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 Director Software Ecosystem, Open Communities, and Services at Celestica. Jeff has been very active in Open Compute since 2013 and has led many contributions and projects within Open Compute. Jeff is an industry recognized technology leader with in-depth experience in the telecommunication industry and has an extensive skill set for networking product architecture and deployment. Prior to Celestica, 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 Celestica, 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 in Intel's datacenter platform group. John has been a member of the DMTF (dmtf.org) standards body since 2004 and has authored numerous specifications. As a member DMTF Board, John also holds the office of VP of Alliances. An original member of the Redfish Forum, John chairs work groups modeling firmware update and composability. While John has been OCP's IC Rep to the HW Management Project, subprojects for rack management, management modules and hardware fault management have been established. John help create OCP profiles for common OCP platform manageability and rack management.

Jason Forrester brings 20+ years of experience leading and executing complex networking projects at start-ups and market leading public companies, including Target, Amazon and Apple.  Jason’s work in the networking industry has led to some of the world’s largest production datacenter networks. Jason holds multiple patents in the areas of networking. The patents focus on routing, load balancing and security. He is very active in the open source community and lead efforts behind Dent and most recently enterprise enhancements to sonic.  Jason’s current focus is to take many of the open source network operating systems and bring them to the enterprise

Dong Wei is a Standards Architect and Fellow at Arm. He leads the Arm SystemReady Program. He has significant experience in leading the industry in innovations and standardizations and is a staunch supporter for open source development in Tianocore EDK2, UBoot, LinuxBoot, OpenBMC and Trusted Firmware. He is the Vice President (Chief Executive) of the UEFI Forum and co-chairs its ACPI Working Group. He is a Board member of the PCI SIG and co-chairs its Firmware/Software Working Group. He is a Board member and the Secretary of the CXL Consortium.  He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

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.

I build and research computer systems. I am the Horizontal Lead for platform Security and the Tech Lead for system software at Google's Technical Infrastructure group. I have led memory management, kernel release, and production mitigation of black swans, including Meltdown and Spectre. I co-founded GridCentric, a virtualization startup, acquired in 2014. From January 2010 to October 2011 I worked in AT&T Labs Research, publishing a number of first-tier academic papers. I got my PhD and MSc from University of Toronto. I got the NSERC Doctoral Prize for 2010, the Eurosys best paper award for 2009, and an NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship. I got my undergrad in Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahia Blanca, Argentina

Siamak Tavallaei is currently the Chief Systems Architect at Google Systems Infrastructure and co-chair of CXL Board of Director’s Technical Task Force. At OCP, Siamak served as co-chair of Server Project from June 2016 to Jan 2021 where he introduced the Modular Building Block Architecture (MBA) concept, co-authored several specifications for open-source solutions such as HGX-1, OAM, and Project Olympus.  He also initiated a collaborative effort on open accelerator infrastructure (OAI) and datacenter-ready secure control module (DC-SCM).  His plans are to encourage industry-wide participation and continue driving open-source contributions toward a modular hardware system (DC-MHS) and an integrated HW/SW system ready for hyperscale, enterprise, and edge datacenters (DC-Stack). At Google, he drives system architecture and productization of solutions around CXL-enabled opportunities.  His current focus is the optimization of large-scale, mega-datacenters for general-purpose computing and accelerated, tightly-connected, problem-solving machines built on co-designed hardware, software, security, and management. As a Principal Architect at Microsoft, he was part of Azure’s Next Cloud System Architecture team collaborating with industry partners to drive a number of initiatives in research, design, and deployment of hardware for cloud-scale services such as Azure, AI, Bing, Office 365, Exchange, and SQL across a global datacenter footprint. Siamak holds over 40 patents in computer server architecture, design, and fault management; he has led and served on industry-wide initiatives; and he often shares his learning through published papers and presentations at industry conferences.  His leadership drove large projects and facilitated communication, collaboration, and contributions of diverse talents for industry-wide initiatives such as InfiniBand and CXL specifications; while, his expertise in memory and storage hierarchy enabled improved performance, reliability, availability and serviceability of servers and solutions. As we collectively reinvigorate the server industry and streamline efficient, flexible, and scalable hardware and software through Open Compute Project, we enable developers to focus their brain power and efforts on solving higher ordered problems.  With his seasoned leadership, Siamak has been actively participating in CXL consortium and OCP activities fostering the philosophy and the direction of the OCP Foundation by effectively communicating the core OCP tenets and encouraging the community to participate in transparent, worldwide collaboration.  Such inclusive participation of diverse contributions and meaningful feedback will drive technical excellence and a healthy OCP ecosystem.

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.

Business development and growth - driving IP, semiconductor, hardware, software system and turn-key solutions with Tier-1 Cloud Service Providers

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.