Biographical note

Kevin Elder lives in Portland, Oregon, and is a Principal Architect and Engineer at Xiologix LLC. With over 15 years of experience in IT, focused on selling, installing, and supporting virtualization and storage technologies, Kevin is responsible for customer success from initial design through implementation. He has been installing, managing, and selling VMware products for over 10 years. Kevin holds a VCP 6 and is a Dell EMC Elect for 2017. Christopher Kusek lives in Portland, Oregon where he is Chief Technology Officer and Executive VP of Engineering at Xiologix. With over 20 years of experience in IT as a technology evangelist and industry leader, Christopher plays a key role in Xiologix's growth, leading its storage and engineering practice to evaluate and architect solutions that meet the client's tactical and strategic goals. He has over 20 years of experience in the industry with virtualization experience running back to the pre-1.0 days of VMware. He has shared his expertise with many far and wide through conferences, presentations, CXIParty, and sponsoring or presenting at community events and outings, whether it is focused on artificial intelligence, cloud, machine learning, networking, security, storage, or virtualization. Christopher has been a frequent contributor to VMware communities, vBrownBag, Twitter, and YouTube, and has been an active blogger for over a decade. Christopher is a proud VMware vExpert and a huge supporter of the program since its inception. He continues to help drive the growth of the virtualization community. He was named EMC Elect in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, and continues with the renamed program of Dell EMC Elect in 2017. Christopher is a Cisco Champion 2016 and 2017, and has been a member of the VMware vExpert Program for nearly 10 years. Christopher is a vExpert specialist in the breakout designations of vExpert VSAN and vExpert NSX, and he's been a frequent contributor to VMware communities such as vBrownBag. Christopher shares his expertise online in the Thwack community as a SolarWinds ambassador, and he's a regular contributor and delegate to the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day series. You'll find Christopher directly through his Twitter handle, @cxi, and on his YouTube channel, CXI. Prasenjit Sarkar is a product manager at Oracle for their public cloud, with a focus on cloud strategy, Oracle Ravello, cloud-native applications, and the API platform. His primary focus is driving Oracle's cloud computing business with commercial and public sector customers, helping to shape and deliver a strategy to build broad use of Oracle's Infrastructure as a Service offerings, such as Compute, Storage, and Database as a Service. He is also responsible for developing public/private cloud integration strategies, customers' cloud computing architecture visions, future state architectures, and implementable architecture roadmaps in the context of the public, private, and hybrid cloud computing solutions that Oracle can offer. He has also authored six industry-leading books on virtualization, SDN, and physical compute, among others. He has six successful patents and six more patents pending at the US PTO. He has also authored numerous research articles.