Rob Mills Email & Phone Number

San Jose, California, Us

Nutanix builds hybrid cloud software infrastructure, and we use our excellence in hardware/software integration to deliver our cloud infrastructure stack on a wide breadth of server vendor platforms, in addition to public cloud bare-metal environments.I lead engineering teams and initiatives dedicated to enabling next-gen datacenter hardware technologies that accelerate software-defined computing infrastructure and emerging data-centric workloads.Teams & Initiatives:♦ Technology exploration labs & projects focused on emerging technologies such as CPU accelerators, new storage and memory technologies, and datacenter offload devices.♦ New CPU enablement for the Nutanix Linux-based AHV hypervisor♦ Advanced validation technologies and analytics for expanded datacenter hardware integration ♦ Strategic engineering partnerships with hardware industry leaders♦ Contribution to company enterprise Linux strategyCurrent Focus Areas:♦ Expansion of Nutanix GenAI solutions to leverage advanced CPU instruction sets♦ Exploration of CXL memory expansion♦ CPU-assisted memory analytics featuring per-VM memory bandwidth monitoring♦ Data-plane offload for virtual networking acceleration with foundational NICs & emerging IPUs♦ Exploration of power efficient x86 processors♦ Exploration of CPU-integrated crypto & compression acceleration♦ Nutanix's Industry Advisory Board representative for UCSC's Center for Research in Systems and Storage (CRSS)♦ Leadership of multiple undergraduate student capstone projects at UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering.Previous work completed includes productization of software-based serviceability of passthrough NVMe drives, exploration of multi-vendor RDMA software architecture, research of open-source support for encrypted VMs, advanced product development for Optane persistent memory, development of engineering partnerships with leading SSD vendors, storage stack productization using SPDK, and productization of Optane storage tiering.

Scotts Valley, Ca, Us

Areias Systems is a provider of electro-mechanical engineering and assembly services. The Advisory Board reviews company strategy and operations and makes strategic recommendations to improve business outcomes.

Belmont, California, Us

Contributed leadership experience and engineering expertise that is empowering Pinnacle to accelerate the pace of its R&D and to expedite new efforts to deliver its core IP to market.Pinnacle Imaging Systems is a fast-paced startup developing breakthrough technologies in High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Leadership for a worldwide team responsible for enabling x86 server hardware technologies and developing solutions for VMware’s flagship vSphere product, including multiple levels of managers and directors.Chief Architect and Strategist for the ESXi native I/O stack transformation, delivering impressive performance gains and enabling rapid technology innovation to support key cloud growth initiatives for the company. Using a great deal of persuasion and influence, I was able to bring on board all required technology partners and to execute hire plans, and was able to convey a compelling vision of the future and help keep the multiple teams and companies motivated and focused on the goals and on the need for flawless execution during the 2 year+ project. This massive injection of new I/O technology into the product (including over 1M lines of kernel level source code) delivered major advances in performance and an architecture that will accelerate ongoing innovation of VMware's flagship virtualization platform into the future.Led vision and oversaw development for the initial releases of the Management Pack for Storage Devices (MPSD) for VMware's vRealize Operations product which provided data visualization, alerts, and root cause recommendations for private cloud infrastructure. A big success at launch, several years later the product continues to be one of the most popular vRelease management packs.Led the transformation of a specialized team into a broad R&D organization responsible for hardware technology enablement, feature development, and solution delivery across multiple domains of technical expertise, including storage, networking, server hardware, I/O devices, and management.Introduced Care Systems Analytics for the healthcare space.Ongoing strong emphasis on advanced development and innovation initiatives, resulting in new features and many dozens of patent filings, intern projects, and papers submitted to VMware's annual innovation conference.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Hired and grew a talented core R&D team from zero that took ownership for multiple focus areas and empowered managers to drive key components of a new collaborative hardware support initiative. Responsible for VMware's competitive hardware enablement strategy.From the company's first kernel-level developer's kit to device drivers, stack features and API development, the team's code ownership grew to represent over two millions lines of code in the critical core hypervisor stack. Formalized the ESX device driver architecture and pioneered the modular packaging and signing model that was adopted across the entire ESX product. Used influencing, communication, and consensus building to engage technology partner companies to begin to invest in VMware's platform product. I then built a first-rate engineering team focused on device drivers, enabling the company to be more agile in updating its I/O device support and empowering and enlisting technology partners to invest in the ESX platform. This greatly lowered engineering costs and made VMware's product more competitive. Asked to be the Project Manager for an effort to modularize the ESX core storage stack and introduce kernel level extensibility APIs in ESX 3.x for multi-pathing plug-ins. The goals were to facilitate feature development to greatly advance testability and release agility and to enable partners to deliver storage stack value-add. Demonstrated ability to ramp up quickly, leveraging my previous project management and software development experience as well as my technical strengths in related areas to help the team. Used my leadership abilities to build support and gain the cooperation of outside teams and stakeholders. The end result was a major architectural transition that delivered breakthrough kernel-level modularity and introduced a truly native kernel module extensibility for partners.

Site Director for the company's Santa Cruz engineering organization.Led multiple software engineering infrastructure teams, including product integration, system test/QA, and worldwide product documentation, and had responsibility for the company’s product security process, licensing, and localization efforts. Fully responsible for the company’s primary revenue generator, the OpenServer 5 Unix operating system. Spearheaded bold project to update the company's flagship OS product with a new Unix kernel and networking, and delivered an innovative, automatic network link failover/restart architecture for UnixWare.Led development of innovative OS container technology products, including a Linux application environment on Unix and a Windows emulation container for Unix. Led Steering Committee role in the UnitedLinux consortium and built consensus among widely diverse companies.Launched a Microsoft Exchange work-alike product for Unix and led the release multiple SCO Linux distributions and maintenance updates on aggressive timelines.Drove engineering improvements in managing to common development processes.

Us

Track record of directing large, complex operating system product release efforts on aggressive schedules. Technical oversight of a protocol stack independent source routing implementation. Visionary for IHV partnership program: Significantly lowered recurring engineering costs by designing and creating an IHV partnership model and recruiting dozens of partners. The new partner leveraging model led to advanced product capabilities and improved quality in addition to lower operational expense. Architect and champion for innovative modular network device driver model, improving performance and adding features. Directed development of the architecture for OpenServer Unix and subsequent adoption into UnixWare, resulting in more highly competitive products with declining costs. Maintained group productivity through difficult periods of layoffs and reorganizations, preventing lost revenue due to loss of staff or productivity. Primary force behind SCO's successful device driver development kits including leading edge, automated test suites. Streamlined development process by improving integration cycle process. Directed project to adapt the innovative Uniform Driver Interface, a portable device driver framework, to the company's mainline OpenServer platform. Assembled and motivated a multi-company project team to collaborate on a UDI test suite.Company’s representative on the Novell ODI Council to drive the NetWare driver architecture. Technical lead roles with TCP/NetBIOS and NetBEUI stack projects.

Ba With Honors, Computer Science, Psychology

Engineering Leadership Professional Program