Herman Chao
Senior Director, Brocade

Presentation Topic:
Management Tools for DC Infrastructure

Domenic Alcaro

Vice President, Data Center Solutions
APC by Schneider Electric

Domenic Alcaro is Vice President of the Data Center Solutions, APC by Schneider Electric, a global leader in critical power and cooling services, provides industry leading product, software and systems for home, office, data center and factory floor applications. In 2007, Schneider Electric acquired APC and combined it with MGE UPS Systems to form Schneider Electric’s Critical Power and Cooling Business Unit, which recorded 2008 revenue of €2,6 billion (including APC-MGE sales of $3.7 billion) and employed 12,000 people worldwide. APC solutions include uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), precision cooling units, racks, physical security and design and management software, including APC's InfraStruXure® architecture, the industry’s most comprehensive integrated power, cooling, and management solution. Schneider Electric, with 114,000 employees and operations in 100 countries, achieved sales of €18,3 billion in 2008. His current role as Vice President of Data Center Solutions entails leading the North American Data Center Solutions sales team for Schneider Electric.

Prior to his current role, Domenic held technical, sales, and management roles during his more than 14 years at APC including Director of the Availability Science Center, Enterprise Regional Manager, Director of the NYC and Philadelphia Metro Region, and in his prior role he was VP Enterprise Sales North America, where he was responsible for helping large corporations improve their enterprise IT infrastructure availability.

Prior to joining APC, Domenic was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy and served more than six years in the submarine community. During that time he was certified to serve as chief engineer of any U.S. nuclear-powered submarine and was also selected as the Navy’s Instructor of the Year, worldwide.

Domenic is a frequent speaker at various industry conferences on topics such as business continuity, physical infrastructure of information technology, and data center design.

Domenic holds a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester and is a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society.

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Jeff O'Neal

Sr. Director, Data Center Solutions Marketing
NetApp

Jeff O’Neal is Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at NetApp.   Jeff and his team are responsible for managing go-to-market strategies and alliances for all NetApp Data Center Solutions including Core Systems, Data Center Network, Manageability and Data Center Automation Software as well as solutions for Consolidation, Cloud Computing and Application Development & Test environments.

Presentation Topic:
Opening and Closing Remarks

Douglas Balog

Vice President, IBM

Mr. Douglas Balog, Vice President, IBM BladeCenter Business Line Executive, Systems and Technology Group, is responsible for the overall IBM BladeCenter business and strategy. Mr. Balog also serves as Chairperson of the industry BladeServer solution community - Blade.org. Previously, Mr. Balog was Vice President, IBM BladeCenter Development, Systems and Technology Group. In that role, he was responsible for the technical direction and development of IBM's BladeCenter products and overall xSeries software.

Until mid-2004, Mr. Balog served as Vice President of IBM TotalStorage Open Software Development in the Systems and Technology Group, and was responsible for leading the development of open system storage software products and autonomic storage management infrastructure. At that time he was also the Senior Site Executive of the IBM San Jose, California facility.

Mr. Balog graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a B.S. in Computer Science in 1983.

Herman Chao

Senior Director
Brocade

Herman Chao is the Senior Director for Brocade responsible for the product management of server connectivity products. Prior to joining Brocade, Herman has held key marketing and business development roles in successful networking industries including storage, Voice over IP, and wireless networking at QLogic, 5by5 Networks and ShareWave. For QLogic, Herman led the strategic marketing team for iSCSI and FC. Herman was also the co-founder of enScaler a leading provider of IT provisioning software. At Hewlett-Packard, Herman was an engineer in the data networking equipment and disk drive divisions. Herman holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the University of California, Davis.

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Presentation Topic:
Dynamic Infrastructure: Building the Cloud Network

Dan Tuchler

Vice President of Strategy and Product Management
BLADE Network Technologies

Dan Tuchler has over 25 years experience in technical and marketing roles in the networking industry. Most recently, he led product management at Mellanox Technologies, the leading supplier of InfiniBand products and an important player in the fast-growing High Performance Computing (HPC) market. Prior to Mellanox, Dan led product management at Force10 Networks, a leading vendor of large scale, resilient 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching products.

Dan's product experience spans a range of networking product technologies including emerging Ethernet standards, InfiniBand, security, load balancing, content aware networking, and high-availability products at companies such as Alteon WebSystems, Wang Labs, and Proteon Networks. At Alteon, he managed several generations of product lines, from the initial launch of the Web Switch through the company's IPO and acquisition by Nortel. In addition Dan has consulted to numerous Silicon Valley start-ups, developing business plans and product strategies.

Dan started his career as a hardware designer developing networking products. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland and an MBA from Boston University.

Presentation Topic:
Technology and Trends Shaping x86 Servers

Gregg McKnight

VP, IBM and Distinguished Engineer System x and BladeCenter Development and Energy Efficiency
IBM

Gregg McKnight is Vice President for IBM System x and BladeCenter Development. Based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA, Gregg leads the Mechanical Design, Power and Thermal Engineering teams for all System x and BladeCenter products. In addition Gregg has leadership responsibility for the System x and BladeCenter Energy Efficiency initiative and Emerging Technologies for IBM’s multi-billion-dollar x86 business. This is the fastest growing server segment in the world.

Having joined IBM in 1984, Gregg has 25 years of experience in x86 server development. His consistent and outstanding technical achievements over the years have earned Gregg the title of IBM Distinguished Engineer, one of the company’s top technical honors. Gregg provides leadership on everything from Blade and Rack server product development to customer solutions and he engages in daily work on applied technology. Prior to becoming Vice President of Mechnical, Power and Cooling Development, Gregg was Chief Technology Officer for the IBM System x group. In that role, Gregg was the lead systems architect on the revolutionary new iDataPlex sever program designed for maximum energy efficiency in grid, Internet-scale and HPC data centers.

Gregg earned a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University.

With extensive experience in server systems architecture, systems design, and systems performance, Gregg has been instrumental in the development and energy efficiency optimization of IBM’s System x and BladeCenter systems.

In his personal life, Gregg enjoys his family, running, cycling and is an instrument-rated pilot.

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Presentation Topic:
Scaling Blades to the Rack

Rob Nance

Principal Architect, High Density Computing Group
Intel

Rob Nance joined Intel in 2005 and is currently serving as chief architect in the High Density Computing Group. He has over 15 years experience in the server design industry, with the last 8 years focused on blade servers. He first designed blade systems for Dell Computer while serving as a technical leader in the server group responsible for the PowerEdge line of products. Mr. Nance then left Dell, following a Dell executive, to join RLX Technologies, a small blade server company, where he served as the chief architect. Intel brought in the RLX design team in 2005 where Mr. Nance was responsible for the architecture and development of the Intel Modular Server, a blade server targeted at the SMB market. His current responsibilities include defining the architecture for server products that will be optimized for the next generation data center.

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