John Bent Email & Phone Number

One of the five vector leads in Seagate Research, I run the Data Infrastructure Vector. I manage a portfolio of internal research projects and collaborations with external partners in academia and industry. . This Vector is primarily focused on building data platforms. Specifically, turning collections of individual storage devices which are relatively small, speak a non-human intelligible interface, and occasionally fail into a single data platform of seemingly infinite size with human friendly interfaces which never loses data. Additionally, we consider why people store data and look for ways to increase the value of stored data as well as to decrease the cost to store it.In addition to my technical contributions, I have led several initiatives to improve productivity, impact, and team morale. Although publishing is not a primary goal, I have had publishing success in this role with recent publications at ASPLOS and HotStorage.

Created the Seagate CORTX Community. An intersection of a small, dedicated team with a larger core development organization and an ever-growing open-source community. Built a team and built a community in less than a year and achieved success in all goals over a two-year period via a steady cadence of engaging events and content creation and publication. Measured goals quantitatively via a series of self-developed metrics automatically extracted via APIs at github and elsewhere.Created the Seagate CORTX Advanced Development Group. Defined and produced multiple technology proposals from data reduction to machine learning proposals. Built and cultivated business partnerships across the customer and partner ecosystem including Intel, RedHat, and others.

Los Alamos, Nm

Led a world-wide team of around 35 presales engineers doing sales in six continents. Worked at the intersection of partner development, customer cultivation, product development, and marketing. Although DDN is typically a company which wins on “speeds and feeds”, I was specifically hired to increase the story telling capability of the sales teams.• Introduced “Own Your Slides” philosophy amongst the team. Regular internal presentations to review, critique, praise, and improve each other’s’ presentations. “Own Your Slides” was the mandate that no graph, no text, no elements could be added to any slide unless the presenter fully understood the meaning and the intent.• Six straight quarters of sales growth.• Critical documentation and design of the RED distributed system which multiple customers said was the best response to an RFP that they had ever read.

Was part of a small team of architects, reporting to the VP of storage, who were responsible for guiding the development and design decisions of Cray’s entire storage portfolio.• Was the designated customer-facing architect and product management liaison for all storage.• Was a key voice in the push to repurpose the existing Lustre product onto all-flash arrays instead of unnecessarily developing new products.

Los Alamos, Nm

Developed architectural designs coupling diverse customer workflows with systems software and evolving storage media. Combined ability to learn anything from anyone with ability to explain anything to anyone to ensure that key technical innovations were understood by internal executives and by external customers.• Created the HAST vision of hardware aggressively optimized for specific roles in data center storage hierarchies.• Extensive international speaking roles and academic publications reinforcing and strengthening Seagate’s preeminent reputation.• Leveraged academic reputation and personal relationships to make key introductions between sales team and customers.

Los Alamos, Nm

Was co-PI on the successful US DOE multi-million dollar funded Fast Forward project which eventually grew into Intel’s DAOS product. More generally, helped EMC explore and understand high-performance computing and develop market strategies accordingly.

Santa Fe, New Mexico Area

HPC IO system designer. PLFS lead developer. National representative for LANL IO. IO team tool developer.

Madison, Wisconsin Area

Received PhD in distributed data scheduling in batch scheduling systems.

Palau

Worked as public school librarian. Lots of nighttime spear-fishing with snorkel and underwater flashlight.

Phd, Computer Science

Ba, Anthropology

Activities and Societies: Rugby

Education record