2023/2024 Board of Directors
The SNIA Board of Directors maintains the legal and fiduciary responsibility for the Association. It consists of 10 seats elected by the SNIA Members and 3 seats that may be appointed by the Board. The individuals you see listed below have agreed to give their time and talent to SNIA for 1 or 2-year terms. The SNIA Board meets at least 4 times per year, and addresses organizational issues such as strategic planning, membership development, marketing and public relations, technical output, operational planning, and more. The SNIA Board is charged with oversight of the organization's vision and mission, and ensures that tangible value accrues to member companies.
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J Michel Metz, Ph.D, Chair and Executive Committee J is a Technical Director for Systems Design for AMD and holds several roles of influence in the tech industry. He is currently serving his 4th term as Chair of the Board of Directors of SNIA, as well as the inaugural Chair of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium formed in 2023. Recognized as a leading storage networking expert, J is an evangelist for all related technologies and has a unique ability to dissect and explain complex concepts and strategies. He is passionate about the inner workings and application of emerging technologies.He does so by coordinating and leading strategic initiatives related to systems architecture, including storage and networking. J has previously held roles in both the startup ecosystem and Fortune 100 companies as a Field CTO, R&D Engineer, Solutions Architect, and Systems Engineer. His extensive leadership across several key industry standards groups, SNIA, and former board member of the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). He was crucial in the founding of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), one of the fastest-growing projects in the Linux Foundation. J is a sought-after entertaining presenter and a prolific writer. He has won multiple awards as a speaker and author, writing over 300 articles and giving presentations and webinars attended by over 10,000 people. A popular blogger and active on Twitter, his areas of expertise include high-performance storage and networking solutions. He earned his PhD from the University of Georgia. |
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Richelle Ahlvers, Vice Chair and Executive Committee Richelle Ahlvers is a Storage Technology Enablement Architect at Intel, where she promotes and drives enablement of new technologies and standards strategies. Richelle has spent over 25 years in Enterprise Storage R&D teams in a variety of technical roles, enabling new technology ecosystems, leading the architecture, design and development of storage array software, storage management software user experience projects including mobility, developing new storage industry categories including SAN management, storage grid and cloud, and storage technology portfolio solutions. Richelle has been engaged with industry standards initiatives with SNIA and DMTF for many years. She serves on the SNIA Board of Directors, the Chair of the Storage Management Initiative, and has led the SSM Technical Work Group developing the Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API from the group’s inception; she is the alliance liaison between SNIA and DMTF, as well as the alliance liaison for OFA, OCP, and the SODA Foundation. She has also served as the SNIA Technical Council Chair and been engaged across a breadth of technologies ranging from storage management, to solid state storage, cloud, and green storage. Richelle has also initiated and led both site and corporate level women's diversity forums, and presents regularly at diversity conferences. https://www.linkedin.com/in/richelleahlvers/ |
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Chris Lionetti, Secretary and Executive Committee Chris Lionetti is a veteran of the storage industry who has been building complex systems and SANs for over 25 years. Chris has long been actively involved with SNIA. He is currently a reference architect on the HPE Nimble Storage team. Earlier in his career, he worked as an engineer for HP, Dell, Microsoft, and NetApp. Chris holds 9 patents on topics related to data centers, networking, and storage. |
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Sue Amarin, Board Advisor, Treasurer and Executive Committee An industry veteran with about 25 years in the semiconductor industry, Sue’s previous focus has been on Storage and Flash Technologies, DRAM technologies and semiconductor microcontrollers. Sue was an active member of JEDEC for over a decade, advancing DRAM technology and enabling its adoption in the marketplace. Currently, Sue leads a team of Customer Support and Sales Engineers at Blaize, an AI HW & SW company. Sue Amarin holds a BSEE degree from San Jose State University and an MBA/Finance from Tulane University. |
