Biographical sketches of authors

Alain C. Azagury IBM Research Division, Haifa Research Laboratory, Haifa University, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel (azagury@il.ibm.com). Alain Azagury is the department general manager of the Storage and Systems department at IBM's Haifa Research Laboratory. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science in 1984 and 1987, respectively, from the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, where he currently teaches a course on Operating Systems Structure. The Storage and Systems department develops advanced systems and storage functions, including copy services for IBM's Enterprise Storage System, clustering and high-availability technologies, and Java™ runtime technologies. In addition, the department pioneered the development of the iSCSI standard and related technologies. The department is currently investigating novel storage technologies such as object storage and semantic access to file systems, as well as new architectures for services in grid computing. Mr. Azagury is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Michael E. Factor IBM Research Division, Haifa Research Laboratory, Haifa University, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel (factor@il.ibm.com). Dr. Factor received the B.S. degree (Valedictorian) in computer science from Union College, Schenectady, NY in 1984, and the M.S., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Yale University in 1988, 1989, and 1990. Since graduating from Yale University, Dr. Factor has worked at the IBM Israel Haifa Research Lab (HRL). Currently, Dr. Factor's focus is on storage subsystems. He is one of the architects of advanced copy functions for the IBM Enterprise Storage Server. He is also the architect for the more advanced work being done in IBM on object stores. In addition, he takes a leading role in storage-related research in his lab, including topics such as distributed storage systems, SAN-NAS convergence, advanced storage networking technologies, storage management, and advanced file system organization techniques. In the past, Dr. Factor was the manager of the distributed and clustered systems department at HRL. Dr. Factor's areas of interest include storage subsystems, Java implementations, cluster computing, high availability, scalable servers, distributed systems, and file systems. In addition to ESS, projects that Dr. Factor has been involved with include the cluster VM for Java™, the XML file system, the IBM iSeries™ integrated file system, NAS for iSeries, and the Web server for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

William F. Micka IBM Systems Groups,, 9000 S. Rita Road, Tucson, Arizona 85744 (micka@us.ibm.com). Mr. Micka is a storage architect working on current and future storage controllers. His specialty is disaster recovery and data replication. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering and began his career with IBM in Rochester, Minnesota in 1968. He has worked in the field of optical character recognition, magnetic tape control unit design, fiber optic channel design, and magnetic disk controller advanced functions. He has 35 issued patents related to the various products that have been developed during his career.