2024/2025 Technical Council
The Technical Council is a select group of acknowledged industry experts who work to guide SNIA's technical efforts. The Technical Council oversees and manages SNIA Technical Work Groups, reviews architectures submitted by Work Groups, and is SNIA's technical liaison to standards organizations.
 |
Bill Martin, Co-Chair Bill has been involved in the storage industry for over 40 years, starting in 1983 with the development of a proprietary optical interface for HP storage, architecting the HP Tachyon interface chip for Fibre Channel, serving on industry consortiums and standards bodies for storage including SNIA, INCITS T11, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, SATA-IO, and NVMe. He has demonstrable skills in gaining industry agreement in a variety of technologies and bringing together competitors for the advancement of the industry. In addition to his role representing Samsung in SSD IO Standards, Bill currently holds the following industry leadership roles: co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, Chair SNIA CMSI, co-chair SNIA CS TWG, Co-Chair SNIA SDP TWG, co-Chair SNIA Standards Committee, Board member of the NVMe Board of Directors, Co-Chair Computational Storage TG, Chair of INCITS T10, Secretary of INCITS T13. His technical leadership is exemplified as:
Bill has received numerous industry recognitions for his contributions to the storage industry over the past decades including: SNIA Volunteer of the Year award 2021, INCITS Gene Milligan award for effective committee management 2016, INCITS Merit award 2013, FCIA Achievement award 2010, INCITS Outstanding Leadership Team award 2007, INCITS Technical Excellence award 2005, FCIA Lifetime Achievement award 2005, and SNIA Outstanding Theme lead for the interop lab 2004. |
 |
Jason Molgaard, Co-Chair Jason Molgaard has over 25 years of experience as a storage device controller RTL designer and architect having worked for various storage device companies architecting and designing HDD and SSD controllers. As a Principal Storage Solutions Architect on the Solidigm Pathfinding and Advanced Development Team, Jason focuses on future storage controller architectures and technologies, including Computational Storage and CXL. Jason is co-chair of the SNIA Computational Storage TWG and the SNIA Technical Council and is chair of the SDC agenda team. Jason was recognized by SNIA with an Exceptional Leadership award in 2020 and Volunteer of the Year award for 2023. Jason helps drive the Computational Storage standard at both SNIA and partner organizations including NVMe and OCP. Jason holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. |
 |
Curtis Ballard, Member Curtis Ballard is a Distinguished Technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the HPE Storage organization. Curtis has over 25 years of experience in storage and storage interfaces technologies. While working at Hewlett Packard and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Curtis has worked in product design teams for magneto optical disk drives, medium changer devices, tape drives, disk arrays, and enclosure management devices. He has worked on hardware designs for storage interfaces and storage controllers as well as firmware for motion control, storage interfaces, user interface, and embedded operating systems. Curtis is a hardware platform architect and also represents HPE in several industry organizations. In addition to serving on the SNIA Technical Council, Curtis is a member of the NVM Express Board of Directors, is a member of the NVM Express technical committee, and is the vice-chair of INCITS/T10 SCSI Storage Interfaces Technical Committee. Curtis is currently the technical editor for several INCITS/T10 standards. He in an inventor on over 40 US patents in the storage industry across electrical, software, and mechanical disciplines and works in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise architecture community on storage architecture, intellectual property, and storage strategy. |
 |
Shyam Iyer, Member Shyam Iyer is a Distinguished Engineer in Dell's Chief Technology and Innovation Office experienced in Researching, Designing, Developing, Debugging, Validating, Leading, and Driving System and Software solutions that have an industry-wide impact. With 50+ granted patents and several patent pending applications, Shyam has wide experience with Kernel, Device Drivers, Operating Systems, Virtualization, FPGA/Hardware device definitions, system architecture, performance tuning, Simulation, characterization, Storage Networking protocol stacks, OS/BIOS interfaces, Systems management, CPU micro-architecture, security architectures, etc. He works on a variety of forward-looking concepts and strategies in Dell’s technical leadership community. He regularly