Conference: Data Center Track

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a Senior Vice President and Founding Partner with Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, conducts strategic seminars and advises key clients. Andreas is a computer scientist, a master of data communications and distributed systems, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a self-professed geek, with an engineering, programming and consulting background. Mr. Antonopoulos honed his speaking skills in front of audiences ranging in size from five executives in a boardroom to hundreds of people in large conferences. With more than three hundred speaking engagements under his belt he is considered a world-class and charismatic public speaker and teacher. Before joining Nemertes, Mr. Antonopoulos was the Security Practice Director at ThruPoint Inc, where he was responsible for a global team of security consultants who deliver solutions to multinational clients. Prior to ThruPoint he was a Security Practice Lead at Greenwich Technology Partners, where he designed the security architecture of a global wire-transfer network interconnecting the world's banks.

Brandon is currently the Senior Manager of the Software & Meters Business Unit within Eaton's Electrical Group. Prior to joining Eaton in April 2005, Brandon held a variety of positions at Rockwell Automation's Rockwell Software division including Director of Engineering and Business Unit Manager. Prior to joining Rockwell Automation in 1993, Brandon worked for Cimflex Tecknowledge in its Information Systems product group. In between obtaining his two engineering degrees, Brandon worked for 2 years for J&L Steel in East Chicago, Indiana. Brandon holds a BS and an ME in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University. Brandon has had extensive experience in developing and delivering common software platform components. As the Communications Business Unit Manager at Rockwell Software, he oversaw the development and, first ever, company wide adoption of a communication subsystem. As Rockwell Software expanded into information system type products, Brandon's team was responsible for the development of a common data model that allowed multiple products to share common manufacturing configuration data. Rockwell built on these initial shared elements and to a launch a key strategic initiative called FactoryTalk™. As Program Manager, Brandon was responsible for the first two coordinated releases of all Rockwell software products adopting the FactoryTalk™ platform. In his new role at Eaton, Brandon is helping to drive a company wide software and communication strategy will unify the communication infrastructure of Eaton's Electrical Group.

David Appelbaum, vice president of marketing for BigFix, Inc., has 20 years experience in the software technology industry having played a variety of sales, marketing, executive, and consulting roles. Prior to joining BigFix, Appelbaum worked with companies such as Borland, Oracle, Autonomy, Salesforce.com, and Antenna Software. He has overseen major product rollouts, as well as highly successful channel development programs, for the US and international markets.

Paul Dunn is a Senior Network Analyst for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which is the fourth largest school district in the United States. Dunn has worked for the District for 24 years starting his career as a science high school teacher before moving to IT as a network administrator and product manager for several of the District's schools. Dunn now works at the District level and is currently leading the effort to implement power management technology across 120,000 endpoints.

With more than 16 years of networking, and telecommunications experience, Errol Roberts brings a practical understanding of how technology can solve business problems. Errol Roberts is a Distinguished Systems Engineer (DSE) at Cisco with a focus on Optical Transport, Data Center architecture and technologies for Service Provider and Enterprise environments. In his role as DSE at Cisco, Mr. Roberts influences technical direction and solutions to address customer requirements and industry trends. In his role, Mr. Roberts consults with customers on emerging technology business application, adoption, development, and architecture impact. Prior to joining Cisco, Errol worked in the of area software development and system administration. Errol holds a Graduate (MSc) degree from New York University.

As a Senior Director of Technology, John Hufferd is responsible for defining Brocade's technology direction and strategy of storage networks including iSCSI based, FC based, FCoE based, and NAS (CIFS, CIFS) networks. John has over 40 years in the storage and networking industries and, prior to joining Brocade, John was retired from the IBM Corporation where he was focused on storage networking strategies. John began work on iSCSI in its very early years (1998) and has been a key mover in getting it accepted as an international standard. John is well known in the industry due to positions held within various industry organizations including SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) and RDMAC (Remote Direct Memory Access Consortium). He was key in defining the specification for iSER (the iSCSI Extensions for RDMA), and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), where he holds the position of Technical Coordinator for IP Storage. John also ensured that the iSER IETF specification was defined such that it not only supported iWARP (RDMA on TCP/IP) but also InfiniBand. He has held positions on the board of advisors for 8 different companies and has authored the definitive book on iSCSI called "iSCSI -- The Universal Storage Connection," published by Addison-Wesley. John is Brocade's representative to the IETF and the IBTA (InfiniBand Trade Association) and has been a Brocade representative to the T11 Fibre Channel Standards Group -- BB5 Working Group -- which is defining FCoE.

Stephen Garrison has more than 19 years of experience designing strategic marketing programs for the telecommunications and networking industries. Prior to becoming vice president of marketing, Garrison directed the company's corporate marketing and customer activities. Prior to joining Force10 Networks, Garrison was the senior director of marketing at Riverstone Networks, where he was responsible for building customer programs. Earlier, he served as the director of marketing at Cabletron Systems. Garrison received a B.S. in ceramic science from Alfred University and an M.S. in materials science and engineering from MIT. He also holds four patents and sits on the board of directors for the Ethernet Alliance.

Vikram has over 15 years of experience in marketing and sales, in the systems and semiconductor segments. Vikram's career spans the PC, server and networking industries. Prior to joining NetXen, Vikram was director of marketing at Broadcom, where he was responsible for strategic planning and product marketing for server chipsets. While at Broadcom, he successfully launched the storage product line of chips used by top tier enterprise storage vendors. Before that, Vikram spent six years at National Semiconductor marketing processors, server chipsets and networking products. He holds an MBA degree from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario and a BSEE from the University of Alberta, both with honors.