This month Brian A. Berg, Senior Certified Professional Consultant of Berg Software Design is PATCA’s featured consultant. He has been consulting for 36 years, and has been a PATCA member for 35 of those years. His specialty is hardware and software in the storage industry, and his skills have progressed through various technologies in that arena including optical (CD-ROM. DVD), magnetic (disk and tape) and flash memory. Brian was invited to give a keynote speech at the China Flash Forum in Beijing in November, and his talk was simultaneously translated into Mandarin for the audience. Titled “How Flash Memory Became the World’s Most Important Storage,” Brian described flash memory’s origins, the impact of Moore’s Law on its growth as a disk drive replacement, and how this low-power, compact, semiconductor storage medium has enabled the portable computing revolution.

Brian has been involved in organizing and speaking at technology conferences since 1987. He considers them to be an integral part of his consulting work since they keep him current in the marketplace and provide numerous important contacts. He is Technical Chair of Flash Memory Summit, and he helps organize five other conferences annually.

Recent projects include:

• In-Situ processing: driven by cloud computing and the Internet of Things, this architecture allows data to be processed and analyzed at its point of capture, thereby eliminating the need for large volumes of data to be transmitted to a central server.
• Ceph: an open-source effort that allows for file-, block- and object-based storage to be supported within a single computer cluster. The architecture is highly distributed and scalable, and eliminates any single point of failure.