Incubation Committee

Dharmesh Jani (‘DJ’) has been an active member of OCP since 2012. DJ has over 20+ years of experience in various roles spanning engineering, product management, and business strategy. He started his career at Rockwell Science Center designing ultra-high speed circuits in CMOS, subsequently as a system designer he designed first terrestrial FEC based optical transmission system at Corvis Systems. As a product manager at Semtech, he introduced the world’s first coherent 100G MUX for ultra-long-haul transport systems. Prior to joining Facebook, DJ led the cloud transformation for the biggest business unit at Flex. He was instrumental in bringing Flex into OCP and via founding of CloudLabs team, building core competencies within Flex to launch a cloud business unit. In his current role at Facebook, he is responsible for leading OCP and other open technologies, working with stakeholders inside and outside Facebook. Earlier in his career, he held roles at Infinera and Intel among others listed above. DJ is based out of Menlo Park, CA and is looking forward to working with the OCP Community and leadership team to continue the drive towards more open infrastructure.

Jeff has 30 years of experience in the Networking industry and is currently the Vice President of Technology at Edgecore Networks. He has very been active in Open Compute since 2013 and is responsible for research and integration of technology into Edgecore's award winning Open Networking product portfolio. Jeff is an industry recognized technology leader with in-depth experience in the telecommunication industry and an extensive skill set for networking product architecture and deployment. Prior to Edgecore, Jeff has held numerous leadership level roles directing worldwide Engineering and Marketing teams to create successful product lines for access layer connectivity, Switching, and Routing platforms bringing high volume, high revenue products to market. Jeff continues to drive the Open Networking technology road map for Edgecore Networks, is active in many open source community efforts, and in the process is helping to guide the transformation and adoption of Open Networking.

Jessica is a Thermal Tech Lead Engineer at Intel in the Data Platforms Engineering and Architecture Group. Currently, her focus is on developing advanced cooling solutions for IT equipment using liquid cooling. Jessica joined Intel 2006 and has managed projects relating to the development of new and innovative technology solutions for IT equipment in fluids, acoustics, and thermals. She joined Intel from academia, where she worked as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering. She taught a variety of fluid mechanic and thermal curriculum. She has 20+ years of experience in modeling, experiments, and project management. Jessica co-chaired the Grace Hopper Poster sessions by invitation from the Anita Borg Institute, and she is a recipient of the 2013 SWE Emerging Leader Award. Jessica has 10 patents and 25+ peer reviewed publications in journals and conferences. In OCP, Jessica has previously led the Advanced Cooling Solutions Cold Plate Sub-Project, which delivered OCPs first cold plate requirements document. 

Justin has over 20 years’ experience in mission critical infrastructure operations. He is the Senior Engineer within the Global Data Center Infrastructure department at Rackspace Technology, and has been with the company for 13 years. He holds a B.S.E.E. from the University of Texas – Dallas, a Master Electrician’s License from the Texas Department of Licensing & Regulation and is currently in pursuit of his Master of Science in Datacenter Systems Engineering at Southern Methodist University.
Justin supports Rackspace Technology’s Global Data Center Infrastructure department through design, build, operation, and maintenance standards including Change Management support for Data Center Engineering and Operations teams globally. He is a strong supporter of the Open Compute Project as well as the OpenStack platform.

John has over 35 years in the computer industry: architecting, designing and coding. Currently, John is a Principal Engineer and a system manageability architect for Rack Scale Design. John has been a member of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standards body since 2004 and has authored and contributed to over 40 DMTF specification. Currently, John sits on the DMTF Board and holds the office of VP of Alliances and Vice-chair. John authored the "OCP Hardware Management using Redfish" which is currently released as DMTF work-in-progress. As the IC Rep for the HW Management Project, John will be responsible for directing the efforts for an OCP profile for RedFish. OpenBMC is currently being developed and once ratified, John will work to define the OCP Profile for OpenBMC as well.

Lihua Yuan is a Partner Software Engineering Manager in Microsoft Azure Networking team. He leads the network management team that manages the entire lifecycle of network devices in Microsoft data centers through automation. He has led a transformation in how Microsoft manages the network - from human- and spreadsheet- driven workflows to automated "lights out" services driven continuously by desired state. He has led multiple research projects advancing the state of art of network management, monitoring and diagnostics, with multiple publications at top research venues like SIGCOMM, NSDI and SOSP, and direct impact on how Microsoft operates the network. 

      Lihua has been working closely with the OCP community since 2014. He has spearheaded the standardization of Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) at OCP, with the support of every major switch ASIC vendors and industrial partners. He leads the open source initiative of SONiC, a Debian-based modular and containerized network operating system that supports many ASIC and hardware platforms. SONiC has attracted a large developer community and been deployed at scale at multiple companies in production at scale. He is committed to work with the OCP community towards an open and disaggregated ecosystem.

