Technical Advisory Board

Jeffrey Birnbaum is focused on emerging technologies. From 1999 through 2006, he was a Managing Director, Global Head of Enterprise Computing and the Chief Technology Architect in Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Securities Division. The group included the Distributed Computing Platform (UNIX and Windows) Engineering and Operations, Database Engineering and Administration, Enterprise Systems Management and Application Infrastructure. Jeffrey was responsible for Morgan Stanley’s aggressive migration to Linux starting in 2001, a stateless computing architecture that allowed the firm to scale their computing footprint at close to zero marginal cost, and the design of an innovative network using the Quagga open source routing software. He also introduced blade servers into Morgan Stanley’s datacenter.

In his role at Morgan Stanley, Jeffrey was very focused on emerging technologies and early stage companies. His goal was to provide guidance and insight in an attempt to influence product direction that could ultimately be exploited by Morgan Stanley to enhance IT efficiency or create new business opportunities.

Prior to joining Morgan Stanley in 1991, Jeffrey worked as a systems engineer in the Aerospace Industry and the CIA. He holds a BS in Electrical Computer Engineering from the University of California Santa Barbara.

Andy Gram has over 30 years of experience in the computer industry in a variety of senior technical roles. He co-founded Nortel’s Blade Server Switch Business Unit (BSSBU) in 2002 as the Platform Architect. He collaborated with the server vendors to architect all BSSBU products developed through February 2005. He is an expert in software systems including MVS, VM and Linux, and enjoys low level software programming.

Andy is currently the Director of Applications Engineering at Ruckus Wireless, a wireless equipment supplier focused on the next generation of home networking.

Andy came to Nortel through its acquisition of Alteon Web Systems, the world’s leading provider of Web and application switches, in October 2000. As Platform Architect at Alteon, he played a key role in the development of the Alteon Switched Firewall, and consulted at Alteon in its early days to debug and bring up the AceNIC product, the first Gigabit Ethernet Network Interface Card.

Prior to joining Alteon, Andy spent 20 years in various roles at Amdahl Corporation, including Principal Systems Software Engineer. He spent most of his career in Customer Services and led the Tools Group in the development of an expert systems-based automated fault detection and notification system.

After graduating from college, Andy served as a Data Systems Officer in the U.S. Marine Corp. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Design Engineering from the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY.

Mike Kolesar is an experienced technology executive whose senior engineering management positions during his 27-year career with HP. During Mike’s five-years heading up the company’s Enterprise Storage Development Labs, he helped develop and ship HP’s first High Availability AutoRAID arrays and JBODs, and over 60 storage patents resulted from this work. Mike also led HP’s only High Availability and RAID array team, and shipped HP’s first SAN with Fibre Channel host bus adaptors and Fibre Channel Hubs, Switches, JBOD and Arrays.

In 1999, Mike served as acting Technical Director for the Storage Network Industry Association, SNIA.

From 2001 through 2005 Mike held VP of Engineering positions with LeftHand Networks, Triad Systems Engineering, and Sherwood Information Partners.

Mike is currently an independent computer storage consultant.

Michael Peterson is President of Strategic Research Corporation based in Santa Barbara California and Chief Strategy Advocate for the SNIA’s Data Management Forum.

For the past 20 years Michael has been an energetic leader, international speaker, and catalyst for the storage industry, and has published insightful books and industry reports. Michael has consulted with the entire industry in business and market development, and helped launch and guide many of the industry’s successful startups over the past 15 years.

Michael has pioneered IT research on storage and management practices, has formed innovative conferences, and developed new solutions and companies.

Michael is a co-founder of the Storage Networking Industry Association, SNIA, and was the past president from 1998 to 1999.