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Top 20 Data Storage Specialists to Know

Storage Server - Top 20 Data Storage Specialists to Know

The foundation of today’s digital world is built on data storage. From cloud services to on-premises systems, the people who architect and innovate storage technologies have a profound impact.

Below is a carefully curated list of top data storage experts worldwide. This diverse selection includes academic researchers, enterprise storage architects, cloud infrastructure engineers, open-source contributors, and independent thought leaders. They span specializations in cloud storage, distributed systems, SSD/HDD technology, archival storage, and storage security:

  1. Sage Weil
  2. Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy
  3. Peter Braam
  4. Jeff Bonwick
  5. Moshe Yanai
  6. Dave Hitz
  7. John Ousterhout
  8. Werner Vogels
  9. Sanjay Ghemawat
  10. Brad Calder
  11. Karin Strauss
  12. Doug Cutting
  13. Theodore (Ted) Ts’o
  14. Jens Axboe
  15. Bianca Schroeder
  16. Margo Seltzer
  17. John Wilkes
  18. Stephen Foskett
  19. Chris M. Evans
  20. Sujal Patel

Now, let’s delve deeper into their roles, contributions, and where you can follow their work.

Sage Weil

sage weil - Top 20 Data Storage Specialists to Know

Sage is the founder and lead architect of Ceph, the popular open-source distributed storage platform.

Weil created Ceph as part of his PhD research and later served as Chief Architect for Ceph at Red Hat. Under his guidance, Ceph pioneered a unified system for object, block, and file storage, and introduced innovative concepts like the CRUSH algorithm for data distribution. In 2021, after nearly two decades leading Ceph, Weil stepped back from day-to-day leadership (while remaining involved as a contributor) to explore new challenges.

His work has helped make scalable, resilient storage accessible to organizations worldwide.

Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy

Anand is a leading open-source storage innovator, known for co-founding two major storage projects.

In 2005 he created GlusterFS, a distributed file system enabling petabyte-scale storage, which was later acquired by Red Hat. Building on that success, AB co-founded MinIO, an open-source object storage server that is S3-compatible and optimized for cloud-native environments. Today, as CEO of MinIO, he is driving high-performance, software-defined storage for enterprise and AI data needs.

Periasamy is recognized as a visionary for advocating open-source, software-centric storage solutions well ahead of industry trends.

Peter Braam

Peter is the creator of the Lustre parallel file system, a cornerstone of high-performance computing (HPC) storage.

Lustre’s ability to scale across thousands of nodes made it the go-to storage for many of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Braam founded Cluster File Systems, Inc. to commercialize Lustre and has co-founded multiple tech startups. He has also held roles at large enterprises (Sun, Xyratex) bridging research and industry. In recent years, Dr. Braam has returned to academia and consulting, applying his expertise to grand computing challenges (such as data systems for the Square Kilometre Array telescope).

His work has significantly advanced distributed file system design in both open-source and enterprise domains.

Jeff Bonwick

Jeff is the inventor and lead developer of ZFS (Zettabyte File System), a revolutionary file system known for its advanced features like pooled storage, data integrity checking, snapshots, and copy-on-write design.

As Sun Microsystems’ storage CTO and Sun Fellow, Bonwick led the team that delivered ZFS, fundamentally rethinking how file systems manage data and reliability. He also created the slab memory allocator (widely used in operating systems) and co-invented the LZJB compression algorithm. After Sun, Bonwick co-founded DSSD, an NVMe flash storage startup later acquired by EMC.

His contributions – especially ZFS – have had a lasting impact on enterprise storage, inspiring many modern file system and storage software designs.

  • LinkedIn: Jeff Bonwick

Moshe Yanai

Moshe is a legend in enterprise storage. He led the development of the EMC Symmetrix in the late 1980s and 1990s – the high-end storage array that became EMC’s flagship product and dominated enterprise storage.

Under Yanai’s technical leadership, Symmetrix introduced features like high-performance disk mirroring (SRDF) and paved the way for today’s SAN arrays. After EMC, Yanai founded multiple storage companies: XIV (grid-based storage acquired by IBM), Diligent (deduplication, also acquired by IBM), and most recently Infinidat, which he currently leads as Chief Technology Evangelist. Infinidat builds multi-petabyte storage systems blending high performance and reliability, a testament to Yanai’s decades of expertise.

With over 40 storage patents and a career spanning mainframe to modern AI storage, Moshe Yanai’s influence on the storage industry is hard to overstate.

