About me

PROFESSIONAL

I graduated from Brown University with an Sc.B. in computer science in 1987, and got an M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in computer science in 1990 and 1995, respectively. I was part of the RAID group at Berkeley, where I did my dissertation work on using randomized data placement for high-performance file systems, a project that laid some of the foundation for later work on the Ceph file system.

Academia

In 1994, I accepted my first faculty position at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where I remained until 2000. I then moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I helped found the Storage Systems Research Center in 2001. I founded the NSF Industrial University Cooperative Research Center for Research in Storage Systems in 2012, which I directed for eight years, stepping down in 2019. At UCSC, I held the Veritas (originally Symantec) Presidential Chair in Storage Systems from 2016 until my retirement in June 2023.

I retired from UC Santa Cruz in Jul;y 2023, becoming a professor emeritus. I expect to remain active in research for the foreseeable future, and will continue to work with researchers in the SSRC and elsewhere.

Industry

I have worked with Pure Storage since its founding in late 2009, helping it to grow from five employees to a multi-billion dollar flash storage company. Along the way, I worked with the engineering team to pioneer efficient and reliable flash storage systems for enterprises, helping with system design and code to ensure reliable data storage. As part of my work at Pure, I have contributed to over 130 patents.

PERSONAL

I live in Santa Cruz, California with my wife Lisa and our family. Our daughter Sabrina graduated from Tufts in 2020, and is now living in Seattle where she works for Microsoft. Zachary is at UC Santa Barbara, and Zoe is a junior in high school. Our family and two dogs, Lilah and Fozzie Bear, keep us busy.

We have a a vacation home in southern Oregon in Jackson County, where I go regularly to enjoy the quiet, and am joined by family and friends when they have time.