Global IT Executive Summit

Brett M. Anders is a partner in the Morristown office of Jackson Lewis where he exclusively represents management in workplace law, including counseling and litigation. Mr. Anders has extensive experience representing employers in all types of employment litigation matters, such as employment discrimination, wrongful discharge and wage and hour cases. He regularly litigates in both state and federal court, as well as before various governmental agencies including the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the New Jersey Department of Labor and the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights. Mr. Anders is a member of the firm’s E-Discovery and Workplace Technology practice group as well as the firm’s Disability, Leave and Health Management practice group. Mr. Anders is also a member of the New Jersey State Bar Association’s Labor & Employment Section and is a member of the Section’s E-Discovery Committee. Additionally, Mr. Anders co-authored “An Employer’s Guide to Avoiding the Pitfalls Associated with E-Mail and Internet Monitoring”, which was published in the New Jersey State Bar Association’s Labor & Employment Quarterly.

Randy has contributed over 40 years to the seismic processing industry in various IT roles. Randy joined CGG in 1982 as a system engineer primarily covering the Houston processing center, but with responsibilities extending to North America and South America processing centers. An opportunity arose in CGG in 1994 and Randy moved overseas to work in global locations for the next 14 years. Randy has been back in Houston since 2009.

His experience covers operations, system management, data archiving, IT Center management, IT sourcing, and global datacenter infrastructure.

Justin is Chief Technology Advocate as well as Manager of Partnership Development for CyArk, and has spent considerable time over the years helping establish the company’s standards for both long-term data archiving as well as data collection during field work. Justin has published articles (both peer reviewed journals and trade publications) on 3D laser scanning for site management, erosion monitoring, preventative conservation efforts, and tourism growth. He has been involved in over 30 CyArk projects world-wide, from field collection and data processing to program management. An expert in the technology and its uses in the heritage field, Justin has conducted workshops and trainings around the world for CyArk partners. This has included working closely with foreign governments including Korea and Scotland as well as establishing technology centers within university partners in the United States and South Africa.

Jon Benson joined Spectra Logic in 2011 to lead the research and development of new technologies for Spectra’s portfolio of data storage solutions. As vice president and general manager of emerging markets, he is responsible for developing new products that address customers’ future data center requirements. Jon also oversees software development and quality for all Spectra products.

Prior, he was employed at StorageTek (STK)/Sun Microsystems for more than 24 years and was serving as vice president and general manager of its tape business when the company was purchased by Sun in 2005. During his tenure at StorageTek, Jon directed the product and business development of numerous tape library, drive and software platforms throughout the 1990s and into 2005-2005, including the PowderHorn, SL8500 and SL3000 tape libraries, VSM virtual tape and 9840/9940/T10000 tape drives.

Dr. Richard L. Bradshaw has 29 years R&D and Research with IBM Corporation, and is the author of sixteen issued US Patents and over 25 published papers. The first Distinguished Engineer (DE) in the Tucson Tape Development Lab as well as the only member from that team to be elected to the IBM Academy of Technology, Dr. Bradshaw is a leader in collaborative tape research efforts, and has been involved with archival storage strategies and best practices since the early 90s. He is a recognized expert in tape formulation design, tape and component characterization, failure analysis and life prediction, data recovery and tape manufacturing process design and control. Dr. Bradshaw was a primary member of the data recovery effort that successfully recovered data from the space shuttle Challenger flight recorder tapes in 1986 and numerous other data recovery efforts for both government and commercial incidents that continue to this day, such as the data recovery efforts underway as a result of the extensive damage from Hurricane Sandy along the East Coast of the United States.

