Editing Storage Project Special Elections (section)

== Nominees ==
 

'''Jorge Campello'''

Has spent the last 15 years in the storage industry, first with IBM, then Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and now with HGST, a Western Digital Company, where he is the Sr. Manager of Systems, Architecture & Solutions at the San Jose Research Center, of HGST.  He holds a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and his interests include, Data Center Efficiency, Power/Energy Propertionality, Distributed Computing and Storage, Security, Digital Communication, Information Theory, Open Source and Open Compute.  He is particularly interested in the Storage aspects of Open Computing and on how to design the most efficient (best TCO) Data Center Storage Solutions for varying types of SLAs.


'''Asghar Riahi'''

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. 

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.  

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 in the San Francisco Bay Area and since March 2013, I have successfully organized four face-to-face meetings that were both well attended and received by the community. In six months, we have grown the OCP Storage Meetup to 187 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 Vienna University of Technology in  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.