Steve Kleiman (CTO, Network Appliance)

The explosive growth in stored data has made petabyte-scale storage infrastructures increasingly common. The scale, growth rate, and increases in regulations related to data storage have imposed a number of non-obvious burdens on data ownership. These trends are driving the need to reorganize the traditional application-centric storage architectures toward a more unified storage infrastructure with new data management paradigms. This reorganization will likely drive a vibrant storage market over the next ten years.

Steve Kleiman joined Network Appliance in April 1996. He is currently senior vice president and chief technology officer and is responsible for setting future technology and product directions for the company. Kleiman has designed and developed UNIX and workstation architecture for 22 years.

He began his career in UNIX development at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1977, where he helped develop the first x86-based UNIX product. Kleiman then moved to Sun Microsystems, where he worked from 1984 to 1996 as a Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of clustered UNIX systems. As chief technologist for Sun's Interactive Services Group, he designed the company's first video server product line. Kleiman was also lead architect for multithreading and multiprocessing in Solaris and is a member of the POSIX Pthreads committee. He developed the Vnodes file system interface and was a member of the original NFS development team at Sun. Kleiman was the project leader of the original port of SunOS to SPARC.

He received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1978 and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977.