The Nomination Period for the 2021-2023 Incubation Committee (IC) has ended. Below are the nominees, listed by Project. If only one candidate is listed, that candidate will run unopposed.
Reminder: only Silver, Gold & Platinum members are allowed to vote in Incubation Committee elections. The listed point of contact for each member organization will receive their unique voting key after July 4th and will have until July 12th, 2021 to cast their votes.
For more information on the election process, click here
| Candidate | Bio |
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Data Center Facility Project |
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Justin Steadman Rackspace |
Justin has over 20 years’ experience in mission critical infrastructure operations. He is the Senior Engineer within the Global Data Center Infrastructure department at Rackspace Technology, and has been with the company for 13 years. He holds a B.S.E.E. from the University of Texas – Dallas, a Master Electrician’s License from the Texas Department of Licensing & Regulation and is currently in pursuit of his Master of Science in Datacenter Systems Engineering at Southern Methodist University. Justin supports Rackspace Technology’s Global Data Center Infrastructure department through design, build, operation, and maintenance standards including Change Management support for Data Center Engineering and Operations teams globally. He is a strong supporter of the Open Compute Project as well as the OpenStack platform. |
Hardware Management Project |
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John Leung Intel |
John has over 35 years in the computer industry: architecting, designing and coding. Currently, John is a Principal Engineer and a system manageability architect in Intel's datacenter platform group. John has been a member of the DMTF (dmtf.org) standards body since 2004 and has authored numerous specifications. As a member DMTF Board, John also holds the office of VP of Alliances. An original member of the Redfish Forum, John chairs work groups modeling firmware update and composability. While John has been OCP's IC Rep to the HW Management Project, subprojects for rack management, management modules and hardware fault management have been established. John help create OCP profiles for common OCP platform manageability and rack management. |
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Geoffrey Cottrell Sims Lifecycle Services |
Geoff Cottrell developed and managed large-scale programs and supplier relationships at Microsoft for over 18 years. He developed Microsoft’s Corporate ITAD program in 2006, and later spun-off part of that program to manage Asset Disposition and Supply Chain Sustainability for Microsoft’s Global Data Centers. Focus areas included; Data Security, Program Optimization, Supplier Relationship Management, and ITAD Operations & Governance. Geoff also managed and enhanced Microsoft’s Corporate Public Print program, Digital Campus. He met his objective of reducing print output by replacing printers with multifunction devices in strategic locations, and encouraging digital workflow in place of printing. Prior to Microsoft, Geoff worked 17 years in Commercial Printing, developing and managing departments, such as; Shipping & Receiving, Inventory, Estimating, Customer Service, Procurement, Facilities, Production, and IT Systems & Administration. Presently, Geoff has taken on a new role at Sims Lifecycle Services, working internally and externally on innovation initiatives around; Process Optimization, Circular Economy, Recyclability of Materials, and Value Recovery. |
Open System Firmware Project |
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Dong Wei ARM |
Dong Wei is a Standards Architect and Fellow at Arm. He leads the Arm SystemReady Program. He has significant experience in leading the industry in innovations and standardizations and is a staunch supporter for open source development in Tianocore EDK2, UBoot, LinuxBoot, OpenBMC and Trusted Firmware. He is the Vice President (Chief Executive) of the UEFI Forum and co-chairs its ACPI Working Group. He is a Board member of the PCI SIG and co-chairs its Firmware/Software Working Group. He is a Board member and the Secretary of the CXL Consortium. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. |
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Jean-Marie Verdun HPE |
I am thrilled by computers. I spent a lot of time designing them at architectural and hardware level, and participated to crazy projects, including building up the biggest european super computer in the late 90's. I love to share my knowledge and enable people to design better computers. I am particularly focused on open technologies currently, which includes design tools like FreeCAD, KiCAD, and open source firmware projects like linuxboot and OpenBMC. I used to work for big companies, created a french based startup that I successfully sold to an american company in 2018. I am now part of HPE mainly focused on open platforms. |
Networking Project |
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Narayanan Suryanarayanan Arista |
Narayanan has over 14 years’ experience in Data Center Networking. He has worked in various roles across Pre-Sales, Software Engineering & Customer Support. He has strong leadership experience in Technical Sales and Strategic Customer Focus. Narayanan joined Arista Networks in 2012 and is a Systems Engineering Manager working closely with Hyper-Scalers to deploy and operate Arista’s products at scale. Narayanan also drives Arista’s co-development efforts with Cloud Customers to build innovative and efficient products for next generation Data Centers. Narayanan is also responsible for Arista’s SONiC strategy and driving SONiC adoption across large enterprises. Prior to Arista, Narayanan has worked at Juniper & Cisco in customer facing and engineering roles. Narayanan holds a MS in Telecommunications from the University of Colorado - Boulder and BS in Electronics from University of Mumbai. |
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Jason Forrester
