Thomas M. Ruwart has over 29 years of experience in the computer and storage industry starting in 1977 with Control Data Corporation. His experience spans hardware and software from IBM mainframe disk drives to large supercomputer-class storage systems. Aside from Control Data, Tom has worked for a start-up company, Edge Computer Corporation, the Minnesota Supercomputer Center, the University of Minnesota Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, Ciprico, and the University of Minnesota DTC Intelligent Storage Consortium that he co-founded. Tom is currently at Sherwood Information Partners as well as consulting on various government-funded large-scale storage projects. As part of this work Tom is actively involved in the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Object-based Storage Device (OSD) Technical Working Group (TWG) and the IEEE Mass Storage Systems Technical Committee. All these activities are focused on driving the research, development, and deployment of intelligent storage technologies, applications, and markets.