Andrew Walls

About Andrew Walls

I am a Storage Expert and a retired IBM Fellow with over 43 years in the business. I was with IBM my that entire time and retired as the CTO and Chief Architect of the entire distributed block storage portfolio. I am a well recognized expert in all areas of storage including high performance storage, SSDs, Flash Controllers, All Flash Arrays, SAN, etcI was the technical lead of our FlashSystems business. I have about 160 patents in all areas of technology and quite a few dealing with Storage, Flash Controllers and RAID. I am proud of the density and performance we have achieved with our FlashSystem 9500, 7300 and 5300. I helped to invent many aspects of the FCM. It was my idea to include compression inside the FCM as well as to make the first enterprise SSD with QLC. I also drove the inclusion of Ransomware Detection AI using statistics gathered in the FCM. In my next chapter, I will be doing some consulting in Storage Technology and Industry. I have formed Great Walls of Storage, LLC to do so.

Experience

1. Ibm Fellow, CTO and Chief Architect Ibm Flash Systems

   IBM

   Apr 2014 — Present

   I am the CTO and Chief Architect for IBM FlashSystems. I define the architecture and requirements for the next generation of all flash arrays for IBM. I also have a broader role to guide IBM in its enterprise storage development strategy. I have very deep expertise in all areas of storage, compute, SSDs and NAND Flash. My responsibilities include developing the vision for where to take storage for the enterprise. This includes the traditional data center as well as non traditional data centers like internet, cloud, hyper converged and hyper scale. Since flash plays a prominent role in today\'s storage, I own the roadmap for flash products, software, features and integration into other platforms and applications. As important as flash is today, I am also responsible for looking at storage class memories and determining how and when they will be part of the storage and server infrastructure.I am the technical leader for a very broad team of talented engineers and programmers in many geographies around the world. Together with this team, we are changing the IT industry by developing world class and differentiating flash technology that can replace HDDs for active data and accelerate many applications. I have the privilege of interfacing with customers from around the world.I love to innovate and come up with new ways to solve things that others think are impossible.

Education

• UC Santa Barbara

  Bachelor of Science (BS), Electrical and Computer Engineering

  1977 — 1981

Skills

• Solaris
• Ssd
• Computer Architecture
• Raid
• Storage Area Network (San)
• Aix
• Storage
• Enterprise Storage
• Cluster
• Pcb Design
• Enterprise Architecture
• Ibm Aix
• Disk Arrays
• Server Architecture
• Servers
• High Performance Computing
• Iscsi
• Storage Virtualization
• Deduplication
• Storage Solutions
• Storage Architecture
• Nand Flash
• Solution Architecture
• High Availability
• Replication
• Nas
• Storage Area Networks
• Cloud Computing
• Data Center
• Fibre Channel
• Asic
• Storage Management
• San
• Server Consolidation
• Computer Hardware
• System Architecture
• Network-Attached Storage (Nas)
• Scsi