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Scott Shadley, Member and Executive Committee Scott Shadley, is a Director of Long-Term Strategy at Solidigm, where his focus is on efforts to drive adoption of new storage technologies, including computational storage, storage-based AI, and post quantum cryptography. Over his 27 years in the semiconductor and storage space, Scott has been involved in wafer production, process engineering, R&D design engineering, and most recently in customer-focused roles involving Marketing and Strategic Planning. Scott has been a key figure in promoting SNIA as a now third-term Board member where he has led the computational storage efforts as former Co-Chair of the SNIA Computational Storage Technical Working Group. He is currently serving as the Co-Chair on the Communications Steering Committee, driving the outward vision of SNIA and its technology efforts, and a member of the Executive Committee. Scott also participates in several additional industry efforts including the Open Compute Project (OCP), Linux Foundation, and NVM Express. Previously with NGD Systems, Scott was the VP of Marketing and developed and managed their Computational Storage portfolio. Prior to that, at Micron, he managed the Product Marketing team, was the Business Line Manager for the SATA SSD portfolio, and finished his stay at Micron as the Principal Technologist for the SSD and emerging memory portfolio. Scott is a subject matter expert in SSD technology and semiconductor design technologies, and is ever evolving his experience and knowledge in the storage stack. Scott earned a BSEE in Device Physics from Boise State University, and an MBA in Marketing from the Univ. of Phoenix. |
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Wayne M. Adams, Chair Emeritus, Board Advisor and Executive Committee Wayne Adams has over 35 years of IT industry experience spanning business development, technical product/solution management, and partner ecosystems. Wayne has been involved in SNIA leadership roles since 2002. Wayne has served on the SNIA Board of Directors since 2003 including roles as Chair, Chair Emeritus, Treasurer in addition to a number of leadership roles for forums and initiatives, conferences, and strategic alliances. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events. Over his career, Wayne M. Adams was a Senior Technologist and Director of Standards within the Office of the CTO at EMC, technical alliances partner manager, and a manager of product managers for its portfolio of SRM products. Prior to EMC, Wayne was responsible for product marketing and business development for several strategic software and hardware products at Digital Equipment Corporation. He started his high-tech career at Eastman Kodak as a system designer of real-time control systems. Wayne has been involved in many industry associations including serving on the DMTF Board of Directors, serving as Advisory Committee member of W3C, contributing to the Industrial Internet Consortium for IoT/big data test-beds, leadership of the Fibre Alliance, and participating with various committees within INCITS, OASIS, Cloud Security Alliance, and TheGreenGrid. Wayne holds a Bachelor of Science degree with a dual major in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh. |
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Peter Corbett, Member Peter Corbett is a Fellow at Dell Technologies, working in the Infrastructure Systems Group CTO office. Peter has spent over 30 years in the IT Industry, including Senior storage system and database system architect roles with HPE, SimpliVity, NetApp, Lotus Development, and IBM Research. Peter’s recent roles have been at the strategic technology decision making level, driving the product architecture for several major storage systems, while working closely with peers in all aspects of the storage business: engineering, marketing, support, strategy, business development, and product planning. He is a technical innovator, with numerous patents and publications. |
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John Geldman, Member John Geldman is a Director of SSD Industry Standards at KIOXIA. John is currently an active contributor to NVM Express, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, JEDEC, OCP, PCI-SIG, SATA IO, SNIA, and IEEE SISWG. John has had corporate leadership responsibility for standards for multi-billion dollar storage vendors since 2011. He has been involved in storage standards since 1992, with an early introduction to standards that included the transition from X3T9 to T13 (ATA) and T10 (SCSI), as well as the transition from PCMCIA to CardBus. John has been an active FMS CAB member for at least 10 years. |