  • LinkedIn: Moshe Yanai

Dave Hitz

Dave is the co-founder of NetApp (Network Appliance) and a key architect of modern network-attached storage.

In 1992, Hitz (with James Lau) started NetApp with a vision to “simplify storage the way Cisco simplified networking”. He helped develop the pioneering WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) file system which enabled fast snapshots and efficient NAS appliances. Under Hitz’s leadership, NetApp introduced the first widely adopted NAS filers, bringing simple, reliable file storage to enterprises. He served as NetApp’s EVP and was the public face of the company for decades, guiding it through transitions to disk arrays, flash storage, and cloud integration. Dave Hitz retired from NetApp in 2019 as “Founder Emeritus” after 26 years.

His book “How to Castrate a Bull” humorously chronicles the journey of building NetApp and the lessons learned in innovation and business.

John Ousterhout

YouTube Video

Managing Software Complexity.

Professor John Ousterhout (Stanford University) is a legendary figure in distributed systems whose work has heavily influenced storage system design.

In the early 1990s, Ousterhout proposed the concept of the Log-Structured File System (LFS), which treats storage like an ever-growing log, vastly improving write performance and crash recovery. This concept (implemented in BSD as the Sprite LFS with his student Mendel Rosenblum) presaged the journaling and copy-on-write techniques prevalent in modern filesystems. Ousterhout also developed the Tcl scripting language and co-created RAID++ (a high-performance disk array). More recently, he led the RAMCloud project, exploring ultra-low-latency storage by keeping all data in DRAM. He continues to research distributed storage for new hardware (like persistent memory). A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Ousterhout has the rare ability to blend big ideas with practical systems.

His textbook “The Case for RAMCloud” and new book “A Philosophy of Software Design” further cement his influence as both a thought leader and educator in system design.

Werner Vogels

Dr. Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon, and one of the chief architects behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), including its storage services.

Vogels played a key role in the design of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), which launched in 2006 as one of the first cloud object storage services at web scale. He is a vocal proponent of building systems with decentralization and fault-tolerance – principles that were baked into S3’s design to ensure “secure, durable… always available” storage. Prior to AWS, Vogels researched distributed systems and scalability (he holds a PhD in computer science). As AWS CTO, he now evangelizes cloud architecture globally and remains closely involved in evolving AWS’s storage, database, and messaging services. Werner Vogels’ blog “All Things Distributed” has long been a go-to for insight into cloud-scale storage practices.

He is widely recognized as a top technology leader for driving the cloud storage revolution.

Sanjay Ghemawat

Sanjay, a Google Senior Fellow, is a quiet force behind some of Google’s most significant storage infrastructure.

He co-designed the Google File System (GFS), which revolutionised large-scale data storage and inspired systems like Hadoop’s HDFS. With Jeff Dean, he also created MapReduce and Bigtable, foundational technologies behind Google services and modern cloud computing. Known for turning massive machine clusters into unified systems, Ghemawat remains at Google, shaping the future of distributed storage and processing.

He’s a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  • Google AI Profile: [Sanjay Ghemawat – AAAS Fellow
  • Publications: Ghemawat’s co-authored papers – GFS, Bigtable, Spanner, etc. (Google Research)
  • Awards: ACM Infosys Foundation Award 2012 (for GFS/MapReduce/Bigtable)

Brad Calder

Dr. Brad Calder has been a key architect of cloud storage in not one but two tech giants.

At Microsoft, Calder led the engineering of Windows Azure Storage, the cloud object storage system underpinning Azure. He co-authored the seminal 2011 SOSP paper “Windows Azure Storage: A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency”, detailing Azure’s approach to scale-out storage stamps and consistency. After nearly a decade at Microsoft (where he helped Azure Storage grow from concept to a massive service), Dr. Calder joined Google in 2015. He is now a Vice President at Google Cloud overseeing product and engineering for storage, databases, and infrastructure. In this role, he drives innovations across Google Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, and more, ensuring Google’s services meet the needs of enterprise workloads.

With a PhD in computer science (UCSD) and even a stint as a professor, Calder combines deep research insight with practical experience building real-world cloud storage. His cross-industry impact makes him a top expert on cloud-scale storage system design.

Karin Strauss

Dr. Karin Strauss is a pioneer at the intersection of biotechnology and data storage.