presents/reviews solutions internally and externally with C-level execs, customers, and developer-oriented audiences. Shyam writes code/reviews them for relief and enjoys a healthy smattering of technical and business-oriented discussions. Among his SNIA activities, Shyam is the Chair for SDXI (Smart Data Accelerator Interface), a SNIA Technical Working Group(TWG) that aims to develop, extend, and drive an extensible, virtualizable, forward-compatible, memory to memory data movement and acceleration interface standard. He is the co-chair for the SDXI + Computational Storage Subgroup that envisions SDXI devices in a Computational Storage architecture and works to propose Computational Storage features to the SDXI standard. Shyam was recognized with the “Excellence in Leadership” award by SNIA membership in 2022. Under his leadership, SDXI TWG won the “SNIA TWG of the Year” award in 2021 and the “Most Innovative Memory Technology” award at Flash Memory Summit(FMS) 2023 for SDXI specification v1.0. |
 |
Fred Knight, Member Fred is a Principal Engineer at KIOXIA. Fred has over 45 years of experience in the computer and storage industry. He currently represents KIOXIA in several US national standards bodies, international standards bodies and several Industry Associations, including SNIA, NVM Express, Trusted Computing Group (TCG), INCITS SCSI (T10), and INCITS ATA/ACS (T13). He is the Convenor for the ISO/IEC JTC-1 / SC25 / WG4 international committee (which oversees the international standardization of INCITS T10 / T11 / T13 documents). Previously, Fred was the chair of the SNIA Hypervisor Storage Interfaces working group, the primary author of the SNIA HSI White Paper, the author of the IETF iSCSI update RFC, and the editor for the SCSI SAM-6 standard and SCSI SES-3 standard. Fred received several awards for excellence and innovation while working at NetApp as well as the INCITS Technical Excellence Award for his contributions to both T10 and T11 and the INCITS Merit Award for his longstanding contributions to the international work of INCITS. He also received the prestigious IEC 1906 award in 2022 for his international work in IEC. He was the developer of the first native FCoE target device in the industry. He contributes to technology and product strategy and serves as a consulting engineer to product groups across the company. Prior to joining KIOXIA, Fred was a Principal Engineer at NetApp, and a Consulting Engineer with Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq, and HP where he worked on clustered operating system and I/O subsystem design. |
 |
David Peterson, Member David Peterson is a Principal Engineer for Broadcom in the Brocade Storage Networking division. Dave is the technical editor for the FCP standards, the FC-NVMe standards, the FC-SW standards, FC-RDMA standard, and chair of the FC-FS and FC-GS work groups. Dave is also the INCITS T11 International Representative, the INCITS SC 25/WG 4 TAG Chair, and a Deputy Technical Advisor for the United States National Committee TAG to JTC 1/SC 25 in the international standards realm. Dave has been involved with networking and storage since 1983, and standards development since the mid-1990s. |
 |
Leah Schoeb, Member Leah Schoeb is a Sr. Manager responsible for storage strategy and architecture at AMD. She was also a senior partner at Evaluator Group, where she helps systems companies with performance engineering and optimization, market positioning, and benchmarking and also architects virtualized, containerized, and big data solutions. She has over 30 years experience in the computer industry, with the last decade in solid state technology. She was previously Acting Director for Storage Solutions Reference Architecture at Intel, where she led a team of segment managers and architects managing cross functional teams for flash and NVMe based data solutions, and reference architectures in major cloud and enterprise solution design assignments. She has prior experience as a Sr Partner at the analyst firm Evaluator Group, where she focused on storage, virtualization, and cloud infrastructure. She has held management and engineering positions at VMware, Dell, and Sun Microsystems. She has over ten publications on such subjects as optimizing Oracle, automated tiering, and solid state performance specifications, and has presented at many technical conferences including SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference and Data Storage Innovation Conference. She currently serves as as a voting member of the Technical Council and tract owner and Chairperson for Flash Memory Summit. Leah has also participated and provided thought leadership for industry groups such as the Transaction Performance Council (TPC), Storage Performance Council (SPC). She is a co-founder of their Solid State Storage System Technical Work Group. She earned an BSEE at University of Maryland College Part and a MBA at the University of Phoenix. She has held management and engineering positions at VMware, Dell, and Sun Microsystems. She has ten publications on such subjects as optimizing Oracle, automated tiering, and solid state performance specifications, and has presented at many technical conferences including SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference and Data Storage Innovation Conference. She is a current member of the SNIA Technical Council. |