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Roger G. Hathorn, Member Roger Hathorn is an STSM and Master Inventor at IBM Corporation. With a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he joined IBM in 1988 and began his long career in IBM Systems Storage. He is an enterprise storage development leader with expertise in mainframe I/O protocol architecture (FICON) and other Fibre Channel standards. Roger’s current roles at IBM include I/O architecture and development of host attachment interfaces for the DS8000 family of enterprise storage arrays. He chairs the systems-storage Invention Development Team, is an IBM Master Inventor, and has hundreds of patents deployed in IBM storage and server products. Roger is the principal member for IBM at INCITS T11 Fibre Channel technical committees and has been contributing there since 2006 . He is the chair of the T11.3 Fibre Channel Interconnection Schemes Task Group, the standing chairman of the FC-SB-6 (FICON) expert group and secretary of other expert groups including FC-NVMe and FC-RDMA. Roger was awarded the INCTS Technical Excellence award in 2016 and the INCITS Team award in 2019. |
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Jonathan Hinkle, Member Jonathan Hinkle is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in Micron’s Storage Business Unit. Previously, Jonathan was Executive Director and Distinguished Researcher of System Architecture at Lenovo, leading their research of datacenter computing architecture. Jonathan is an industry leading technical expert in memory, storage devices, and data center systems architecture with over 24 years of experience. pmcsJonathan also serves as Vice-Chair of Marketing and Chairs the CXL Memory Task Group, standardizing CXL-attached memory devices. He has generated more than 34 granted or pending patents and earned BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University. |
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Dave Landsman, Member Dave Landsman is Director of Industry Standards at Western Digital, where he manages storage standards across Western Digital’s businesses. Dave has been an active technical member in storage standards since 2008, representing SanDisk and, post-merger, Western Digital, making contributions to NVMe, PCI-SIG, JEDEC, SATA-IO, T10, T13, SNIA, SFF, and others. He is currently WD’s board representative for NVMe, SATA-IO, and the Compact Flash Association. Dave has over 35 years of experience in the technology/semiconductor industry, having spent his “first career” at Intel, and “second career” in storage, at msystems/SanDisk/WD, with brief hiatus at a startup in between. He earned a BA in computer science from the University of California, San Diego. |
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David McIntyre, Member Director, Product Planning and Business Enablement, Samsung Corporation David McIntyre leads data centric and sustainable memory, compute and storage acceleration solutions development at Samsung, for applications including AI inference, database search and CXL applications. He has held senior management positions with AMD, Intel, IBM and at Silicon Valley startups. He has consulted for institutional investors including Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and UBS. David is a frequent presenter at industry conferences as well as a contributing chairperson across multiple SNIA initiatives and SIGs. |
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George Pamboris, Member George Pamboris is a 25+ year veteran of the IT industry having served in executive leadership roles at companies including EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Amazon Web Services, Teradata, and Weka.IO. He worked for EMC Germany in several technical positions ranging from regional software specialist to NAS specialist for the EMC Celerra product line. After 5 years of product management positions in Germany and EMEA at Hitachi Data Systems, Pamboris moved to the United States to head up worldwide product management for core and emerging products before becoming vice president of Technology. At AWS, he was senior manager of product management and a member of the product management leadership team, which was responsible for the company’s Relational Database Service (RDS) portfolio. Pamboris joined the Teradata executive team as vice president for the Analytical Ecosystem Product Management division, driving and owning the strategy and roadmap of the Analytical Ecosystem, including third-party integration and partnerships. George joined NetApp in 2022 from Weka.IO, where he was a member of the executive team as the vice president of Product Management, being responsible for advancing the company’s parallel file system’s for on-premises and cloud customers running Artificial Intelligence (AI), Life Sciences, Financial Services (FSI) and High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) workloads. He is leading the Product Management teams for the NetApp Hybrid-Cloud portfolio driving short-, mid and long-term roadmaps and pricing based on customer needs and feedback, innovation goals, market competitiveness at a fast pace. |
