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.

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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.

Don Deel

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 member and Treasurer, Storage Management Initiative Technical Development Committee Chair, and Management Frameworks Technical Working Group Chair.

Eric Hibbard

Eric Hibbard is the Senior Director of Data Networking Technologies in Hitachi Data Systems, reporting directly to HDS Corporation's Chief Technology Officer. In his role, Mr. Hibbard is responsible for storage security strategy, identifying and defining new storage security architectures, and designing new storage networking infrastructures. Hibbard is also a senior security professional who serves as the International Representative for the INCITS/CS1 Cyber Security and the Vice Chair of IEEE P1619 Security in Storage Working Group. His positions and participation in storage and security organizations like INCITS/T11, ISACA, ISSA, the Trusted Computing Group along with activities like the IEEE-USA Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee (CIPC) and the Information Security Committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) afford him a unique perspective on issues germane to securing storage ecosystems.

Eric has almost 30 years experience in information and communications technology (ICT), working for government, academia, and industry in non-vendor positions for at least 25 of these years. Almost all of his work experience is associated with high performance computing environments where he held both R&D as well as senior operational management positions. In addition to leading complex IT projects, Mr. Hibbard played key roles in more politically-charged agency-wide supercomputing and wide area networking consolidations as well as reengineering the computing infrastructure of DoE laboratory. Mr. Hibbard has authored numerous papers and documents on the topics of computer graphics, supercomputing, ICT infrastructure, and information assurance.

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).

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. Most recently he championed the formation of the File Area Network (FAN) taskforce and now serves as chairman of that group.

Steve continues to contribute to the ANSI Fibre Channel standards and is currently editor of the Fibre Channel Switching standard (FC-SW-5). Other Fibre Channel related activities include contributing to the FCoE and Inter-Fabric routing efforts in T11. 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.