As a Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research, she has led groundbreaking work on storing digital data in synthetic DNA molecules. Strauss and her collaborators demonstrated fully automated end-to-end DNA data storage – encoding digital bits into DNA sequences and reliably retrieving them – a technique with potential to archive vast amounts of data in tiny physical volume. For this visionary project, she was named among the “100 Most Creative People in Business 2016” by Fast Company, and the work was highlighted as a World Economic Forum Top 10 Emerging Technology in 2019. Beyond DNA storage, Karin Strauss’s background spans computer architecture and emerging memory technologies, and she holds an Affiliate Professorship at University of Washington.

By looking to nature to solve technology’s challenges, Dr. Strauss is opening an entirely new frontier for archival storage with DNA, promising storage densities and longevity far beyond conventional media.

Doug Cutting

Doug is the co-creator of Apache Hadoop, the open-source framework that made big data storage and processing accessible to the world.

In 2005, inspired by Google’s GFS and MapReduce papers, Cutting (and Mike Cafarella) developed Hadoop while at Yahoo!, open-sourcing a platform for distributed storage (HDFS) and computation. Hadoop’s HDFS became the backbone for countless organizations to store petabytes of data across commodity servers, effectively democratizing large-scale data storage. Before Hadoop, Doug Cutting created Apache Lucene (a widely used search engine library) and Nutch (a web crawler), so he was already an open-source luminary. In 2009, he joined Cloudera as Chief Architect, helping to bring Hadoop to enterprises. Today, as CTO of Cloudera, he remains a prominent advocate for open data architectures.

Cutting’s contributions – often driven by the philosophy of open source – have enabled the current wave of data analytics and machine learning by ensuring there was a robust, affordable storage layer (HDFS) to feed those systems.

  • LinkedIn: Doug Cutting
  • Twitter (X): @cutting

Theodore (Ted) Ts’o

Ted is a prominent Linux kernel developer and the original maintainer of the EXT4 file system in Linux.

In fact, Ted was the first North American contributor to the Linux kernel back in 1991 and has been deeply involved in Linux storage and security ever since. He developed /dev/random (the kernel’s random number generator) and led development of the ext3 and ext4 file systems, which for years have been the default filesystem on most Linux distributions. As ext4 maintainer, Ted guided it to include journaling, extents for large files, and online defragmentation, significantly improving reliability and performance for millions of Linux systems. He also introduced file-system level encryption for ext4 (bringing enterprise-grade data-at-rest security to Android devices and ChromeOS). Ted Ts’o has served as CTO of the Linux Foundation and continues to be an active technical voice in Linux storage conferences.

His long commitment to open-source storage and his skill in building robust filesystems make him one of the most respected figures in the Linux storage community.

  • Twitter (X): @tytso
  • GitHub: tytso (Ted’s projects and contributions)

Jens Axboe

Jens is the Linux kernel’s block I/O layer maintainer and one of the world’s foremost experts on storage I/O performance.

For over two decades, Axboe has overseen and contributed to the Linux kernel’s block subsystem, which is responsible for interfacing with disks/SSDs. He wrote influential I/O schedulers (CFQ, Deadline, Noop) and developed blktrace, a tool for tracing every block I/O operation. More recently, Jens Axboe created io_uring, a new asynchronous I/O interface in Linux that delivers high-performance, low-latency I/O by minimizing system calls and context switches. Employed by Meta (Facebook) and previously by Fusion-io and Oracle, Axboe also authored the popular benchmarking tool fio (Flexible I/O Tester), widely used to test disk and SSD throughput. His work directly impacts database, cloud, and application performance on Linux.

In short, if you use Linux for any storage-heavy workload, Jens Axboe’s fingerprints are on the code paths that make it fast and efficient.

Bianca Schroeder

Professor Bianca Schroeder (University of Toronto) is a leading researcher in storage device reliability and fault tolerance.

Her empirical studies have shed light on how often disks and SSDs actually fail in the field, challenging industry assumptions. For example, her work “Disk failures in the real world” collected data from thousands of drives and revealed that failure rates do not follow simplistic models and that latent sector errors are a serious issue. She has also conducted large-scale field studies of SSD reliability in production storage systems, providing invaluable insights as enterprises deploy flash (e.g., finding that SSD failure patterns differ from disks). Bianca Schroeder’s research interests span high-performance computing, data centers, and distributed systems, but a unifying theme is making storage more reliable and efficient. She has received multiple “Test of Time” awards for the lasting impact of her work, and holds a Canada Research Chair in Reliable and Efficient Data Centres.

Her evidence-based approach helps storage architects design systems with realistic expectations of hardware behavior under fault conditions.

Margo Seltzer

Professor Margo Seltzer is a highly respected computer systems researcher whose work has shaped file systems, databases, and data provenance.