Ron Minnich is a Software Engineer at Google. He has been writing firmware for 40 years, starting with the z80 and 6800. He's also a long time contributor in the Unix, BSD, Plan 9, and Linux communities. He started the LinuxBIOS project in 1999, which was renamed to coreboot in 2008 and is now used in tens of millions of Chromebooks. His most recent effort, LinuxBoot, is now part of the Linux Foundation and aims to bring the benefits of a full Linux kernel to several firmware environments, including coreboot, u-boot, and UEFI.

Steve Mills is a Mechanical Engineer who has dedicated over 25 years to the development of IT hardware in the enterprise and hyperscale space.  He joined Facebook in 2012 and is currently a Technical Lead for Open Rack. Prior to Facebook, he worked for at Storspeed and DELL Technologies.  While at Dell, developing custom solutions for large clients, he was first introduced to Open Compute in 2011. Since then, he has been a champion of OCP as a Lead in Open Compute’s Rack and Power Project for 5 years before moving to the Incubation Committee.  He has 47 patents and is an author of 7 contributions to OCP.

Elaine Palmer is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Research. She currently serves as the IC Rep for the OCP Security Project.

Jia Ning has been an active member of OCP since 2012. Jia has 14 years of experience in server development and started his career at Supermicro. He joined Facebook in 2011 to work on OCP server products. At Facebook, Jia has developed number of CPU and GPU server systems and contributed 6 specifications to OCP through server work group. Presently, Jia leads OCP NIC subgroup that developed a widely adopted OCP NIC specifications with strong community collaboration. In his current role at Facebook, he leads a team of engineers responsible for CPU, GPU, and Hardware Accelerator server development. Jia is based in Menlo Park, CA and is looking forward to working with the OCP Community and Foundation team to drive collaboration, and innovation in server space.

Twenty-two years in the data storage industry with Seagate focused on HDD product development and driving storage hardware and software ecosystem development Career. Twelve years in mechanical design for HDD, ranging from advanced motor technology development, HDD design and leading mechanical design teams for mission critical products.

Developed three mission critical HDD products over seven years as a product core team design lead, successfully leading cross functional design teams to provide the highest performance and highest reliability products in the storage industry. Development of these products required an understanding of all facets of storage device level subsystems and mandated interactions with customers to understand their system requirements. Led an effort to define the system level operating vibration ecosystem to optimize the environment to enable delivery of the lowest $/TB storage solution. Required coordinating HDD device development and CSB system developers to provide a sustainable ecosystem allowing HDD storage devices to grow capacity at sufficient rates to maintain the data industries long term growth goals while maintaining performance standards. Understanding the industries long term strategies around cooling of compute plus storage, the higher level architecture that optimizes for power consumption and $/TB costs required for a healthy and competitive industry.

Developed the technical strategies to deliver device level firmware features that support the industry requirements through T13 and T10 standards and supporting feature arriving from industry organizations such as OCP. Increasingly device requirements must adapt to support the requirements of the larger storage architecture to support multiple ecosystems defined cloud and edge. Leading an effort to deliver open source tools and methods to manage installed storage both in the cloud and at the edge, creating options that enable delivery of low cost, highly available and secure storage to the industry. Tools that facilitate device health management and power optimization provide the operators the capability to minimize opex and industry implementation of these tools allows device makers to deliver the lowest $/TB to minimize capex.

Working with industry organizations such as ASHRAE and Open 19, pushing industry standards for environments and hardware architectures to optimize cooling and maintain environments promoting device reliability and capacity by minimizing vibration, reducing power consumption. Standardizing on hardware architecture and environmental conditions facilitates device and system developers lowers the both the capex and opex costs of deployed storage for the industry.

Professionally, I support the adoption of OCP specifications into the Telco environment. I have worked with the Nokia team to make several Telco/NEBS enhancements to OpenRack including -48V and HVDC inputs into the power shelves, EMI shielding options, and Zone 4 Earthquake certification. Most recently completing work on a Skylake motherboard with support for high packet throughput VNF’s, and also having hot swappable high-speed storage options.  I also assist several software teams to validate and develop enhancements to telco related open software stacks on integrated OCP hardware cabinets many based on Openstack and also the VNF’s that run on these stacks. I also have several patents related to core backbone networking.

OCP Community based, I have been involved in the OCP Telco Project since the formation meetings of the group. I was privileged to serve as a founding co-lead of the project and established many of the administrative aspects of the project. It is my belief that open communities are fundamental building blocks towards the future of technology.  I have contributed to many IETF RFCs and co-authored several addressing software disaggregation of network link technologies.