Thought Leadership

Xiotech's Advanced Storage Group is comprised of the industry's best and brightest technologists. Our team has worked together at leading companies including DEC, HP, EMC, Seagate and Cray, pioneering most of the major breakthroughs in storage technology during the last thirty years. Among the many industry-first innovations from Xiotech:

  • Virtualization of the storage pool
  • Distributed storage clusters
  • Heterogeneous boot from SAN
  • Virtual links between systems (for scalability and fast recovery)
  • Geographically distributed cluster over IP
  • Web Services management layer

With Xiotech's patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, the team has delivered another stunning accomplishment - the introduction of the world's highest-performing, most reliable application-oriented data storage.

As industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group wrote when ISE was launched:

"Why keep managing around the lack of disk drive reliability if it can actually be fixed? Based on an exhaustive review of 42 million hours of drive run time, ESG Lab has confirmed that Xiotech has indeed fixed the problem. Not only were the number of drive failures reduced, but more important the need for drive replacements was totally eliminated. Using a sealed 'no-touch' approach that turns a group of drives into a foundational storage element with excellent price-performance that fixes itself, ESG believes that Xiotech has developed game changing technology that experienced storage administrators would be wise to consider."

Today, the Advanced Storage Group is working on the next generation of ISE and innovations that will continue to distance Xiotech from the competition.

Stephen Sicola - Chief Technology Officer

Stephen J. Sicola was the VP of the Advanced Storage Architecture group within Seagate Technology. Stephen has over 29 years in the storage industry, was a Compaq Fellow, former CTO of StorageWorks at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation. Stephen has led developments on several generations of storage arrays, storage architectures, and software & hardware teams. Stephen has 39 patents pending or granted in the areas of Storage Architecture, RAID, Fault Tolerance, Caching, Disaster Tolerance, and Virtualization.

Stephen has a BSEE from Stanford University in Electrical Engineering, and a Master from NTU in Computer Architecture/Fault Tolerant Computing.

Jim McDonald - Chief Strategy Officer

Jim McDonald is Chief Strategy Officer of Xiotech Corporation, and joined the company in October of 2009, working out of Xiotech Europe Ltd.

McDonald came to Xiotech from EMC, where he served as a Chief Technology Officer. Prior to EMC, he co-founded WysDM Software, Inc., a company specializing in data protection management across industries such as financial services, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals. He served as Chief Technology Officer there, initially developing the WysDM product architecture and latterly working in business development and with the company's largest customers and partners on product strategy. The company was sold to EMC in 2008.

Before co-founding WysDM, he was Director of Engineering at StorageNetworks, where he was responsible for global primary storage engineering as well as being a technical liaison with a number of key accounts. He's also worked for Goldman Sachs, where he held international responsibilities in the systems management, scheduling and primary and secondary storage areas, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he was primary architect and systems administrator for one of the first public-access systems on the Internet.

McDonald holds a BSc [Hons] in computer science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Richard Lary - Corporate Fellow

Richard Lary is corporate fellow at Xiotech, and joined the company in December of 2009.

Richard Lary has been in the computer industry for 40 years. He began his career as a software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), building operating systems and compilers for the PDP-8 and PDP-11 computers. In 1975, he served as a member of the core team that defined the VAX computer architecture, and later the implementation team for the first VAX computer. After joining DEC's Storage Business Unit in 1978, Richie was a key architect of the Digital Storage Architecture and a key implementer of several of the hardware and firmware components of the associated product family. He became DEC's Storage Architect in 1990, Storage Technical Director in 1994, and Compaq Computer Corporation's Storage Technical Director in 1998, where he was responsible for technical oversight of the entire corporate storage architecture and product line. Prior to joining Xiotech, he had been an independent consultant in the storage industry and a technical advisor to several emerging storage companies since 2000.

Richard holds 32 patents for his work in processor and storage system architecture and design, and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Server I/O Conference in January 2000. He also frequently speaks at industry events.

Richard holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

Rob Peglar - Senior Fellow

Rob Peglar is a 32-year storage industry veteran, published author and sought-after speaker and panelist at leading storage and networking-related seminars and conferences worldwide. At Xiotech he helps shape strategic vision and emerging technologies, defines future offering portfolios, plays a key role in product planning and serves as an industry/customer liaison. He was recently re-elected Treasurer of the Board of Directors of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and has served as chair of the SNIA Tutorials, on the boards of the Green Storage Initiative and the Solid State Storage Initiative and as secretary/treasurer of the Blade Systems Alliance. He has won numerous awards for his efforts and expertise, including being one of 30 senior executives worldwide selected for the Network Products Guide 2008 MVP Award.

