Global IT Executive Summit

Mike Anderson is a Storage Systems Engineer at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. He is part of the Infrastructure Services team in the Office of Information Technologies. Mike received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Miami and his master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Clemson University. Since 2006, he has been deploying, maintaining, and designing storage solutions for the University of Notre Dame that have included projects with disk, tape, and cloud storage. Mike began his professional career working for AT&T in 1984 as a manufacturing test engineer for transformers and inductors in Radford, Virginia. He moved into the Informational Technology field in 1987 while working at a manufacturing plant in Mexico for AT&T. He worked in manufacturing for a total of 22 years, starting with AT&T. He then worked for Lucent Technologies (a spinoff from AT&T), and then Agere Systems (a spinoff from Lucent Technologies), both of which were located in Orlando, Florida.

Jason Buffington is the Principal Analyst focusing on all forms of data protection, preservation and availability. He has actively deployed or consulted on data protection and storage solutions for 27 years, working at channel partners, Cheyenne(CA) ARCserve, NSI DoubleTake, and Microsoft. Jason has been a featured speaker at many server-infrastructure, business continuity, and storage events around the world, and his articles have appeared in numerous IT industry journals. Check out Jason’s book, Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers.

James Cates is Senior Vice President at Oracle Corporation where he has responsibility for the Archive Development organization. His portfolio includes the SL8500, SL3000 and SL150 tape libraries, LTO and T10000 Enterprise tape drives, virtual tape disk products, encryption, Oracle HSM software, and DIVA software including the associated cloud offering. These storage offerings are deployed by customers for data protection and long term digital preservation in diverse areas including cloud, finance, media and entertainment, high performance computing and national libraries.

Previously at Sun Microsystems and StorageTek, James held various management and engineering positions in the storage development organizations. 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.

Gary cut his Systems Engineering teeth in the formative years of commercial Internet services in South Africa. After spending some time consulting at financial and commodities companies in London and Zürich, he has spent the past decade as an Engineering Manager building planet-scale infrastructure.

As an SRE Manager at Google, he established the buildout and managed production of their massive globally-distributed tape-backup service. At Facebook, he was Production Engineering Manager for the assorted Storage and Compute areas of their Data Warehouse, also managing teams responsible for Cold Storage, as well as POSIX Storage. He is currently a Senior Manager at LinkedIn responsible for the grid for “everything Hadoop”.

Richard has worked in the Motion Picture Industry for over 20 years. His current assignment deals with architecting and managing the digital media assets of the LDS Church. Retention and Preservation is a key component in the world of digital media, but so is the immediacy of access and use. Richard has pioneered the church’s position in this space and built an infrastructure to support both long-term preservation, as well as quick access to millions of media assets.

Richard began his career as a sound designer, and has worked on hundreds of films, television programs, and audio recordings. He is an award winning sound mixer, and continues to record and mix great music and film projects as time permits. He was asked to design and architect the asset management and archive systems of the church in 2007, to make available the large collection of media assets to the various production teams creating great media products and experiences for the church. His role later expanded to include the vast distribution of media assets available in over 96 languages on the various distribution channels the church uses for distributing it’s media, including its web properties, mobile apps, and television and satellite broadcast systems.

Tom leads the team responsible for daily backup infrastructure and operations for all of Pixar. The team currently protects six petabytes of storage and over 2000 workstations and servers through a combination of disk and tape based strategies. Pixar pushes an average of 100TB to tape nightly and has over 25PB stored on LTO6.

Tom coordinated efforts to recover digital assets of old productions from archaic backup and storage systems. He helped modernize assets for current pipelines and implemented strategies to permanently preserve old assets while making them continuously available for ongoing franchise work.

Previous to working at Pixar Tom worked 3 years as a gardner in San Franciso. Previously to gardening Tom was an electrical engineer designing microprocessors at Hewlett Packard for 9 years.

