Andy Walls is Chief Architect and CTO for IBM’s Flash Systems Division. He is also an IBM Fellow, the company’s most prestigious honor. A 35-year storage industry veteran, Andy is a pioneer in enabling flash memory in the enterprise. He has developed enterprise storage systems that achieve high performance, good endurance, and the availability data centers require. He was responsible for the Texas Memory Systems acquisition and has since defined the architecture for all FlashSystem products. He is currently defining next generation products that can be used in traditional SAN environments as well as in clouds and by emerging workloads. He is widely recognized an expert in storage and flash memory. He has designed ASICs, PCBs, firmware stacks, and systems. Known as an innovator, he has filed over 100 patents. Andy earned a BSEE from UC Santa Barbara.