Rob holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis, and performed graduate work at Washington University's Sever Institute of Engineering.

Ken Bates - Fellow

Ken Bates is a technologist at Xiotech, where he is responsible for the measurement and analysis of Xiotech's Emprise storage products built on Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, as well as investigating and developing new algorithms and methodologies to improve the performance of those products.

Ken began his storage career at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1981, where he developed the disk server code for the company's first disk and tape controller, the company's first shadowing (RAID-1) specification and the first striping driver for VMS. After a few years, he moved into storage performance, specializing in analyzing performance through measurements, analytical models and discrete event simulations as well as competitive product analysis. He also developed several tools to enable storage customers to analyze and predict performance on their systems, and has published many performance-related articles in industry magazines as well as a book. Accordingly, he has earned a reputation as one of the foremost experts on storage performance, and he often speaks at industry and customer events and teaches storage technology seminars all around the globe. Ken also served as the primary representative to the Storage Performance Council for both DEC and Compaq, where the work he had previously done on customer I/O trace analysis provided the initial specification that was the basis for the current SPC-1 I/O workload.

Ken studied post-graduately at Air University and the University of Maryland.

Todd Burkey - Fellow

Todd Burkey is a Fellow at Xiotech, and has been with the company since March 1996 – nearly the entire time the company has been in business.

At Xiotech, Todd has been a leader in system-level architecture and development of ease-of-use features for the company's storage systems. He was responsible for the initial design and software development on the Magnitude, the company's legacy SAN product line, he led the team that introduced the 3D product to the storage world, and he was involved in bringing the company's current flagship ISE technology. Over the years, Todd has delivered innovations in automation, embedded design, replication, performance visualization, telemetry, automated telemetry analysis and extended predictive failure detection. Prior to Xiotech, Todd worked for three years as principal design engineer of server diagnostics at Tricord Systems, four years as software development manager developing real-time control software at Interlaken Technology and another combined 12 years in various software design and engineering roles for ETA Systems, Zycad, Metheus and Honeywell. He also owned and operated a successful sole proprietorship for 20 years, through which he developed applications and software for various computer and other high-tech projects.

Todd holds a bachelor's degree with distinction in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He also holds four patents, with many other patents pending.

Clark Lubbers - Fellow

Clark Lubbers is a technologist at Xiotech, where he architects and implements new hardware and software systems for the company.

Clark has been a chief contributor to the advancement of storage systems and software throughout his 40-year career. He began as a research assistant and programmer at the University of Michigan, where he worked for 12 years. Then, in 1982, he joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which merged with Compaq and Hewlett-Packard in his 20 years at the company. He worked there on everything from developing the company's first disk and tape controller to designing subsequent array controller products. In addition, he is the person most responsible for the design, conception and implementation of HP's current flagship product, the Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), and one of the people most responsible for the introduction of virtualization into the storage industry. He then joined Seagate in 2002 to work with the company's Advanced Storage Architecture group, which Xiotech acquired in 2007, and is the chief developer of intellectual property for the company's flagship Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology.

In sum, Clark holds 40 patents and has more than 30 pending for his work in storage hardware and software. He had the honor of collaborating with computer and earth scientists on Project Sequoia 2000 at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1990s, and has done some consulting work as well.

Clark holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Bill Pagano - Fellow

Bill Pagano is a technologist at Xiotech, where he is responsible for developing and architecting new hardware for the company.

Bill has been a chief contributor to the advancement of storage hardware throughout his more than 30-year career. He began at Storage Technology Corporation in 1976, and worked there for four years testing disk drive printed circuitboards. Then, in 1980, he joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which merged with Compaq and Hewlett-Packard during his 22 years at the company. He tested equipment for several years, and eventually moved to the company's StorageWorks group where he designed controllers and disk drive chips. He was responsible for the initial design of HP's current flagship product, the Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), and was the lead hardware engineer on the FibreChannel interfaces for the group's storage systems. He then joined Seagate in 2002 to work with the company's Advanced Storage Architecture group, which Xiotech acquired in 2007, and is the lead hardware designer of the company's flagship Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology. He holds five patents for his work in hardware design.

Bill holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.