 |
Steven Wells, Member 37-year veteran with most of that time focused on flash memory component and SSD design. He currently holds 65+ patents covering flash memory and security. He currently is a Fellow of Storage Solutions Architecture at Micron Technology. |
 |
James Borden, TC Advisor James has over 30 years in the storage industry, and has led numerous successful storage product programs in several companies. In his roles, James has been involved in several standards organizations and associations (e.g., Linux) to enable product and market adoption. |
 |
Craig Carlson, TC Advisor Craig Carlson is a Storage and Networking Architect at AMD. Craig has over 25 years of experience in Storage Networking technologies. In the past he was Chair of ANSI INCITS Task Group T11.3, the committee that defines Fibre Channel protocols and Vice Chair of ANSI INCITS Technical Commitee T11 - Fibre Channel. He was also Technical editor for the T11 Standards FC-LS-5, and FC-FS-6, as well as the Chair of the T11 Standards FC-SW-7, and FC-SW-7, and NVMe-3. He was also involved with NVM Express, the IEEE 802.1 Data Center Bridging Task Group and is the editor of the IEEE Standards 802.1Qaz (Enhanced Transmission Selection). Craig's background includes many years of development of storage networking products including being on the team of architects for the first public loop Fibre Channel switch. He also has many years of standards experience within ANSI/INCITS T11, NVM Express, IEEE, and IETF. Craig has also won numerous industry awards including the INCITS Gene Miiligan Award for Effective Committee Management for his role as T11.3 Chair, and most recently an FCIA achievement award for his contributions to the growth of Fibre Channel SAN Storage technology. |
 |
Paul Coddington, TC Advisor Paul Coddington is a Mechanical Engineer for the Amphenol Corporation working in standards development primarily for the Amphenol Communications Solutions and Amphenol Global Interconnect Systems businesses. In this role, Paul is involved in several industry standards and associations in the server/storage market space, including the INCITS/SCSI Technical Committee, the SNIA SCSI Trade Association Forum where Paul has served on the Board of Directors and as Treasurer, the INCITS/Fibre Channel Technical Committee, several Work Groups within PCI-SIG®, the Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) Consortium, and the SNIA SFF TA TWG where Paul serves as Co-Chair, Treasurer, and Editor of several SFF specifications. Prior to this role, Paul worked as an Interconnect Design Engineer at Amphenol for about 10 years and prior to that as a Product Design Engineer for another 10 years. Paul earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). |
 |
Clarete Crasta, TC Advisor Clarete Crasta is a Principal Engineer in Hewlett Packard Enterprise, currently working in the HPC and AI Advance Development group. She is a well-recognized technical architect and has built a solid reputation over 20 years with deep system software expertise in High Performance Computing, memory and storage technologies, operating systems kernel, platform & IO, and virtualization. Her ability to drive and lead teams, focus on customers, willingness to take up any complex work in newer areas, effective communication skills, and active collaboration has gained her acceptance across the community. Clarete has experience leading and collaborating across teams, business units, customers and partners. She is a co-inventor on 7 US filed patents and has co-authored 7 publications. She has presented at various conferences such as SNIA CMS, SNIA SDC, CUG, GHCI on Fabric Attached Memory and related topics. She has worked as a member of the technical committee and review board for GHCI, IEEE and has served as a PC member for IC2E. She holds a master’s degree in software engineering and bachelor’s in electrical engineering |
 |