Michelle Butler is the Senior Technical Program Manager of the Storage Enabling Technology and Network Engineering groups. In such, she is in charge of the center’s data environments which include the online disk systems (>35PB), the file systems, the disk hardware environments, the nearline systems (>300PB), backup systems, the WAN and LAN environments which includes the 120Gb WAN connectivity, the 55GB 40GigE network for the BlueWaters system, large data lab cluster networks, and down to the disk top and wireless infrastructure. Not only do these have production responsibilities but the research/testing of hardware, architecting and designing for performance/reliability, and implementation into production are also included. She has numerous responsibilities for the BlueWaters machine allocated by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

David Cerf is executive vice president of business and corporate development at Crossroads Systems. With more than 25 years of corporate development experience in the IT industry, David is a frequent speaker on data growth, storage and protection issues at several national industry conferences. Joining Crossroads in 2005, he currently leads global efforts to expand Crossroads innovative data protection solutions and develop relationships with key early technology adopters. Serving as a key member of Crossroads’ executive team, he helps distinguish the company’s future product roadmap and overall business direction. Prior to joining Crossroads, David served as vice president of sales and business development at NexQL, a leading provider of advanced database acceleration technologies. He was also a co-founder of 360World, a national provider of video and imaging solutions. In 1988, as the founder and managing director of the Dallas Business Incubator, he was responsible for the development and funding of more than 50 new high-growth startup companies.

George Crump is President and Founder of Storage Switzerland, an IT analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization of segments. With 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation’s largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.

George is responsible for the storage blog on Information Week’s web site and is a regular contributor to publications such as Byte and Switch, SearchStorage, eWeek, SearchServerVirtualization and SearchDataBackup.

Sarah Duncan is an IT Jill of all trades for The WGBH Educational Foundation, which includes the TV station, two radio stations, and production of a number of shows that are nationally televised. At WGBH, we produce Antiques Roadshow, Masterpiece, Nova, American Experience, Frontline, Arthur, and Design Squad among others. Sarah started there in 2007 as the UNIX systems administrator. At that time everything ran on Solaris: netbackup, SAMFS, DNS, email, www.wgbh.org, financials and fundraising. Now only netbackup and SAMFS still run on Solaris, so Sarah also handles Linux, Windows, and VMWare together with her two very terrific sys admin colleagues. Before coming to WGBH, Sarah worked for two Harvard biophysicists for many years, and even had a brief foray into corporate America. Sarah has a BA in Engineering and Applied Sciences and a Masters of Divinity from Harvard, and completed a college year abroad in Madurai, Tamilnadu, India. She is always looking for people she can practice speaking Spanish or Tamil with. In her spare time, Sarah likes to make glass beads at the torch, officiate at weddings, and hang out with her wife and two cats.

John Herron is currently leading tape drive development at Oracle, a position he has held for the last six years. He has led the Oracle design team to the successful delivery of industry-leading tape drive products. A large part of the success of these products resulted from joint development work done with Fujifilm. John championed the approach to deliver tape drives with high capacity, high performance and features needed to enhance both usability and performance of tape drives in various application environments. John has spent his entire career designing and then leading product development in the data storage industry. Prior to his work at Oracle, he worked at StorageTek and also served as engineering Vice President in four startup companies, which included magnetic tape, disk drive and holographic data storage technologies.

Jason Hick graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1996 with a B.S. in Computer Science. After spending 5 years in the Field Artillery, 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 mullti-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.

“Failure is not an option” is the enduring credo uttered by Gene Kranz as NASA flight control director when he led the effort to bring the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission back to Earth. For his role as the ultimate crisis manager, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his leadership, heroism and steely resolve. A legendary American hero, he speaks of the pride, determination, and passion needed to make any mission a successful one.

In 1960, Mr. Kranz joined the NASA Space Task Group at Langley, Virginia; and was assigned as assistant flight director for Project Mercury. He assumed flight director duties for all Project Gemini Missions, and was the branch chief for Flight Control Operations. Mr. Kranz was selected as division chief for Flight Control in 1968, and continued his duties as flight director for the Apollo Program. He was the flight director for many Apollo missions, including the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and he led the “Tiger Team” for the successful return of the Apollo 13. He performed as both a flight director and flight operations director for the Skylab Program, and, at its conclusion, was assigned as deputy director of flight operations with responsibility for space flight planning, training and mission operations, aircraft operations, and astronaut operations.

