storage management development organization with Oracle's Server Technologies group. Employed by Oracle since 1999, Jim's contributions to Oracle's highly regarded storage management infrastructure have included optimizing the operating system I/O path layer, developing fault detection and recovery strategies in the storage stack, and developing a mechanism for global locking through shared resources in storage devices. This has led to Jim being awarded one patent and two pending patents.

Previous to Oracle, Jim was employed with Amdahl Corporation for seventeen years, most recently working in Amdahl's storage array product area as a Strategic Product Manager. Jim's primary responsibilities at Amdahl were overseeing the storage management software strategy and leading several research projects for the company's storage division.

Jim has represented Oracle and Amdahl on several standards organizations and industry consortium and currently serves as Oracle's primary technical representative to SNIA and to the INCITS T10 (SCSI) Standards Committee.

Jim majored in Computer Science and received a Bachelor of Science at Arizona State University in 1978.

Steve Wilson

Steve Wilson is Director of Technology and Standards at Brocade Communications, Inc. Steve’s responsibilities at Brocade include the development of technologies and architectures for storage networking and storage management. Steve is presently 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.

Steve established and chaired the SNIA Fibre Channel Work Group in its various forms from June 1998 until April 2002. During his tenure as chair of the Fibre Channel Work group, the HBA API was defined and submitted to T11, Fibre Channel was modeled in CIM and submitted to the DMTF, and a white paper was delivered outlining SAN Management using CIM.

Steve has contributed to the ANSI Fibre Channel standards since 1993. He is currently editor of the Fibre Channel Switching standard (FC-SW-5) and chair of the Inter-Fabric Routing (FC-IFR) working group.

Steve is the recipient of the INCITS Technical Excellence Award for his work on the Fibre Channel switching standards and is currently an elected member of the SNIA Technical Council.

Ken Wood

Ken Wood is the Senior Director of Data and Storage Technologies in Hitachi Data Systems’ Global Strategy and Planning organization, reporting directly to HDS Corporation’s Chief Technology Officer. In his role Mr. Wood is responsible for new technology research, identifying and defining new storage architectures, and designing new storage infrastructures. Wood also serves on the Data Management Forum’s Board of Directors, represents Hitachi Data Systems at the Global Grid Forum, and participates in the Grid File System working group. Mr. Wood’s involvement with the SNIA’s Data Management Forum began in the fall of 2003, when the forum merged with EBSI.

With over twenty years experience developing technology solutions, Mr. Wood’s expertise covers storage architecture and product performance. Wood’s previous role in HDS includes Director of Product Performance, where he oversaw performance testing and performance management of HDS products. Mr. Wood has authored over 20 papers describing storage architectures and application performance tuning for HDS storage arrays.

Prior to joining HDS in 1997, Wood worked for five years in a customer capacity for two defense contractors as a database programmer, DBA, systems and network administrator, and a senior systems engineer. Prior to that, for over 10 years, he worked for Digital Equipment Corporation’s Large Systems Group as a Systems Engineer and Ultrix consultant. Mr. Wood holds a B.S. in Computer Science and a M.S. in Software Engineering.

Key Programs

• Data Management Forum
• Green Storage Initiative
• Storage Management Initiative (SMI)
• XAM Initiative