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Saturday, April 17, 2010

Exploring Silicon Valley wizards: Kumar Malavalli


Kumar Malavalli is widely considered to be the visionary behind Fiber Channel storage fabrics, a technology that enabled the development of production-class SANs.Kumar holds several patents in fibre channel including zoning for SANs.He served as chair of the ANSI T11 Technical Committee, which established universal standards for Fibre Channel. He has also served on the Boards of Directors of the Storage Networking Industry Association and the Fibre Channel Industry Association.
In 2003, Malavalli was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame for his contributions to technology. He also received the Gene Milligan Award for Effective Committee Management from the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) for chairing an INCITS committee that developed 17 standards in the area of Storage Area Networks. He had made a gift of $1 million to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to establish the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair in Storage Systems Research at UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering. This major gift provides valuable support for the engineering school's Storage Systems Research Center.
Malavalli earned degrees in electrical engineering and physics at the National Institute of Engineering in Mysore, India. Malavalli currently invests in and mentors numerous storage networking startups in both Silicon Valley and in India. He also contributes substantially towards his own global vision, which encompasses telemedicine and education.
VC Seth Neiman is reported to have discovered Kumar, the engineer and with his support lunched Brocade Communication. The rest, as they say is History.

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