The SNIA Announces its 2008 Technical Council

San Francisco, Calif. (November 5, 2007) The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is pleased to announce its 2008 Technical Council responsible for providing guidance and direction on the varied technical activities of the SNIA. The SNIA's membership elects seven Technical Council members and the SNIA Board of Directors appoints up to two additional members. The Technical Council leaders are the Chairman and Vice-Chairman. They were elected by the Technical Council members at the Storage Networking World Fall 2007 conference.

"There is significant activity surrounding new standards for storage networking in the pipeline, and we have established a very strong, diverse Technical Council to help push these new ideas forward," said David Thiel, Chairman of the SNIA Technical Council. "From standards including SMI-S and XAM, to our expansion to embrace new software development activities, we look forward to continuing the work of the Council, the SNIA's 22 Technical Working Groups, and all of the SNIA's technical activities in 2008 to support the SNIA's overall mission of advancing storage and information technology world-wide."

The 2008 SNIA Technical Council and their roles are:
o David Thiel (HP), Chairman
o Alan Yoder (NetApp), Vice Chairman
o Duane Baldwin (IBM), Member
o David Black (EMC), Member
o Mark Carlson (Sun Microsystems), Member
o Erik Riedel (Seagate), Appointed Member
o James Williams (Oracle), Member
o Steve Wilson (Brocade), Member
o Ken Wood (Hitachi Data Systems), Appointed Member
o Arnold Jones (SNIA), Non-voting Member

The SNIA Technical Council keeps the development efforts of the Association on-track and on-target while looking for new opportunities like software development and green storage to expand the SNIA's efforts and provide additional value to the industry and customers. The Council works closely with the Board of Directors and other SNIA bodies in planning and executing technical activities, governs the Technical Working Groups, reviews and approves all SNIA architectures and standards, and serves as a technical resource for all SNIA activities, including its role as technical program committee for SNIA's standout Storage Developer Conference. During the past year, the Council has launched the XAM SDK TWG, the first SNIA Technical Working Group chartered to develop software, and the Green Storage TWG, the technical complement to the newly formed Green Storage Initiative. In addition, the Council initiated the first SNIA Technical Working Group based outside of North America, the India-based File System Management Regional TWG, expanding both the technical scope and geographic reach of efforts contributing to the SMI-S storage management standard. Please visit www.snia.org for additional information on each Technical Council member.

About the SNIA

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of some 400 member companies and 7,000 individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA's mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards, technologies, and educational services to empower organizations in the management of information. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education, and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at www.snia.org .