Joseph J. Lazzarotti is a Partner in the Morristown, New Jersey office of Jackson Lewis LLP. He leads the firm’s Privacy, Social Media and Information Management Practice, edits the firm’s Privacy Blog, and is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP) with the International Association of Privacy Professionals. He is also a member of the Employee Benefits Counseling and Litigation Practice Group. In short, his practice focuses on the matrix of laws governing the privacy, security and management of data, as well as the impact and regulation of social media. He also counsels companies on compliance, fiduciary, taxation, and administrative matters with respect to health and welfare plans, and is a member of the firm’s Healthcare Reform Taskforce.

Mr. Henry Newman has over 30 years of advanced systems architecture and performance analysis expertise in solving the most complex challengers 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 Linux, UNIX, and Windows environments. Prior to joining Instrumental, Mr. Newman 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. Mr. Newman has been with Instrumental, which he helped found, since 1992 and is the CEO/CTO for the company.

Mark Peters is an ESG senior analyst focused on storage systems. His particular areas of emphasis are block storage; virtualized storage; all types of solid-state storage; and the challenges of power, cooling, and space efficiency in data centers. Mark has more than 25 years of data storage industry experience and has held senior management roles in sales, marketing, product management, business development, and customer intimacy in the U.S. and internationally.

Before joining ESG, Mark ran his own corporate communications consulting business focusing on storage and IT. He has enjoyed a varied career in high-tech commerce, working at Xerox, Memorex-Telex, StorageTek, Sun Microsystems, and a software startup. Hailing from the U.K., Mark has a Master’s degree from Oxford University and has been based in Colorado since 1997.

After graduating from Eastern Washington University with a B.S. in Computer Science (1985), Alan worked at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) and studied for his Masters in Computer Science at the University of Idaho. In 1987 he played a key role in setting up INEL’s first Cray supercomputer and later its first Internet connection (NSFnet/Westnet).  Alan has been working with the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) division at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) since 1992 and has been very involved with the evolution of the facility’s supercomputing center. One of his first major projects was setting up archive software (DMF) for the Crays. As the HPC Technical Director, one of his major accomplishments was leading a team through the installation of Project Columbia (20 single system image nodes with 512 CPUs each for a total of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 CPUs) in 2004. His team built one of the fastest HPC systems in the world and with the quickest deployment, installation-to-production, of any large HPC system, it was the first to surpass Japan’s Earth Simulator performance.

Molly Rector joined Spectra Logic in 2004 and currently serves as the company’s chief marketing officer, leading a department of channel and market development, marketing communications, public relations and product management professionals. A key member of Spectra’s executive leadership team since 2005, she helps define and execute the company’s future product roadmap and overall corporate direction. In 2010, Rector’s vision led to the formation of the Active Archive Alliance, a non-profit storage industry association, on which she represents one of fourteen vendor organizations and serves as the chairman of the board. She is also a member of the SNIA board of directors, and was named a 2010 Channel Chief by Everything Channel’s CRN. Rector holds certifications as CommVault Certified System Administrator; Veritas Certified Data Protection Administrator; and Oracle Certified Enterprise DBA: Backup and Recovery. She earned a bachelor’s of science degree in biology and chemistry.

In 2013 Rob started his own company, CitadelTek, to focus on providing large storage architectures and solutions for a broad base of partners in the commercial and federal sectors. Data growth is exploding at exponential rates and CitadelTek is at the forefront of solving the challenges companies experience trying to create storage architectures that provide the benefit and value to their business at cost points that allow them to meet their mission requirements. An accomplished speaker and technologist, Rob brings 25 years of hands-on experience in IT design, engineering development, manufacturing, and operational management. Throughout his career his vision coupled with his deep technology roots has led him to create innovative products and solutions as evidenced by his current 15 patents with multiple additional patents in process. Prior to CitadelTek, Rob led Crossroads Systems for 9 years as the CEO/CTO having risen quickly to that position through proven leadership in research & development as well as managing the overall operations of the company as the COO. Among his numerous accomplishments, Rob has been recognized with the Technology Industry’s Most Valuable Performers Award and has been honored with numerous industry recognitions including the Stevie Award Top Executive finalist. Prior to Cossroads, 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 Chariman 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 30-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.