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Nidish Kamath, Board Advisor Nidish Kamath is a Board Advisor with interests in low latency Ethernet Networking such as UEC and secure/confidential Storage technologies. He has previously worked in marketing, product management and engineering roles at AMD, Kioxia, Avalanche Technologies, Brocade Communications Systems, Qualcomm, Cray Research and Lucent Technologies. At AMD, Nidish drove the marketing push for computational storage, SmartNICs and GPU cluster networking solutions. He serves on the Board of Directors at SNIA, and has previously served on the industry advisory board at the Center for Open Source Software (CROSS), U.C. Santa Cruz. Nidish holds a B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, an M.S. degree from the University of Minnesota and an M.B.A. from the Anderson School of Management, University of California Los Angeles. |
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Bill Martin, Board Advisor, Technical Council Co-Chair Bill has been involved in the storage industry for over 40 years, starting in 1983 with the development of a proprietary optical interface for HP storage, architecting the HP Tachyon interface chip for Fibre Channel, serving on industry consortiums and standards bodies for storage including SNIA, INCITS T11, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, SATA-IO, and NVMe. He has demonstrable skills in gaining industry agreement in a variety of technologies and bringing together competitors for the advancement of the industry. In addition to his role representing Samsung in SSD IO Standards, Bill currently holds the following industry leadership roles: co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, Chair SNIA CMSI, co-chair SNIA CS TWG, Co-Chair SNIA SDP TWG, co-Chair SNIA Standards Committee, Board member of the NVMe Board of Directors, Co-Chair Computational Storage TG, Chair of INCITS T10, Secretary of INCITS T13. His technical leadership is exemplified as:
Bill has received numerous industry recognitions for his contributions to the storage industry over the past decades including: SNIA Volunteer of the Year award 2021, INCITS Gene Milligan award for effective committee management 2016, INCITS Merit award 2013, FCIA Achievement award 2010, INCITS Outstanding Leadership Team award 2007, INCITS Technical Excellence award 2005, FCIA Lifetime Achievement award 2005, and SNIA Outstanding Theme lead for the interop lab 2004. |
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Michael Meleedy, Board Advisor, Executive Committee Advisor As the Chief Operating Officer of SNIA, Michael Meleedy oversees the organization's day-to-day operations, spearheads key initiatives, and works closely with the executive team to set strategic goals. He leverages his extensive industry knowledge to ensure that SNIA remains at the forefront of innovation, collaborating with industry stakeholders, technology vendors, and end-users to address the evolving challenges of data storage, security, and management. Prior to SNIA, Michael was the Sr. Director of Event Operations for Computerworld/IDG. In this role, he oversaw the Storage Networking World Conference, a collaboration between SNIA and Computerworld. Michael holds a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Marketing from Bentley University. |
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Jason Molgaard, Board Advisor, Technical Council Co-Chair Jason Molgaard has over 25 years of experience as a storage device controller RTL designer and architect having worked for various storage device companies architecting and designing HDD and SSD controllers. As a Principal Storage Solutions Architect on the Solidigm Pathfinding and Advanced Development Team, Jason focuses on future storage controller architectures and technologies, including Computational Storage and CXL. Jason is co-chair of the SNIA Computational Storage TWG and the SNIA Technical Council and was recognized with an Exceptional Leadership award in 2020. Jason helps drive the Computational Storage standard at both SNIA and partner organizations including NVMe and OCP. Jason holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. |
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Jim Pappas, Board Advisor Jim Pappas is the Director of Technology Initiatives in Intel’s Data Center Group. In this role, Jim is responsible to establish broad industry ecosystems that comply with new technologies in the areas of Enterprise I/O, Energy Efficient Computing, and Solid State Storage. Jim has founded, or served on several organizations in these areas including: PCI Special Interest Group, SNIA, InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), Open Fabrics Alliance (OFA), The Green Grid, Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and several emerging initiatives in his newest focus area of Solid State Storage. Mr. Pappas has previously been the Director of Technology Initiatives in Intel’s Desktop Products Group, and successfully led technologies such as AGP Graphics, DVD, IEEE 1394, Instantly Available PC, PCI, USB, and other advanced technologies for the Desktop PC. Mr. Pappas has over 37 years of experience in the computer industry. He has been granted eight U.S. patents in the areas of computer graphics and microprocessor technologies. He has spoken at dozens of major industry events and holds a B.S.E.E. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts. |
