Dan Blanchard,

Paul Poppleton, Senior Staff Engineer with Qualcomm

Paul has working with virtual infrastructure since Qualcomm began adopting the technology six years ago. He has in-depth experience with the deployment, operation and management of some 4,000 virtual servers and related systems, storage and I/O hardware.

Jay Corn, Senior Manager, Accenture.

Jay is the North American lead for Accenture’s Infrastructure Automation initiatives as well as the global co-lead for Accenture’s Utility Computing and Virtualization practices. Jay’s background includes both infrastructure consulting as well as application development/deployment. Jay has extensive experience with program delivery for Fortune 100 clients across data center provisioning and rationalization, server/storage consolidation, system integration, and custom application development.

MODERATOR: Johanna Ambrosio, Technologies Editor, Computerworld
Johanna Ambrosio is a senior editor at Computerworld who manages the Technologies channel on Computerworld.com. Johanna's an award-winning journalist who has been covering the technology industry for over 20 years. Mainframes and system software were also the core of Johanna's beat as a reporter in the early 1990s, when she experienced one of the highlights of her career: interviewing the legendary Thomas J. Watson, Jr., the former IBM chairman.

Arun Taneja, Founder & Consulting Analyst
Arun Taneja is the Founder, President and Consulting Analyst of the Taneja Group, an analyst and consulting group focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies. From late 2000 to early 2003 he was a Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group, an analyst group focused on storage technologies. He has 25 years experience in the industry specifically in the areas of Servers, Operating systems, File Systems, Storage Area Networks, Network Attached Storage, FC, iSCSI and InfiniBand, Clustering and Storage Management Software (backup/restore, replication, snapshot, SRM, virtualization, etc.).

Arun has held various executive level positions in marketing and engineering with companies like Sun Microsystems, IBM, Data General, Vixel and Andataco. He specializes in identifying technologies that have disruptive market potential and assisting companies with market positioning and strategy. He works with a number of VC's in assessing technologies (FC, iSCSI, InfiniBand and others) and companies. He speaks often at trade shows, customer and industry events and writes on technology trends and implications for IT in the mid to large enterprises. He is frequently quoted in the press as an industry expert in storage networking. Arun holds a Bachelor’s in Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India and an MSEE and MBA from the University of New Hampshire.

Dave Bartoletti, Senior Analyst & Consultant
Dave has developed, delivered, and marketed emerging technologies for over 20 years at several high-profile infrastructure software and solutions companies. He was at the forefront of the virtualization, messaging middleware, web/SOA application, and data center automation technology waves as both vendor and consumer. Dave advises clients on server virtualization strategies and the automation of highly virtualized environments, and has deep knowledge of the unique requirements of the global financial services industry. He helps our clients bring emerging technologies to market through clear product messaging and positioning, focused industry launches, and effective solution differentiation and segmentation. Dave joined Taneja Group from Enigmatec, a leading virtualization automation vendor, where he was Vice President of Marketing. Earlier in his career, Dave held senior positions at TIBCO Software, Fidelity Investments, Capco, and IBM. He holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University and an MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jeff Byrne, Senior Analyst & Consultant
Jeff brings to Taneja Group more than 20 years of marketing and operational experience at a variety of infrastructure software, systems and semiconductor companies. He focuses on server and desktop virtualization, and also covers the intersection of these technologies with various types of storage, including Fiber Channel and iSCSI based SANs. Jeff advises clients on issues ranging from product and competitive positioning to messaging and go-to-market initiatives, and helps companies to work through challenging product and technology transitions. Prior to joining Taneja Group, Jeff spent five years as Vice President of Marketing and later Vice President of Corporate Strategy at VMware, a leading provider of virtual infrastructure software acquired by EMC in 2004. Earlier in his career, Jeff held senior management positions at DG Systems, Dataquest, MIPS, and HP. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Math and Computational Sciences from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard.

