NetApp at OpenWorld 2012

As executive vice president of engineering, David Hitz is responsible for the future strategy and direction of Network Appliance.

Dave Hitz and James Lau founded Network Appliance in 1992 with a desire to simplify storage the way Cisco simplified networking. Hitz and Lau believed that general-purpose computing systems were too complex, so they built dedicated devices called appliances. These appliances were designed to do one thing well—storage. Thus, the word appliance was inserted into the company name.

Prior to this, Hitz worked as a senior engineer at Auspex Corporation, an enterprise storage solutions provider, where he was responsible for file systems and microkernel design. He also held engineering positions at MIPS Computer, focusing on file system and I/O subsystem design for the System V kernel development effort. Before his career in the computer industry, Hitz worked as a cowboy, where he got valuable management experience by herding, branding, and castrating cattle.

Hitz holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University.

Eric Grancher leads the database back-end services section in the CERN IT department – supporting databases related to mission critical assets such as particle accelerator and experiments events that supports CERN’s infrastructure and research. Since joining CERN in 1996, Eric assumed responsibilities in IT to work on RAC application scalability with Real Application Cluster, storage scalability for databases as well as high-availability architectures. Prior to joining CERN, he graduated as engineer at the French school “Telecom ParisTech” and with an MSc at “Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon”. Eric has been an OakTable member since April 2005 and has specific interest in database applications and performance. Eric is a frequent speaker at industry events and Oracle community forums to share his vision, strategy and experience in managing and driving unique Oracle databases.

Michael Landers manages the IT Operations team for the AT&T Wi-Fi. AT&T is one of the country’s largest Wi-Fi hotspot providers with over 30,000 venues supporting billions of connections yearly. Michael's group is responsible for the operation of all the systems, networks, storage, databases, and applications supporting the AT&T Wi-Fi product and service. This includes multiple data centers and POPs throughout the US with over 1.5 PB of storage, thousands of servers, multiple very large Oracle RAC clusters, and hundreds of gigabytes of Internet bandwidth. Michael joined Wayport in 2005 which was purchased by AT&T in 2008. Prior to joining AT&T, he worked for Applied Science Fiction (acquired by Eastman Kodak in 2003) leading the IT group. Michael has been working in the IT field for 15 years.