Selected Products at NetApp
SAS 3 Storage Shelves and Controller
As Director, HW Engineering, Mark had responsibility for Mechanical, Power, and Digital Design Engineering for the new generation of SAS 3 shelves. He kept the projects on schedule and in budget despite a forced change to the SAS expander chip used in IOM 12 for connectivity. His insistence on using load boards to validate the drive slot environments for shelf and integrated controller configurations made this and future generations of drive and controllers predictable.
First to Market with 15TB and 30TB SAS 3 SSDs
Worked closely with Tier-1 vendor for first to market delivery of 15TB and 30TB SAS 3 SSDs in the Storage Systems market. Negotiated with vendor at beginning of project to set expectations that allowed early engagement and overlapping development and qualification activities to achieve goal.
Selected Products at Themis Computers (now Mercury Systems)
CS-5U Blade Server
5U rack mount chassis supports up to 4 Processor and IO Blades, redundant Chassis Manager, N+1 Power. Dual 10Gb Ethernet data planes through Fulcrum switches in Chassis Managers. PCI Express Gen2 x16 implemented on backplane. Freedom of Blade placement with associativity determined by Blade adjacency. Processor Blades leverage off the shelf dual socket Nehalem motherboard with Themis IP to deliver two PCI Express Gen2 x16 buses and four 10Gb Ethernet ports to the backplane. IO Blades receive two PCI Express Gen2 x16 buses and support three PCI Express Gen2 x16, six PCI Express Gen2 x8, or a mixture of ports. IO Blades also support storage driven locally or directly attached to Processor Blades.
Worked with business development to define system configurations and derivative products. Advised customers. Delivered sales demo units.
- Roles: Architect, Technical leader, Program Management, Personnel Manager
- Direct Reports: Electrical Engineering, System Integration and Test, EE Tech, ME Tech
- Indirect Reports: Mechanical Engineering, Documentation, Manufacturing, Marketing
- Team Size: 17
1/2 ATR 3U VPX System
Conduction cooled 1/2 ATR chassis that supports 3U VPX modules. (VPX is VME follow-on that supports high speed serial fabrics). All-new design except IO cards. Wide range power supply, chassis manager, backplane, IO Transition board, Core i7 based single board computer module, IO carrier modules. -40C to 71C operational ambient temperature in a sealed chassis.
Delivered customer specific design while developing a general purpose configurable system. Products released as configured systems as well as individual modules. Worked with business development to define system configurations and derivative products. Advised customers.
- Roles: Program Management, Personnel Manager
- Direct Reports: Electrical Engineering, System Integration and Test, ME Tech
- Indirect Reports: Mechanical Engineering, Documentation, Manufacturing
- Team Size: 10
RS3100 Storage Server
Partnered with a Tier-1 Storage Systems vendor to create a product that leveraged their electronics and SW with Themis packaging for reliable storage in harsher environments.
Coordinated with the Tier-1 Storage Systems vendor on HW and SW rollout. Negotiated leverage of manufacturing tools. Developed manufacturing acceptance and verification test strategies and processes. Solved embedded branding and entitlement problems. Provided project technical management to ensure product completeness, deliver prototype systems, and release into manufacturing. Management of assembly of rack-based Proof of Concept (dual servers, RuggedStore, private network, display, keyboard, in a portable case).
- Roles: Program Management, Personnel Manager
- Direct Reports: System Integration and Test, ME Tech
- Indirect Reports: Mechanical Engineering, Documentation, Manufacturing
- Team Size: 6
GPGPU High Perf Server
Purpose-built 1U server to run NVidia Tesla card at elevated temperature (ambient increase of 15C). First in family of 1U, 2U, and 3U servers.
Instigated relationship with NVidia through CS-5U work that led to partnership which allowed this project.
- Roles: Personnel Manager
- Direct Reports: EE, System Integration and Test
- Team Size: 2
Selected Products at Sun Microsystems
Dual Port Fiber 10Gb Ethernet PCI Express Low Profile Board
As Director of Throughput Networking, Mark managed several departments which designed the 10Gb Ethernet controller ASIC and the board shown here, developed the firmware, and delivered the drivers for Solaris, Linux, Windows, and VMWare. The ASIC supports multi-threading and virtualization via line rate classification and a high DMA engine count which can be partitioned to support direct IO to different domains. Support for MSI/MSI-X interrupts reduces bottlenecks by allowing interrupts to be spread across multiple threads.
High End SPARC Server Uniboard Redesign
As an engineer in the Value Engineering group Mark figured out how to use next generation memory in the Uniboard design without re-designing the processor chips and started the project. As Director of Value Engineering he brought together the whole team for contributions across many areas – board design, new data path and memory ASIC, new power supplies, new mechanicals, more reliable and higher performance cache. A very conservative Net Present Value savings estimate including the engineering effort, launch, and FRU field stocking was over $45M.
Sun Ray Thin Client
This stateless device provides a mobile desktop session registered to a SMART card. Pull the SMART card from one Sun Ray and put it in another to move your desktop display and session to another physical location – different office or room, different building, different state. It will re-appear just as you left it including where the curser was. You can think of it as a frame buffer with keyboard, mouse, and audio access on an ethernet port. As Senior Manager and Product Boss, Mark drove design and delivery of the system including HW, firmware, and diagnostics