Eric Lundquist
Eric Lundquist is the Content Director, New Media Products at Computerworld. A well-respected industry veteran, Lundquist comes to IDG from Ziff Davis where he was editor-in-chief of eWeek for over a decade and most recently served as editor-at-large for CIO Insight. Lundquist has appeared regularly as a technology commentator on CNN and CBS Marketwatch and has won numerous journalism awards including Neal Awards, Computer Press Association awards and New England Press Association awards.

In this new role, Lundquist will work with IDG media teams to create new focused content sites that deliver information about specific, timely business technology topics and ideas. Lundquist will contribute his own personal commentary and analysis to these initiatives. These sites will benefit the IT community by aggregating need-to-know news, information, and analysis around the most pertinent business technology issues of the day.

While at Ziff Davis Enterprise, he served as the Editor-in-Chief/ Editorial Director of eWeek (named PC Week, prior to 2000) which included print, online, international, product testing and conference editorial strategic direction. He wrote the Upfront print column, blog and video report on eweek.com. He is a frequent speaker at industry events which in 2008 included numerous international and U.S. appearances. Lundquist came to technology reporting after working as a daily newspaper reporter in Massachusetts and stringer for United Press International. Lundquist has appeared regularly as a technology commentator on CNN and CBS Marketwatch. He has won numerous journalism awards including Neal Awards, Computer Press Association awards and New England Press Association awards. He was named to the Marketing Computers “Most Influential Journalist” list.

Jack Wilson

Enterprise Architect – Assistant Vice President
Amerisure Mutual Insurance Company

Mr. Wilson has been in the IT industry for 30 years and has owned his own consulting firm as well as a being a principal at Ernest & Young. His experience has included a number of companies and has spanned the insurance, finance, transportation, software and health industries in the United States and Europe. The depth of his experience includes system development, database administration and for the last decade architectural strategy, design and implementation.

Mr. Wilson started with Amerisure Insurance in 2004 as their first Enterprise Architect and has acted as a change agent in that organization to bring about a significant transformation, moving the company forward with a comprehensive virtualization strategy. The early and tangible success of these efforts have created a momentum for driving this strategy broader and deeper across the organization.   

Johanna Ambrosio,  Technologies Editor, Computerworld
Johanna Ambrosio is a senior editor at Computerworld who manages the Technologies channel on Computerworld.com. Johanna's an award-winning journalist who has been covering the technology industry for over 20 years. Mainframes and system software were also the core of Johanna's beat as a reporter in the early 1990s, when she experienced one of the highlights of her career: interviewing the legendary Thomas J. Watson, Jr., the former IBM chairman.

Eric Lundquist- Moderator
Eric Lundquist is the Content Director, New Media Products at Computerworld. A well-respected industry veteran, Lundquist comes to IDG from Ziff Davis where he was editor-in-chief of eWeek for over a decade and most recently served as editor-at-large for CIO Insight. Lundquist has appeared regularly as a technology commentator on CNN and CBS Marketwatch and has won numerous journalism awards including Neal Awards, Computer Press Association awards and New England Press Association awards.

In this new role, Lundquist will work with IDG media teams to create new focused content sites that deliver information about specific, timely business technology topics and ideas. Lundquist will contribute his own personal commentary and analysis to these initiatives. These sites will benefit the IT community by aggregating need-to-know news, information, and analysis around the most pertinent business technology issues of the day.

While at Ziff Davis Enterprise, he served as the Editor-in-Chief/ Editorial Director of eWeek (named PC Week, prior to 2000) which included print, online, international, product testing and conference editorial strategic direction. He wrote the Upfront print column, blog and video report on eweek.com. He is a frequent speaker at industry events which in 2008 included numerous international and U.S. appearances. Lundquist came to technology reporting after working as a daily newspaper reporter in Massachusetts and stringer for United Press International. Lundquist has appeared regularly as a technology commentator on CNN and CBS Marketwatch. He has won numerous journalism awards including Neal Awards, Computer Press Association awards and New England Press Association awards. He was named to the Marketing Computers “Most Influential Journalist” list.

