I led the Simplicity architecture team, covering all aspects of the product including data path, control plane, management plane, data protection, security, performance, and solutions. I drove significant innovation through my team, including a new software-defined data path, new work on cloud-based lifecycle management, and higher scale. I drove strategy from a technical perspective, and initiated a major focus on HCI as a solution for the edge, a new separate management plane, and an expanded agenda to support containers as well as VMs.

Simplifying IT

2015-2016: Chief Architect of Emerging Technology,CTO OfficeTechnical lead for NetApp's Advanced Technology Group, a team of about 60 engineers, mostly PhD level, spread across four sites in the US and India. Aligned research agenda with product group sponsors to maximize product impact from ATG.Fostered innovation and incubation projects for possible new product development.Lead VP Chief Architect group in detailed analysis of technology and operational trends, with conclusions that drove shifts in strategic investments.2011-2015: VP, Chief Architect, Data ONTAP GroupLead architect for Data ONTAP, the storage operating system that runs NetApp's main product line, the FAS storage systems.Technical lead for a major rearchitecture of ONTAP from a monolithic storage system with pairwise HA to a scale out storage system with continuous non-disruptive operation. This strengthened FAS and ONTAP as an excellent platform for unified storage, with the ability to scale out, replace hardware, and upgrade software without disrupting workloads.2007-2011: Senior Technical Director, Data ONTAPDirected architecture efforts for Data ONTAP, including scale out, space efficient data replication, management and control plane operation, and file system and protocol handler improvements. Drove the shift of focus to the scale out architecture.2004-2007: Technical Director, Data ONTAP GXWrote all internal protocols for ONTAP GX clusters. Built automated code generation to produce working code directly from the protocol specs, and integrated those tools into the ONTAP build system, greatly improving engineering productivity. Defined milestone driven development process for ONTAP.2000-2004: Senior Engineer: ONTAP WAFL file system and RAIDInvented RAID-DP, NetApp's RAID6, and implemented the high performing execution kernel (in SSE2 assembler) achieving single core operation at memory bandwidth. RAID-DP gave NetApp many years of competitive differentiation.

Engineer for Lotus Notes and Domino DatabaseWent to Iris Associates (Lotus subsidiary responsible for development of Lotus Notes) on special assignment from IBM Research. Worked with Iris database team to incorporate DB2 database technologies into Notes and Domino, including write-ahead logging, greatly improving transaction throughput and overall durability and consistency. Wrote and deployed a unified buffer manager to consolidate several different buffer managers into a single subsystem, supporting a number of clients with disparate demands.

Research on parallel file systems, and parallel computing.Lead architect, designer and implementer of Vesta Parallel File System

Research in Silicon Compilation for Digital Signal Processors. VLSI CAD.Co-creator of the Digit-Serial Silicon Compiler, for high performance digital signal processing chips. This silicon compiler would take a high level language description (similar to C, but with explicit timing controls to describe DSP functions such as filters and transforms) and produce complete integrated circuits designs and layouts. The compiled chips were competitive with custom designs due to the sophisticated digit serial architecture, which achieves full utilization of all hardware elements. We later applied this technique to systolic arrays, to take advantage of the loop delays to reduce the hardware cost at the same performance level.