Advisory Board

Geoff Barrall

Geoff Barrall is CTO and VP of Engineering for Overland Storage. Prior to joining Overland Storage, Dr. Barrall served as CEO of Data Robotics, a company he founded in 2005. With more than a dozen storage-related patents to his credit, he has founded five companies, including BlueArc Corporation and several IT and consulting services firms. Dr. Barrall earned his PhD in Cybernetics from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

Daniel Beveridge

Daniel Beveridge is a Senior Technology Strategist with broad experience in networking, systems and virtualization technologies. Mr. Beveridge has direct experience implementing and designing advanced Information Technology architectures at leading virtualization consulting firms. Mr. Beveridge helped write the play book for Virtual Desktop Technology via published whitepapers, speaking engagements and extensive industry interactions. Technology futurist and design visionary, Mr. Beverage earned a B.A in Religion from Reed College and M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Hector Garcia-Molina

Hector Garcia-Molina is a Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Previously, Dr. Garcia-Molina was on the faculty at Princeton University. In addition to his numerous duties at Stanford, he was a member the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee for four years. Dr. Garcia-Molina is a Fellow of the ACM and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is also a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle. Dr. Garcia-Molina received a BS in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, and earned an MS and PhD from Stanford University. He holds an honorary PhD from ETH Zurich.

Matt Jacobs

Matt Jacobs is the Sales Director at Nimble Storage. Prior to Nimble, Mr. Jacobs was the launch sales person at Data Domain. Mr. Jacobs has extensive experience in both end-user and channel lead sales and over twenty years of global sales experience. Previously Mr. Jacobs has worked at BlueArc and Meridian Data (now a part of Overland Storage). Mr. Jacobs received his B.A. in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kai Li

Kai Li co-founded Data Domain in October 2001. Dr. Li has been consulting as Chief Scientist since 2002. Since 1995, Dr. Li has been a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He was elected as ACM Fellow in 1998. Dr. Li holds a B.S. in computer science from Jilin University, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University.

Robert Lyon

Robert Lyon co-founded Legato Systems in 1988 with three co-workers from Sun Microsystems. Legato grew rapidly, went public, and achieved a $4 billon market capitalization. Prior to founding Legato, Mr. Lyon worked at Sun Microsystems, Xerox and AT&T Bell Labs. Mr. Lyon is now retired while actively helping fellow entrepreneurs. Mr. Lyon received his Bachelor of Science from Cornell University followed by a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Ethan L. Miller

Dr. Ethan L. Miller is a Professor of Computer Science in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, and is the UCSC Director of the NSF-funded Center for Research in Intelligent Storage and Associate Director of the Storage Systems Research Center. He was a member of the RAID project at UC Berkeley, where he did his PhD on a decentralized parallel file system for high-end scientific computing. His current research interests include archival storage systems, scalable metadata management, file systems for next-generation memory technologies, and petabyte-scale file systems. He is particularly interested in issues in file and storage system reliability, scalability, and security, both for “short-term” and archival storage.

Hans van Rietschote

Hans van Rietschote is the CEO and founder of Mercury Swan Consulting. Until June 2009 he was a senior director at Symantec (before that VERITAS) where for 10 years he ran the Technology Scouting Group as part of the office of the CTO. In that role he scouted out and analyzed thousands of technology companies that were at the leading edge of innovation in areas such as Storage, Security, System Management and Virtualization. Hans also identified and continues to monitor the top ten technology trends that will have a serious impact on the software industry in the next 3-5 years. Before that, he spent more than 10 years working at AT&T Bell Labs in the Netherlands. Hans has over 30 software patents filed in his name in the areas of virtualization, system and network management, and storage technologies. Hans has both an MS in mathematics and an MBA in telecommunications.