Arnold Jones, TC Advisor Arnold has been involved in the Storage Industry for over 34 years, designing and developing a wide variety of storage products and standards. Since 2001 Arnold has been managing the activities and programs of the SNIA Technical Council, including the Technical Work Groups in the development of standards in the broad and complex fields of digital storage and information management. Prior to the SNIA he was deeply involved for over 9 years in another association, the Optical Storage Industry Association (OSTA) (www.osta.org). As a key Member of OSTA his involvement was at multiple levels: Board of Directors, Technical Work Groups and Market Development Committee. During his involvement with OSTA he was the Primary Architect and Technical Editor for the Universal Disk Format (UDF) file system specification, the standard file system used for all forms of optical storage today. Arnold holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida. |
 |
Peter Murray, TC Advisor Peter Murray is an expert with over 40 years of experience testing, characterizing performance, implementing, troubleshooting, and maintaining secure, fast, and highly available storage systems and networks. Peter has served on technical teams at test equipment and network equipment manufacturers, including Pure Storage, Virtual Instruments, F5 Networks, Spirent Communications, and Nortel Networks. Peter currently serves as an advisor member on the SNIA Technical Council. |
 |
Yukinori Sakashita, TC Advisor Yukinori Sakashita, Ph.D., is a researcher and developer of IT system management (including storage) and container technologies. Sakashita has over 20 years of experience in IT system management technologies. Since 2003, he has joined SNIA and has developed various specifications such as SMI-S. He has been the chair of the Technical Committee at SNIA Japan since 2012 and is currently the vice chair of the committee, leading the storage industry in Japan. He is a member of the Information Processing Society of Japan(IPSJ). Before LY Corporation (formerly Yahoo Japan), he held Senior Researcher at Hitachi R&D and Lab Manager at Hitachi America R&D. The emphasis of his technical work at these companies was the research and development of storage, VM, cloud, and IT system management technologies. Currently, he is working on persistent volumes in the container world, such as Kubernetes. He has spoken at many events to bridge Japan's container and storage industry. |
 |
Ryosuke Tatsumi, TC Advisor Ryosuke Tatsumi is a seasoned researcher with over 14 years of experience in storage systems and storage management controllers in Hitachi and Hitachi America R&D. He has made significant contributions to the research and development of advanced, high-performance, and reliable storage technologies. Since joining SNIA Japan in 2020 as a member of the Technical Committee, Tatsumi has played a pivotal role in shaping the organizationís technical direction, contributing to various Technical Working Groups (TWGs) focused on advancing storage standards and practices. He currently serves as the Vice Chair of the Technical Committee. At present, Tatsumiís research at Hitachi America is focused on integrating high-performance and reliable storage features into cloud-native environments, such as Kubernetes. His goal is to ensure that these advanced storage technologies are optimized for the scalability and flexibility required in cloud infrastructure, delivering enterprise-grade reliability and performance to the cloud. |
 |
David Thiel, TC Advisor David Thiel currently does consulting work in the Storage Industry. Previously, Dave was Technical Director and Staff Fellow in HP's StorageWorks Division. David was been employed by HP, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corporation from 1980 to 2008. Since 1991, David has worked in the area of computer storage leading distributed storage system, storage virtualization, storage area network architecture, RAID, storage management software, standards, patent, and technical staff development activities. Previously, he was with the OpenVMS Operating System development organization where he was the lead architect and designer of OpenVMS Cluster systems. David has long been active in the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), where he has been a member of the Technical Council since 1999, including serving as chair for 4 years and vice-chair for 4 years. Dave has served as an ex-officio member of the Board of Directors and has participated in many additional SNIA activities. David earned 3 degrees in Electrical Engineering at MIT and holds 24 U.S. patents. |
 |
SW Worth, TC Advisor SW Worth is a former Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft. From 2002 through 2006 he was the worldwide lead for the SNIA Tutorials. Before joining Microsoft in late 2003, SW was Technical Marketing Manager at Crossroads Systems. From 1991-1999 he was an internal IT consultant with a large integrated electric and gas utility in the northeastern United States. He has a background in environmental engineering, and worked in paper mills in several U.S. states and in France. |