Technical Council

The SNIA Technical Council is composed 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

Alan Yoder, Chairman, snia-tc-chair@snia.org
Mark Carlson, Vice-Chairman, snia-tc-vicechair@snia.org

Alan Yoder, 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.

Mark Carlson, Vice Chairman

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.

Richelle Ahlvers

Richelle Ahlvers is a Storage Management Architect in the HP StorageWorks Division's CT organization. In this role, Richelle is responsible for setting and driving the SMI-S strategy within HP, as well as to drive consistency and commonality across HP's storage software portfolio.

Richelle has over 15 years of industry experience in storage working on storage management software, disk array systems, storage area network management, solutions and internal standards development. She has led multiple advanced development and offshore development teams, as well as leading joint university research projects. Richelle has also initiated and leads both site and corporate level women's diversity forums.

Duane Baldwin

Duane Baldwin is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM and is currently a member of the Systems & Technology Group’s Storage Solutions & 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. His 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 network management.

Duane has led technical work in SNIA working groups for 7+ years and has served on the Technical Council since 2007. Duane’s focus in SNIA is to advance technical/standards work by maintaining a balance between the launch of new technical work and working to ensure standards efforts underway are focused on industry needs, are adopted, and are ‘production ready’.

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.

Erik Riedel

Erik Riedel, Ph.D. is Senior Director of Technology & Architecture in the Cloud Infrastructure Group at EMC in Cambridge, MA. The group is working to build cloud storage technology for deployment in private and public clouds. Focus areas include scalability, robustness, metadata-informed policy, multi-tenancy and security.

Erik is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, helping to lead industry-wide education, technology promotion and standardization efforts.

Before joining EMC, Erik was Director of Interfaces & Architecture at Seagate Research in Pittsburgh, PA. The group he founded and led focussed on novel storage devices and systems with increased intelligence to optimize performance, improve security, improve reliability, and enable smarter organization of data. The technology targetted both large-scale enterprise storage clusters and ad-hoc collections of consumer and mobile storage devices working together. Previously, Erik was a researcher in the storage program at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA. He has authored and co-authored eleven granted patents and a number of 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).

David Thiel

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.

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.