SNIA Technical Council

Dave Thiel, Chairman

Dave Thiel is Technical Director in the Office of the CTO, HP.

After earning 3 degrees in Electrical Engineering at MIT, Dave joined General Radio (later Genrad) and developed software for automatic test equipment, including (early) computer networks. In 1980 Dave joined Digital Equipment Corporation and worked in the VMS Engineering group from 1980 to 1991 in a variety of assignments centered on VMScluster development, including serving as the architect for VMSclusters from initial development through maturity. In 1991, Dave moved to Digitalís storage organization, where he was the chief designer of Digitalís first internally developed RAID-5 product, led storage management software development, and led Digitalís foray into the emerging world of network storage creating the vision and plan that ultimately led to VersaStor and the Enterprise Virtual Array. Dave continued this work after Compaq acquired Digital in 1998, taking on broader technical leadership roles within Compaqís storage organization. In 1999, Dave became the Technical Director of the newly formed Storage Software and Solutions Division. After HP acquired Compaq in 2002, Dave was appointed Technical Director in the Office of the CTO and also (temporarily) Technical Director and manager of the Technical Office for the Storage Software Division. In these positions, Dave leads technical strategy, participation in technical SNIA activities, standards development, architectural process, technical community developement, and sundry other activities. Dave holds 15 U.S. patents.

Alan Yoder, Ph.D., Vice Chair

Alan Yoder, Ph.D. is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Network Appliance, 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.

David Black, Ph.D

David L. Black, Ph.D. is a Senior Technologist at EMC Corporation, a member of the SNIA (Storage Network Industry Association) Technical Council and one of the chairs of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) IP Storage (ips) Working Group.  In the latter role, he has overseen standardization of block storage over IP protocols (e.g., iSCSI, FCIP, iFCP).  He is a co-author of IETF RFCs (Request for Comments) on Differentiated Services (network QoS) and TCP Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), and is one of the principal authors of the SNIA Shared Storage Model.  At EMC he contributes to corporate technology and product strategy and serves as a consulting engineer to product groups across the company.  Prior to EMC, Dr. Black performed operating systems research and development at the Research Institute of the Open Software Foundation (OSF), later part of The Open Group.  Dr. Black holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University along with an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, and has over 10 years of experience in operating systems design and implementation.  He is a member of the ACM, and the IEEE Computer Society.

Mark A. Carlson, Chairman

Mark A. Carlson, Senior Architect at Sun Microsystems' Network Storage division, has more than 25 years of experience with Networking and Storage development and more than eight 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 and Board. 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.

Steve Hand

Steve Hand has over sixteen years experience in the computer industry. Steve has worked in the industry as a corporate consumer of the computer industry products and as a producer of the computer industry products. Steve has extensive experience consulting for custom software products and also advising on network, computing, and storage configuration and deployment. The point of view garnered by this experience bridges the gap between the producer and consumer of computer technologies.

Steve has participated and directed in IT solutions that employ leading edge technologies of the time in creating systems of systems and conglomerations of IT systems that together deliver significant functionality and competitive advantage. This has meant being a technical lead or advisor to multi-discipline and geographically dispersed teams.

Steve has been involved in what became SMI-S since the specification was called "bluefin" and was developed in the Partner Development Process. He continues to contribute to the content and advancement. He also is prominent in the demonstration of SMI-S at Storage Networking World.

In Steve's capacity as a leader within, and of SMILab, SNIA has proven to itself that storage management can be an activity affected from anywhere and anytime. Specifically, Steve lead the development of the proof that a storage management application that uses SMI-S technology can reliably manage any storage device from anywhere on the globe.

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 a Principal Engineer in the Technology and Standards group at Brocade Communications, Inc. and has 23 years of experience in the Computer and Storage industries. Steve’s responsibilities at Brocade include the development of SAN technologies and architectures for storage networking and SAN management. Steve is presently the leader of the Technology and Standards team at Brocade and a principal contributor to the ANSI T11 Fibre Channel standards.

Steve previously worked for Amdahl in the Computer Architecture group where his focus was on the development of instruction level management interfaces between the operating system and firmware, and the principal architect for the development of the systems management strategies and architectures. Steve has additional storage and IT experience at 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-3) and facilitator of the Backbone (FC-BB-3) working group that defines how Fibre Channel is transported over backbones such as Wide Area Networks.

Steve is the recipient of the 2002 INCITS Technical Excellence Award for his work on the Fibre Channel switching standards.

Steve received his B.S. in Computer Science from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in 1978.

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.