In the early 1990s, Seltzer was the lead author of the BSD Log-Structured File System (LFS) paper, working under Michael Stonebraker. That work was a key evolution in file system design, introducing logging techniques to improve write performance and reliability. She also co-developed Berkeley DB (BerkeleyDB), an embeddable database that became nearly ubiquitous in applications. Beyond academia, Margo spent years in industry startups focusing on file systems and transaction processing. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems at UBC (previously Harvard CS professor). Her recent interests include data provenance (tracking the lineage of data through systems) and storage for emerging hardware. Margo Seltzer has received numerous awards, and an ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award recognized the lasting influence of her early work.

With a career spanning from the first log-structured file systems to today’s accountable storage, she stands out as one of the most influential storage systems thinkers.

John Wilkes

John is a distinguished engineer at Google (recently retired) and formerly a researcher at HP Labs, known for his work on automated storage management and cluster scheduling.

At HP, Wilkes led the development of HP AutoRAID, an innovative hierarchical storage system that automatically moved data between RAID levels (mirrored vs. striped) to balance performance and cost. AutoRAID (published in 1996) was a breakthrough in self-managing storage, allowing enterprises to get high performance and high reliability without manual tuning. After a 20+ year career at HP Labs, Wilkes joined Google in 2008. There, he co-designed Omega, Google’s cluster workload management system (successor to Borg), ensuring efficient scheduling of jobs across Google’s vast infrastructure. He also worked on internal storage services and Google’s network infrastructure. John Wilkes has always pushed for automation (“self-driving” storage) and better integration between storage QoS and system needs. He has published dozens of influential papers and even co-authored a book on storage systems.

His dual contributions to making storage hardware smarter (AutoRAID) and data centers more efficient (Google Omega) secure his spot among the top experts.

Stephen Foskett

Stephen is an independent thought leader and organizer in the enterprise storage community.

He is the founder of Tech Field Day and Gestalt IT, through which he brings together industry experts and IT vendors (in events like Storage Field Day) to share knowledge about the latest in data storage and IT infrastructure. Foskett has a background as a practitioner – a former storage architect and consultant – which gives him practical insight into the challenges IT teams face. He actively writes and speaks about storage networking, data management, and backup, always with an objective and analytical tone. Stephen’s Storage Field Day events have become a staple in the industry, spotlighting emerging storage startups and new product announcements in an interactive forum. In addition, he co-hosts the “On-Premise IT Roundtable” podcast.

Stephen Foskett’s influence comes from being a connector and commentator: he amplifies cutting-edge developments and provides context and critique through his writing. Anyone following enterprise storage technology has likely benefited from Foskett’s curation and analysis.

Chris M. Evans

Chris is an independent consultant and blogger with over 30 years of experience in enterprise storage.

Based in the UK, he founded the consultancy Brookend and runs the popular blog Architecting IT (formerly “The Storage Architect”). Over the decades, Chris has advised large organizations on storage strategy, from SAN/NAS implementations to virtualization and cloud storage adoption. He has a talent for breaking down complex storage topics – whether it’s NVMe-over-Fabrics, software-defined storage, or cloud data management – into clear analyses for IT audiences. Evans is also frequently published in tech media like Network Computing and appears at community events (he’s a delegate at Tech Field Day and other forums). Through his blog and reports, Chris Evans provides unbiased opinions on vendors and products, helping enterprises navigate the rapidly changing storage landscape.

His long tenure in the industry, combined with an independent voice, make him a trusted source on the state of storage technology and where it’s headed.

Sujal Patel

Sujal is a successful entrepreneur who fundamentally changed how enterprises store and scale out their unstructured data.

He is the founder and former CEO of Isilon Systems, which introduced a new class of scale-out NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions for big data. Patel founded Isilon in 2001 to address the explosion of file data that traditional file servers and monolithic storage couldn’t handle efficiently. Isilon’s clustered storage system allowed organizations to start small and linearly scale out performance and capacity by simply adding nodes – a fundamentally new paradigm at the time. After a highly successful IPO, Isilon under Sujal’s leadership grew rapidly (achieving +20% operating margins) and was acquired by EMC in 2010 for $2.6 billion, EMC’s largest acquisition to date . Patel stayed on as President of EMC’s Isilon division until 2012.

In recent years, he pivoted to life sciences as co-founder of Nautilus Biotechnology, applying data techniques to proteomics. Yet in the storage arena, Sujal Patel is revered for ushering in the era of scale-out storage appliances that now underpin big data and media workflows everywhere.

  • LinkedIn: Sujal Patel

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals in available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

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