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Jason Forrester brings 20+ years of experience leading and executing complex networking projects at start-ups and market leading public companies, including Target, Amazon and Apple. Jason’s work in the networking industry has led to some of the world’s largest production datacenter networks. Jason holds multiple patents in the areas of networking. The patents focus on routing, load balancing and security. He is very active in the open source community and lead efforts behind Dent and most recently enterprise enhancements to sonic. Jason’s current focus is to take many of the open source network operating systems and bring them to the enterprise |
Rack & Power Project |
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Steve Mills |
Steve Mills is a Mechanical Engineer who has dedicated over 25 years to the development of IT hardware in the enterprise and hyperscale space. He joined Facebook in 2012 and is currently a Technical Lead for Open Rack. Prior to Facebook, he worked for at Storspeed and DELL Technologies. While at Dell, developing custom solutions for large clients, he was first introduced to Open Compute in 2011. Since then, he has been a champion of OCP as a Lead in Open Compute’s Rack and Power Project for 5 years before moving to the Incubation Committee. He has 47 patents and is an author of 7 contributions to OCP. |
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Peter Panfil Vertiv |
Peter Panfil is the Vice President of Global Power at Vertiv. He leads strategic customer development for the power business and works to apply the latest power and control technology to proven and emerging topologies to provide the availability, scalability and efficiency levels customers demand. A thirty year critical space veteran, he has held executive positions including VP Engineering and VP/GM AC Power prior to his current responsibilities. He is a frequent presenter and spokesperson for industry trade shows, conferences and media outlets serving the IT, facilities and engineering industry. Peter wants to make sure all involved know that by electing him to the OCP Incubation Committee you will be getting a team of more than a dozen critical space domain experts in critical power infrastructure, critical thermal infrastructure, liquid cooling, integrated modular solutions, DC power, racks and energy storage that are all part of the Vertiv OCP Pursuit Team. These domain experts represent over 3 centuries of critical space experience. |
Security Project |
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Elaine Palmer IBM |
Elaine Palmer is a Senior Technical Staff Member at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Her research interests are in operating system and firmware security, and security evaluations of hardware and software. She holds multiple patents in security technologies. Ms. Palmer is currently the Security Representative to the Open Compute Project's Incubation Committee. As an active participant in OCP’s security project, she is the editor of “Attestation of System Components” and contributor to the “Common Security Threats” documents. As a contributor to the OCP “2021 Supplier Requirements Checklist,” she recognizes that suppliers want to do the right thing, but may need help prioritizing their efforts. Security is an exercise in risk management, and suppliers must take many factors into consideration, not the least of which are cost, ease of use, and value of the assets to be protected. As a project leader in IBM’s Security Research department, Ms. Palmer has worked on design and implementation of security in a gamut of platforms, including systems-on-a-chip, hardware security modules, telco systems, cloud infrastructure, and large servers. Ms. Palmer is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and the IEEE, and a Distinguished Engineer in the ACM. She has a BS in computer science from Louisiana State University and an MS in computer science from Pace University. |
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Andres Lagar-Cavilla
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I build and research computer systems. I am the Horizontal Lead for platform Security and the Tech Lead for system software at Google's Technical Infrastructure group. I have led memory management, kernel release, and production mitigation of black swans, including Meltdown and Spectre. I co-founded GridCentric, a virtualization startup, acquired in 2014. From January 2010 to October 2011 I worked in AT&T Labs Research, publishing a number of first-tier academic papers. I got my PhD and MSc from University of Toronto. I got the NSERC Doctoral Prize for 2010, the Eurosys best paper award for 2009, and an NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship. I got my undergrad in Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahia Blanca, Argentina |
Server Project |
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Siamak Tavallaei |
Siamak Tavallaei is currently the Chief Systems Architect at Google Systems Infrastructure and co-chair of CXL Board of Director’s Technical Task Force. At OCP, Siamak served as co-chair of Server Project from June 2016 to Jan 2021 where he introduced the Modular Building Block Architecture (MBA) concept, co-authored several specifications for open-source solutions such as HGX-1, OAM, and Project Olympus. He also initiated a collaborative effort on open accelerator infrastructure (OAI) and datacenter-ready secure control module (DC-SCM). His plans are to encourage industry-wide participation and continue driving open-source contributions toward a modular hardware system (DC-MHS) and an integrated HW/SW system ready for hyperscale, enterprise, and edge datacenters (DC-Stack). At Google, he drives system architecture and productization of solutions around CXL-enabled opportunities. His current focus is the optimization of large-scale, mega-datacenters for general-purpose computing and accelerated, tightly-connected, problem-solving machines built on co-designed hardware, software, security, and management. As a Principal Architect at Microsoft, he was part of Azure’s Next Cloud System Architecture team collaborating with industry partners to drive a number of initiatives in research, design, and deployment of hardware for cloud-scale services such as Azure, AI, Bing, Office 365, Exchange, and SQL across a global datacenter footprint. Siamak holds over 40 patents in computer server architecture, design, and fault management; he has led and served on