SNIA EMEA Board of Directors

Daniel Sazbon

Chair Emeritus

Daniel Sazbon was the Storage Sales leader for IBM Europe, and held several responsibilities within the Storage Sales and the Networking Sales organizations with more than 20 years experience.

He is a founding member of SNIA EMEA, member since 2000 and was appointed Chair Emeritus in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the storage industry.

Alex McDonald

Chair, SNIA EMEA

Alex has been active in the Storage Networking Industry Association since joining member company NetApp in 2005 after more than 30 years in a variety of roles in the software industry. With a background in software development, support, sales and a period as an independent consultant, Alex is now part of NetApp’s Office of the CTO that supports industry activities and promotes technology & standards based solutions. He is a Board of Director for SNIA EMEA, Co-Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative, Co-Chair of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, and Vice Chair of the SNIA Networking Storage Forum.  

Martin Smolko

Board Director

MIS & PC / CU International, Head of CU International, SIS Slovakia, Tribe head SBNO Global

T-Systems International GmbH

Olivier Fraimbault

Board Director

Storage & Software Defined Infrastructure, Technical Manager, IBM Systems, Hardware, Europe

Fausto Vaninetti

Board Adviser

Senior Consultant Systems Engineer 
Cisco Systems, Italy

Dr. Fausto S. Vaninetti is a senior Technical Consultant for Datacenter technologies at Cisco Systems. With over 20 year experience in the ICT sector, he primarily focuses on storage networking, Datacenter interconnection, unified computing and application acceleration solutions.

Before joining Cisco in the technical sales organization back in 2000, he was a Research and Development engineer on optical components and DWDM platforms at Pirelli Optical Systems. During his tenure at Cisco, Fausto expanded his technology coverage from telecommunication systems into storage networking, unified computing, virtualization and application acceleration.

Fausto holds a degree in Electronic Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of Milan. He is part of Cisco Systems’ EMEAR Datacenter organization and based off the Milan office, Italy.