Global IT Executive Summit

James Cates is Vice President, Hardware Development at Oracle Corporation where he has engineering responsibility for the Tape Technologies organization. His portfolio includes the SL8500, SL3000 and SL500 tape libraries, the T9840 and T10000 Enterprise tape drives, mainframe virtual tape storage products, tape software and OEM tape products. These tape systems are being deployed by customers for data protection and long term digital preservation in diverse areas including finance, internet applications, telecommunications, media and entertainment, high performance computing and national libraries.

Previously at Sun Microsystems, James served as Sr. Director of Tape Development where he had development responsibility for Sun tape drives, tape libraries, at-rest data encryption and storage software. With StorageTek he led the development of the T9840C and T10000 tape drives and served in various management and engineering positions in drive engineering and the recording head organization. James has a M.S. degree and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Alabama. He holds 23 patents relating to data storage technology.

Richard is a certified disaster recovery planner with over 25 years of experience in Information Technology. Richard has extensive subject matter experience in Disaster Recovery Planning, Backup & Recovery Program Design, High Systems Availability, and infrastructure re-engineering.

Richard is an award-winning speaker who has presented over 200 sessions at many IBM COMMON conferences, Oracle, JDE Collaborate, and user groups during his twelve years of participation. A frequent technical contributor to industry publications, and has recently authored a book on Disaster recovery planning. Richard has held positions as President of local users groups, board member, subject matter expert at IBM COMMON and Advisory Committee panelist for IBM Business Resiliency. He has supported 18 computer room disasters and performed over 300 DR tests.

Jason Hick graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1996 with a B.S. in Computer Science. After spending five years in the Field Artillery as a Fire Support Officer, Support Platoon Leader, Executive Officer, and Battalion Supply Officer he transitioned to a career as a software developer at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) in 2001.

At LANL, Jason worked as a developer in the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) collaboration. In 2005, Jason served as team leader for the Data Storage Team with responsibility for a site-wide Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup solution and two HPSS multi-PB archives supporting the Advanced Scientific Computing Initiative and the follow- on Advanced Simulation & Computing programs.

Jason joined NERSC in 2006 and is currently the Storage Systems Group Lead. The group has responsibility for providing center-wide file system and archival storage to NERSC users. His personal areas of focus are in storage planning and management, software development, and database administration. He also serves as HPSS Technical Committee chairperson for LBNL and Large Tape Users Group (LTUG) Vice President.

In 1998, Fred Moore founded Horison Information Strategies, an information strategies consulting firm in Boulder, Colorado that specializes in marketing strategy, industry analysis and business development for the IT industry. Fred began his 21-year career at StorageTek as the first systems engineer and concluded as corporate vice president of Strategic Planning and Marketing. Fred served as Storage Editor for West World Productions and has written numerous books, articles and reports for the storage industry. He is a 1989 recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award and a 2004 recipient of the Arts and Science Scholar-In-Residence Award at the University of Missouri where he received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in computer applications in physical geography. A sought-after IT speaker, motivator and writer worldwide, Fred completed the Berkeley Executive Program in 1997. He currently serves on a few select boards in the storage networking industry.

Henry Newman has over 29 years of advanced systems architecture and performance analysis expertise in solving the most complex challenges for customers in government, scientific research, and industry around the world. This comprehensive experience includes hardware and software requirements analysis and design; file system and HSM design and optimization; system performance analysis and optimization; storage system architecting; high-performance networking; capacity planning; and hierarchical storage management with the focus on high performance computing and complex UNIX, Linux and Windows environments. Prior to joining Instrumental, Henry worked at Cray Research in a variety of capacities for over 11 years. His last position was International Technical Support responsible for performance and tuning issues. Henry has been with Instrumental, which he helped found, since 1992.

Matthew Parker is a seasoned storage veteran with 17+ years in the IT industry. Matthew has spent the last 7.5 years at industry leader Amazon.com designing and building large scale database and backup systems to accommodate Amazon’s ever expanding storage requirements.

As an international storage and data protection veteran with in-depth engineering expertise, Rob joined Crossroads Systems’ development and operations team in 1999. Given his recognized success and leadership, Rob rose quickly to the position of President, CEO and Board member. Rob currently leads the Crossroads corporate vision and growth strategy. An accomplished speaker and technologist, he brings more than 20 years of hands-on experience in IT design, development and manufacturing, operational management, and engineering. Among his numerous accomplishments, Rob is a recipient of the Technology Industry’s 2008 Most Valuable Performers Award and has been honored with numerous industry recognitions including the Stevie Award Top Executive finalist. Prior to joining Crossroads, Rob managed the advanced manufacturing and product test organizations at Kentek Corporation. He also managed the manufacturing, engineering and quality organizations at Exabyte. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Colorado State University.

Jon Toigo is an outspoken technology consumer advocate and vendor watchdog whose articles, columns and blogs are enjoyed by over a million readers per month.

He is CEO and Managing Principal of Toigo Partners International LLC, an independent consultancy and technical research/analysis firm and Chairman of the Data Management Institute LLC, a professional development organization for those who design, plan, manage and administer storage infrastructure and data assets.

Toigo is a 29-year IT veteran who has worked both as an operative and manager within corporate information systems departments and as a senior consultant with two international systems integrators. He has supported the development of over 150 disaster recovery plans for a broad range of businesses and non-profit organizations.

He is also a prolific writer with 15 books (5 covering disaster recovery planning) and thousands of articles in the technology trade press to his credit.