Brad Johns is President of Brad Johns Consulting LLC. He specializes in computer storage technology and strategies; helping suppliers communicate the value of modern data storage systems and users effectively deploy them. He retired from IBM in July, 2010 after a 32 year career that included management and project leadership in Information Technology marketing, consulting and sales. In his last position he was Manager of IBM’s Storage Market Management organization where he led an international team responsible for worldwide marketing of IBM’s midrange disk storage, storage virtualization, de-duplication and tape storage offerings. He first joined the Storage Systems Division in 1997 as Manager of Marketing for IBM’s tape storage offerings. He subsequently led a number of storage marketing, strategy and product management teams in IBM’s Storage Systems that launched many storage offerings into the marketplace including: the second generation Virtual Tape Server, LTO tape drives and libraries, TS1120 Tape Drive with Encryption and recently IBM’s ProtecTIER De-duplication offerings. He joined IBM as a sales trainee in the Data Processing Division of IBM in 1978 and subsequently held a number of sales and sales management positions in the Southwest. He went on to join the IBM Consulting Group and worked with a number of clients in the design and implementation of engineering change management solutions. Brad is currently the President of the Tucson chapter of the American Marketing Association. He holds a Master in Business Administration and Bachelors degree in Economics from the University of Arizona

Fred Moore began a 21-year career with StorageTek as the company’s first systems engineer and concluded as Corporate Vice President of Strategic Planning and Marketing. In 1998, Fred founded Horison Information Strategies in Boulder, Colorado, a data storage industry analyst and consulting firm specializing in executive briefings, market success strategy development, and identifying key and emerging technology trends for end-users, storage industry suppliers, and startup ventures.

A sought-after motivator and frequent keynote speaker at storage conferences and IT events worldwide, Fred completed the Berkeley Executive Program in 1997. He currently serves on a few select boards in the storage networking industry.

Fred also served as Editor of Storage for Computer Technology Review magazine and has produced numerous books, articles, research reports, whitepapers, analysis, infomercials and webcasts for the storage industry, analyst groups, and financial groups.

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, Columbia where he received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in computer applications in physical geography.

Chris Powers is Vice President of the Data Center Development Unit for the Hewlett Packard Storage Division. Chris’s organization is responsible for development and delivery of the mission critical tier 1 disk array and long term retention product portfolios.

In his nearly 25 years of experience in the data storage industry, Chris has experience in a broad range of roles spanning finance, strategy development, operations, product development, product management and P&L responsibilities. Chris’s experience has spanned across a broad range of technologies including disk and tape drives, high end disk array, tape automation and library products. Chris has extensive experience in successfully developing and managing complex global development and operational partnerships across the value chain.

Chris holds several technical undergraduate degrees in technology and business and has an MBA from the University of Arizona.

Chris is based in Ft. Collins, CO

Calline Sanchez is Vice President, IBM Enterprise Systems Storage. In this role, Ms. Sanchez is responsible for worldwide development of IBM’s Enterprise Storage Systems including DS8000, Physical/ Virtual Tape, and back up/archive solutions. Prior to this role, Ms. Sanchez was Vice President of IBM Systems Storage Program Management. Calline led a worldwide team of program managers, engineers and scientists representing locations worldwide to deliver the IBM Systems Storage Product Portfolio. Her execution focus is to deliver the best of breed technology products/solutions to the marketplace.

In 2011, as the IBM Data Protection and Retention Development Director, Calline led the Backup SystemStrategy enabling the Virtual and Physical Tape teams. Prior to this position as the Enterprise Disk StorageDevelopment Director she led the transformation to improve execution and substantiate a foundation for delivering IBM Enterprise Disk into the marketplace.

In 2008, Calline was on temporary assignment at IBM Corporate Headquarters in Armonk, New York. The role consisted of learning from Nick Donofrio, Executive Vice President and champion supporting IBM’s technical community worldwide. Visiting 30+ countries in this role, she engaged in projects that NMD led within Innovation, Technology, Government Programs, Corporate Citizenship, IBM Research, and Education.

Calline began her career with IBM in 1999 as a co-op in Markov Chain Statistical Tools and accepted a full time position with the Storage tools team. As the team lead, Calline contributed significantly to the development of assertion based models and coded in C for FCP, SCSI, and FICON interfaces for both disk and tape products. She has B.S.B.A. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona,

B.A. in Communications from the University of Arizona, and an MBA with an emphasis in Finance from the same university.

