Howard Johnson

Howard is the chair of the INCITS/Fibre Channel techncial committee and remains actively involved in the development of Fibre Channel standards. As Broadcom's technical liaison to many Fibre Channel industry partners, Howard joined the forces of the Fibre Channel ecosystem vendors to deliver products based on the Fabric Notifications standards and architecture for the Fibre Channel industry. These efforts developed solutions that leveraged Fabric Notifications in the formation of autonomous SAN technology. Howard began his career in 1984 developing configuration applications for 3270 Cluster Controllers for McDATA Corporation in Boulder, Colorado. In 1993, in partnership with IBM, Howard was part of the team that created the ESCON Director Models 3/4/5 as well as the FICON to ESCON Bridge. As technical leader, he directed the efforts of the technical teams that expanded IBM’s original storage-area networks (SAN) from ESCON to FICON. In 2007, Howard joined Brocade, a Broadcom company, as a member of the Fabric Operating Systems Architecture group and is responsible for the technical strategy relating to Brocade’s mainframe infrastructure offerings. His industry experience lead to a featured interview in Enterprise Executive (2019, issue 6), where he discussed the future of the mainframe, FICON, and Fibre Channel. Today, Howard is an active member of the Brocade SAN Networking (BSN) division of Broadcom Limited and continues his technical leadership in enterprise networking solutions. With more than 40-years of professional experience in high-end processing environments, Howard remains an active advocate of Fibre Channel.