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Tom Phelan earned his computer science degree from UC Berkeley and then began a long career focused on storage and systems virtualization. After cutting his teeth on UNIX internals at Altos Computer Systems he went on to develop highly fault tolerant storage subsystems at Stratus. At Silicon Graphics he was a member of the team that designed and developed the XFS file system. Furthermore, he was the architect and primary developer of the GRIO, Guaranteed Rate I/O, sub system of XFS which he used later to optimize storage performance for the delivery of streaming data. Tom was an early employee at VMware and as senior staff engineer was a key member of the ESX storage architecture team. During his 10 year stint at VMware he designed and developed the ESX storage I/O load balancing subsystem and the modular “pluggable storage architecture.” He went on to lead teams working on many key storage initiatives such as the cloud storage gateway and vFlash. He resigned from VMware in 2012 to join Kumar Sreekanti as co-founder and chief architect of BlueData.