Enrico Signoretti is a very successful Italian blogger, analyst and advisor. He’s been working in IT for over 20 years, beginning as an assembler in the second half of the 80s before moving on to UNIX platforms until his recent switch to the cloud. In 2012 he founded Juku consulting, a consultancy and advisory firm highly focused on supporting end users, vendors and third parties in the development of their IT infrastructure strategies. Enrico is constantly keeping an eye on how the market evolves and continuously looking for new ideas and innovative solutions.

Immediately before founding Juku Enrico was the founder and CEO of Cinetica, a prominent storage and virtualization consultancy firm in central Italy. Once Juku took off Enrico left Cinetica to focus entirely on his new venture, which has now expanded and become the organization behind a number of one-day seminars taking place around Europe and the USA.

In his spare time Enrico is a keen sailor and an (unsuccessful) fisherman.

Marcellus Tabor is an industry professional with decades of experience in technology and the Storage industry from a sales, system administrative and a technical management perspective. He is currently at Intuit as the Manager for Storage and Data Protection. Previously Marcellus worked in a similar capacity as a Storage Manager at McAfee, now Intel Security. Before those exciting times he spent a few years leading a team of professionals at the consulting firm and reseller Bedrock and prior to that, he provided email to the free world as the Global Manager of Storage and Data Protection for Yahoo. Marcellus specializes in both building out highly scalable storage platforms as well as developing strong, highly engaged and successful teams. When not elbows deep in Storage technology, Marcellus enjoys spending his time being terrorized by his 4 year old son, playing reggae music in front of thousands and writing about World History.

Nathan C. Thompson is the chief executive officer of Spectra Logic Corporation. He founded Western Automation, which manufactured memory boards, peripheral test equipment and storage systems, in 1979, while enrolled at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Nathan continued the business while in school, graduating in 1983 with a bachelor’s of science degree in electrical engineering and computer science. Under Nathan’s direction, Western Automation acquired the assets of the interface company Spectra Logic in 1988 and renamed the combined company Spectra Logic Corporation in 1996. Today, Spectra Logic continues as a manufacturer of innovative tape and disk-based data backup and archive solutions—with products installed globally in over 40 countries.

Nathan has served as a member and chapter chairman of the Rocky Mountain Young President’s Organization (YPO) since 1994, the Colorado 30 Group since 2004, the University of Colorado’s Electrical Engineering advisory board since 2006, and recently joined the Wells Fargo Community board. He also serves on the finance and investment committees for the Alexander Dawson School of Lafayette, Colo. Additionally, Nathan is a licensed commercial instrument pilot with more than 2,100 flight hours logged.In 1996, Ernst & Young and USA Today named Nathan Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2003, he was awarded the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award (DEAA) from the University of Colorado. In April 2012, he was inducted into the Boulder County Business Hall of Fame.

Read his Colorado Engineering magazine article to learn more about how Nathan started the company as a college undergraduate.

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 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 (five covering disaster recovery planning) and thousands of articles in the technology trade press to his credit. In 2014, Toigo introduced IT-SENSE.org, a quarterly web publication focused on common sense IT strategy to rave reviews. The first issue focused on the renaissance of tape technology.

As a technology strategist and director of global strategic alliances for HGST’s Cloud Infrastructure Business unit, Stefaan Vervaet plays a vital role in building the partner ecosystem to drive innovation and business growth for HGST’s scale-out cloud and archive storage solutions.

Stefaan brings 15 years of experience in the data storage and backup industry. As a business-focused technologist with a start-up background, he brings a unique perspective to HGST. His background includes product management and go-to-market positions at Symantec/Veritas, as well as presales and support executive positions at Amplidata.

As an innovator with a proven track record, Stefaan successfully helped build startup companies like DataCenter Technologies, a dedupe technology (acquired by Veritas in 2005) and Amplidata, a leading object storage vendor (acquired by HGST in 2015). Immediately before joining HGST, he established and built the US office running pre-sales, support, and operations worldwide for Amplidata.

Vervaet holds a master’s degree in Applied Informatics from the University of Ghent, Belgium.