Kevin R. Baradet,Chief Technology Officer, S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University
Kevin Baradet is the Chief Technology Officer for the S. C. Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. For more than 20 years he has been involved in the research, application and support of technology in various industries including manufacturing, consulting, software development and higher education.

His current job responsibilities include: technology strategy, budget planning, IT policy development, infrastructure security and technology management. Current projects include policy development in the areas of Communications Infrastructure Disaster Recovery, IT security, Business Continuity and General IT policy.Kevin serves on a number of technology industry advisory boards that include hardware and software vendors and IT publications.

His presentations include seminars on wireless networking and Bluetooth technologies for Worldwide Business Research, Inc. and research reports for venture capitalists. Kevin has also been a panelist and product award judge at COMDEX, CeBIT USA, Mobile Enterprise Mobilizer Awards and the eWEEK Excellence Awards.Kevin holds a B.S. from Cornell University and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional.

Christopher M. Carter-President & CEO, CCI
Christopher Carter founded CCI in 2002 and as the President and CEO, has since facilitated the firm’s growth as an SAP premier partner and is our CEO&CTO. He leads the growth of his firm with the powerful combination of over 10 years of experience in the SAP ecosystem and his strong entrepreneurial spirit for IT and business.

Chris has spent the last three years working on SAP in Virtual environments by testing and offering true data returns from there in-house testing data center while being on the forefront of the SAP virtualization movement for SAP clients success.

In 2000 Carter was appointed to the American SAP Users Group (ASUG) National Education and Content Committee, on which he served for two years. He is currently sitting member of the Board for The Village of Hales Corners, WI and serves as a member of the Cities Planning Commission. He served on the Board of Directors of eInnovate, a national IT think tank for IT professionals. He is also a member of The Business Roundtable and the CEO Roundtable for MMAC in Milwaukee, WI.

Tom Henderson, Managing Director & Principal Researcher, ExtremeLabs, Inc.
Tom Henderson is managing director and principal researcher for ExtremeLabs, Inc., of Indianapolis. Tom is a member of the NetworkWorld Global Test Alliance and the author of numerous books and hundreds of tests in enterprise computing qualitative and performance characteristics.

Michael Skaff, CIO, San Francisco Symphony
With over 15 years of experience that ranges from the data center to the Board room, Michael has built a solid reputation as a visionary leader and an expert in identifying and delivering business-driven technology solutions. He has demonstrated success in developing and managing high-performance teams in strategy, operations, IT and consulting across a broad array of industries and environments.   By bringing together the best people and the best technology to fit each unique opportunity, he has established a track record of delivering successful strategic investments that drive quantifiable business value.  Michael is currently the CIO of the San Francisco Symphony, and a regular speaker, advisor and judge at major technology industry events.

Mike Poor is a founder and Senior Security Analyst with Intelguardians. Mike conducts forensic analysis, penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, security audits and architecture reviews. His primary job focus however is in intrusion detection, response, and mitigation. Mike is an author and editor of the international best seller “Snort 2.1” book from Syngress, and is a Handler for the Internet Storm Center. Mike teaches Intrusion Detection for the SANS Institute and has supported Intrusion Detection and Incident Response teams for the military, and has worked for Sourcefire as a research engineer, and for the SANS Institute leading their Intrusion Analysis Team.

Gene Kim is the CTO and founder of Tripwire, Inc. In 1992, he co-authored Tripwire while at Purdue University with Dr. Gene Spafford. In 2004, he wrote the Visible Ops Handbook and co-founded the IT Process Institute, dedicated to research, benchmarking and developing prescriptive guidance for IT operations and security management and auditors. In 2003, was named by InfoWorld as one of the “Four Up and Coming CTOs to Watch" and in 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to their “40 Innovative IT People Under The Age Of 40” list.

Nathan Coutinho
Nathan Coutinho is a Solutions Manager for CDW, focused on virtualization. He has more than 10 years of experience in IT, covering various roles in management, technical sales and consulting.  His current responsibilities include evaluating and educating clients on the trends and directions in the server, client and storage virtualization spaces.