industry-wide initiatives; and he often shares his learning through published papers and presentations at industry conferences. His leadership drove large projects and facilitated communication, collaboration, and contributions of diverse talents for industry-wide initiatives such as InfiniBand and CXL specifications; while, his expertise in memory and storage hierarchy enabled improved performance, reliability, availability and serviceability of servers and solutions. As we collectively reinvigorate the server industry and streamline efficient, flexible, and scalable hardware and software through Open Compute Project, we enable developers to focus their brain power and efforts on solving higher ordered problems. With his seasoned leadership, Siamak has been actively participating in CXL consortium and OCP activities fostering the philosophy and the direction of the OCP Foundation by effectively communicating the core OCP tenets and encouraging the community to participate in transparent, worldwide collaboration. Such inclusive participation of diverse contributions and meaningful feedback will drive technical excellence and a healthy OCP ecosystem. |
Storage Project |
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Michael Allison Samsung |
Over the last 7 years, I have devoted myself to the storage industry covering SATA, SCSI, Management, TCG, NVMe-oF, OCP – Storage for SSDs and becoming an expert of NVMe and NVMe-MI. I’m now broadening my knowledge and support in OCP for Samsung. In addition to standards I was a Firmware Architect/Firmware Technical Lead defining system interactions between hardware and firmware on SSDs, High-end servers, graphics cards, various component of fighter aircraft, and laser beam recorders. What I bring to the table is attention to detail, correlating interactions between specifications/new developments, thorough reviews, and viewpoints from the platform to the peripherals. I have a BS in EE/CS from the University of Colorado, Boulder, 1985; plus 31 patents. |
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Matt Shumway Seagate |
Twenty-two years in the data storage industry with Seagate focused on HDD product development and driving storage hardware and software ecosystem development Career. Twelve years in mechanical design for HDD, ranging from advanced motor technology development, HDD design and leading mechanical design teams for mission critical products. Developed three mission critical HDD products over seven years as a product core team design lead, successfully leading cross functional design teams to provide the highest performance and highest reliability products in the storage industry. Development of these products required an understanding of all facets of storage device level subsystems and mandated interactions with customers to understand their system requirements. Led an effort to define the system level operating vibration ecosystem to optimize the environment to enable delivery of the lowest $/TB storage solution. Required coordinating HDD device development and CSB system developers to provide a sustainable ecosystem allowing HDD storage devices to grow capacity at sufficient rates to maintain the data industries long term growth goals while maintaining performance standards. Understanding the industries long term strategies around cooling of compute plus storage, the higher level architecture that optimizes for power consumption and $/TB costs required for a healthy and competitive industry. Developed the technical strategies to deliver device level firmware features that support the industry requirements through T13 and T10 standards and supporting feature arriving from industry organizations such as OCP. Increasingly device requirements must adapt to support the requirements of the larger storage architecture to support multiple ecosystems defined cloud and edge. Leading an effort to deliver open source tools and methods to manage installed storage both in the cloud and at the edge, creating options that enable delivery of low cost, highly available and secure storage to the industry. Tools that facilitate device health management and power optimization provide the operators the capability to minimize opex and industry implementation of these tools allows device makers to deliver the lowest $/TB to minimize capex. Working with industry organizations such as ASHRAE and Open 19, pushing industry standards for environments and hardware architectures to optimize cooling and maintain environments promoting device reliability and capacity by minimizing vibration, reducing power consumption. Standardizing on hardware architecture and environmental conditions facilitates device and system developers lowers the both the capex and opex costs of deployed storage for the industry. |
Time Appliances Project (TAP) |
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Elad Wind NVIDIA |
Business development and growth - driving IP, semiconductor, hardware, software system and turn-key solutions with Tier-1 Cloud Service Providers. |
Telco Project |
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Craig White Nokia |
Professionally, I support the adoption of OCP specifications into the Telco environment. I have worked with the Nokia team to make several Telco/NEBS enhancements to OpenRack including -48V and HVDC inputs into the power shelves, EMI shielding options, and Zone 4 Earthquake certification. Most recently completing work on a Skylake motherboard with support for high packet throughput VNF’s, and also having hot swappable high-speed storage options. I also assist several software teams to validate and develop enhancements to telco related open software stacks on integrated OCP hardware cabinets many based on Openstack and also the VNF’s that run on these stacks. I also have several patents related to core backbone networking. OCP Community based, I have been involved in the OCP Telco Project since the formation meetings of the group. I was privileged to serve as a founding co-lead of the project and established many of the administrative aspects of the project. It is my belief that open communities are fundamental building blocks towards the future of technology. I have contributed to many IETF RFCs and co-authored several addressing software disaggregation of network link technologies. |
Target
