Christos Karamanolis joined VMware in 2005. He was appointed as a VMware Fellow in 2016 for his overall contributions to storage virtualization. He currently serves as the chief technology officer of the Storage and Availability Business Unit where he is in charge of strategy and technical product roadmap.

 

Christos was one of the original vSAN architects who envisioned and developed the product, currently the fastest growing business in VMware’s product portfolio. He is still actively involved in the architecture and development of the product. During his tenure with VMware, he has worked on the ESXi storage stack and led a number of projects including VMware’s vSphere Replication, Virtual Volumes and Storage Policy-Based Management. He also works with strategic industry partners to architect storage and data protection features and APIs that enable a rich product ecosystem for VMware customers.

 

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 30 issued patents with several more pending. Christos holds a Diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece and a PhD in Distributed Computing from Imperial College, London, UK.