Private Cloud Computing: Consolidation, Virtualization, and Service-Oriented Infrastructure

Stephen R. Smoot, Ph.D., helped start up Riverbed Technology in February 2003, and currently serves as senior vice president of technical operations, running the technical support, technical publications, technical marketing, and global consulting engineering groups. He spends his time thinking about where technology is going and helping customers to solve their problems. Smoot previously worked on acceleration and video at Inktomi Corporation (now a part of Yahoo). He joined Inktomi, following its acquisition of FastForward Networks, which designed overlay network technology for streaming video with millions of viewers over the Internet. Smoot previously worked at Imedia (Motorola), Honeywell, and IBM. Smoot received his doctorate in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, working with Lawrence Rowe. His dissertation, "Maximizing Perceived Quality at Given Bit-Rates in MPEG Encoding," describes various aspects of creating MPEG video from its original video source. He also holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. His undergraduate education was at MIT where he received bachelor's degrees in computer science and mathematics.

Nam-Kee Tan, CCIE #4307, has been in the networking industry for more than 16 years. He is dual CCIE in routing and switching and service provider and has been an active CCIE for more than 10 years. His areas of specialization include advanced IP services, network management solutions, MPLS applications, L2/L3 VPN implementations, next-generation data center technologies, and storage networking. Nam-Kee is currently the lead network architect in the Riverbed advanced network engineering team where he designs and deploys cloud computing service infrastructures and virtual data center solutions for Riverbed enterprise and service provider customers. Nam-Kee also advises internal Riverbed engineers in the area of next-generation service provider technologies. Nam-Kee is the author of Configuring Cisco Routers for Bridging, DLSwþ, and Desktop Protocols (1999, ISBN 0071354573); Building VPNs with IPSec and MPLS (2003, ISBN 0071409319), and MPLS for Metropolitan Area Networks (2004, ISBN 084932212X); and is co-author of Building Scalable Cisco Networks (co-author, 2000, ISBN: 0072124776). He holds a master's degree in data communications from the University of Essex, UK, and an MBA from the University of Adelaide, Australia.