Christos Karamanolis joined VMware in 2005. He was appointed as a VMware Fellow in 2016 for his overall contributions to storage virtualization and data protection.

Christos was one of the original vSAN architects who envisioned and developed the product, currently the leading HCI system in the industry. During his tenure with VMware, he also worked on the ESXi storage stack and led a number of projects including VMware’s vSphere Replication, Virtual Volumes and Storage Policy-Based Management. Christos is still actively involved in setting technical strategy for VMware’s storage products and services. More recently, his focus has shifted to the data infrastructure enterprises need to develop modern applications.

Prior to VMware, Christos spent several years at HP Labs, where he led research and development in large-scale distributed storage systems and QoS algorithms. He started his career as an academic at Imperial College, where he taught distributed algorithms and did research in fault-tolerant distributed software. His research has been recognized internationally including best paper award at SOSP 2007 and research grants by the European Commission, EPSRC and NATO.

Christos has co-authored more than 20 research papers in top-tier peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He has 50 issued patents in the US and more internationally. Christos holds a Diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece and a PhD in Distributed Computing from Imperial College, London, UK.