Ron Bonig, Retired VP & CIO at George Washington University
Ron Bonig is the Retired Vice President and Chief Information Officer for The George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., where he managed the IT infrastructure including data and voice services for 25,000 users in over 120 buildings on three major campuses and two data centers. Bonig's 35 years of IT experience include directorships with Systems & Computer Technology Corporation, the Social Security Administration, and municipal government.  He holds a B.S. degree from Frostburg State University, a M.S.A. from The George Washington University, and a master's-level certificate from the University of Washington. .

Scot Finnie is Editor in Chief of Computerworld. Finnie is an award-winning journalist who has nearly 25 years experience as a magazine and online editor and writer covering computers and IT.

Stephen Vilke – Chief Technology Officer, Desktop at a Distance, LLC (DaaD)
Stephen is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Desktop at a Distance (DaaD), and oversees the strategic platform and implementation efforts for the globally centralized desktop solution. Stephen left the Barclays Global Investors (BGI) senior management team in 2008 where he led the IT technology strategy and architecture disciplines.  Previous to BGI, Stephen was the VP of Technology Architecture and Strategy for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), the CIO of Alteon WebSystems and held various senior management strategy and operations positions for Nortel Networks and Clarify, Inc.  Stephen spent his early career at NASA, where he participated in the identification of the Hyakutake comet tail and worked with the European and Russian Space Agencies on several spacecraft and satellites. He holds a degree in Physics from U.C. Berkeley.

Tony Antinori, VP of Technology & Operations, St. Vincent Catholic Medical Center of New York City
Tony Antinori is the VP of Technology & Operations with St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers. In this role, Tony looks after leading a team providing all aspects of technology strategy, including day to day operations, applications and vision. A big believer in future technology, Tony supports the advancement of virtualization. Tony is a qualified IT VP and holds a bachelors degree from Nyack College, NY.

Tony is no stranger to IT, having spent 5 years in different various engineer roles and an additional 5 in IT management, which taught him the importance of aligning strategic technology to meet business needs as well as goals. Before joining Saint Vincent’s in 2007, Tony worked for Bayonne Medical Center, NJ & Richmond University Medical Center, NY.

To contact Tony Antinori please email Tantinori@svcmcny.org or go to www.svcmc.org.

Kane Edupuganti, Director of IT Operations & Communications, St. Vincent Catholic Medical Center of New York City
Kane Edupuganti is the Director of IT Operations and Communications at Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers based out of New York City. Kane is a new comer to the IT industry, only been in the industry for 10 years but thru his passion, dedication and work ethic has achieved a successful career in Information Technology. He started his IT career at Bear Stearns in 1998 as a desktop rollout consultant and worked his way up to being “Director – IT Operations and Communications” at Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers. With exposure to multiple industries like legal, pharmaceuticals, Financial and healthcare he brings an air of expertise not just from a technical perspective but also from a business process perspective. He has 10 years experience in the industry specifically in the areas of Routing, Switching, Security, Wan Acceleration, Servers, Operating systems, Hardware, File Systems, Virtualization (Both Server Virtualization and VDI), Storage Area Networks, Network Attached Storage, Fabrics, Backup Strategies, DR strategies, Web development, Clustering, Active Directory, Exchange, Citrix, NetScalers, Fat Pipe, Juniper, Check Point, Cisco, Riverbed and Akamai solutions.

Doug Dineley, Executive Editor, Test Center-Moderator
Doug is responsible for InfoWorld's product reviews and testing projects. In addition to overseeing Test Center coverage, Doug contributes to all manner of InfoWorld editorial initiatives and serves as content chair of Virtualization Executive Forum. He's been with InfoWorld since 1999, and head of the Test Center since 2003. He holds a bachelor of science degree in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley.

Wesley Baker, VMware Systems Architect, Jewelry Television
Wesley Baker is a virtualization systems architect in the IT infrastructure group at Jewelry Television, one of the U.S.’s fastest-growing home shopping networks with a companion web store. Based in Knoxville, TN, the live, 24/7 programming is completely unscripted with knowledgeable hosts presenting product information on a wide array of jewelry, loose gemstones, castings, and jewelry-making tools. Customer calls are supported by a 240+ seat state-of-the-art call center and award-winning shipping department.

