Editing Governance/ProjectLeadElectionsJan2014 (section)

==== Asghar Riahi - Seagate (Un-opposed) ====
(w/Per Brasher as co-lead)

My Name is Asghar Riahi. As a Principal Cloud Architect at Seagate, I engage with Cloud Service Provider customers at the architecture, system, and device level to tackle both everyday and evolving storage challenges faced in the data center. Storage challenges that range from capacity and performance to security and reliability in all types of workloads for all types of applications.

Currently I'm the chairman of the Storage track, elected in Oct 2013. I was originally introduced to the OCP by Cole Crawford at the October 2012 OpenStack conference in San Diego, and since have been closely engaged with a variety of OCP members to fully appreciate OCP's vision and mission, and instill it in Seagate.  I have co-authored two submissions to OCP as follow:
-	Single port T-Card for storage device with Ethernet interface
-	Storage device with Ethernet interface

At the OCP Summit in Jan 2013, I presented on the topic "Lowering Data Center TCO through Storage" which illustrated how storage device-level innovations can help lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in large scale-out data centers. Currently I am the organizer of the OCP Storage meetups (http://www.meetup.com/SFBay-Open-Compute-Project-OCP-Storage/) in the San Francisco Bay Area and since March 2013, I have successfully organized five face-to-face meetings that were both well attended and received by the community. In 10 months, we have grown the OCP Storage Meetup to 193 members, and it continues to grow. The demands scale-out data centers place on the storage architectures, systems, and devices are ever-evolving.  The individuals and companies that embrace and contribute to the storage evolution will ultimately win. I plan on being one of those individuals, and driving Seagate to be one of those companies.  
I have an MS in Computer Science from University of Technology in Vienna/Austria and over 24 years of experience in the IT solutions, both in US and Europe. I'm married with two sons and live in the Bay Area.
My hobbies are Traveling, Photography and watching sports.