During his 3 years at Jewelry Television, Wesley has implemented VMware View (formerly VDI) to manage virtual desktops from the central service desk, eliminating the need to deploy technicians for troubleshooting.

Prior to Jewelry Television, Wesley was a professional services consultant with Intellithought, where he specialized in architecting, implementing and managing Windows-based environments. His clients ranged from SMBs just getting started in virtualized environments to large enterprise chemical and energy companies with more significant virtualization implementations.
Wesley is a VMware Certified Professional and a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

Michael Love, Assistant Director of Information Technology, Borland-Groover Clinic
Michael has worked in the information technology field for ten years. His career initiated with desktop support before moving on to server and network responsibilities. His first foray in to virtualization was Citrix Metaframe 1.8 with the PGA Tour.

Michael has been with the Borland-Groover Clinic for five years. His virtual technical responsibilities include Citrix XenServer, XenApp and XenDesktop. Other responsibilities include day-to-day management of the service desk, network infrastructure, backups, telephony and coordinating technology with the needs of the business.

Derek Niedermayer- Network Support Supervisor/IT, McHenry Savings Bank
Derek Niedermayer is the Network Support Supervisor at McHenry Savings Bank, a $280 million full-service bank, which has five locations in McHenry County, northwest of Chicago, Ill. For the last five years, he has spearheaded the implementation of server virtualization for McHenry Savings Bank. Derek's expertise lies in enterprise computing, especially high-availability and secure banking transactional systems. Derek's undergraduate work was completed at Western Michigan University’s Haworth College of Business with a B.B.A. in Computer Information Systems. He currently resides in Illinois.

Good day blogosphere.  This is my first-ever post!  I plan to be a regular contributor and will focus on topics related to technology in general.  Initially, I would like to discuss the technologies related to the storage industry, specifically virtualization. 

File virtualization is about adding a level of freedom to the networked file system space that has so far not been there.  This is a functionality that you absolutely need.  It is absolutely complementary to your other virtualization technologies, for pretty much the same reasons – saving money, and freedom of device use versus logical use.  

Virtualization is a relatively new word for what in the industry is essentially an ancient concept.  File systems are nothing but a virtualization of disk drives.  This technology has been around since the 1940s.  We have been virtualizing all kinds of things ever since, without ever using that word.  Today, people talk a lot about virtualization, and justifiably so – it is a great concept to describe a very important aspect of computing.  There are different flavors of virtualization that are important today.  Most people, when they use the word virtualization, are thinking about server virtualization or application virtualization – which means running multiple applications on a single piece of hardware, typically in the Windows environment (something that has been happening with UNIX for a long time).  That is the most common meaning of the word today.

Block virtualization is also a very important concept in the storage space.  It’s been talked about and well implemented for about 15 years.  When the storage experts talk about RAID groups, LUNs, LUN carving, or LUN allocation, they’re really talking about virtualizing a bunch of disk drives through a networking scheme that are used to create redundancy, resilience, and flexibility in allocation (like a SAN).  Virtualization is typically used in the context of databases, online transaction processing, 24x7 protection, migration from one set of resources to another, and upgrading from older disk drives with lower capacity to newer disk drives with more capacity in the same storage enclosure. 

There are other kinds of virtualization, of course.  Some people may remember navigational databases.  Essentially, before 1980, all applications that dealt with databases had navigational logic in them that prevented the system administrator or database administrator from reallocating data freely on disk drives, if you did so, you would have to rewrite the applications that did the access.  Relational databases were then introduced, and they virtualized the relationship between the logical data presentation used in the application and the physical data layout as it was present on disks.  This gave the database administrator complete freedom in putting the data where it needed to be, in whatever combinations were needed, without requiring changes to the applications themselves.  Application writers could think about business logic, database administrators could think about disk utilization, and the two of them would get along through the virtualization of a relational database.