Walt Wallach
Walt Wallach is a senior technology leader with more than twenty years executive experience formulating and articulating technology strategy, He is passionate about synthesizing new products across technologies and ahead of the competition. Having successfully built development teams and mentored them on sound engineering process, Walt has delivered a stream of successful and pioneering products in eight startups and three large corporations. He considers problems in a wide context of customer interest and across company functions to maximize the benefit to the customer and the profit to the company. His engineering credentials include 52 U.S. Patents on hardware and software technology. Walt’s teams and peers consider him a resource for validating ideas and designs. His passion for technology and broad technological and business experience allows him to quickly understand how actions affect other parts of the organization, as well as the entire customer experience.
Walt began consulting in 1997. Clients included Sleep Solutions, 3Com and Suma Technologies.
Walt served as Vice President of Software Development at NetXen, Inc. (a pioneering 10gigabit Ethernet device company).
Prior to that he was Vice President of Software and Strategy at Penguin Computing, where he was responsible for the Scyld Clusterware clustering and virtualization technology. During his tenure, shipments of Scyld grew from around 10 in 2004 to more than 1000 by 2006, while revenue increased from $45,000 $700,000 in 2006 and was headed towards $1,500,000 in 2007.
As Director of Software Development for Houston-based Industry Standard Servers (ISS) at Compaq and HP, Walt’s team developed driver stack and configuration tools for low latency cluster interconnects for Windows-based Proliant servers. Walt and the team worked closely with Microsoft on the design of the driver stack for the VIA-based Servernet interconnect and later for Infiniband and RDMA over Ethernet.
Concurrently, Walt managed a group integrating Oracle Parallel Server and RAC on Proliant servers with a hardware and software product that made installing and running the Oracle clustered database easy and reliable. Working with Oracle, the team provided the first supported hardware and software stack for Oracle 9i RAC for industry standard servers on Linux, garnering 50% market share while maintaining Compaq’s 50% market share for RAC on Windows.
Prior to that, Walt served in a number of management capacities at NetFrame Systems, a pioneer provider of industry standard servers. Walt lead the team delivering Novell NetWare on NetFrame servers, which provided the majority of company revenue and was considered the leading high availability NetWare solution. Walt added responsibility for Windows and for the company’s system management software, and became chief technologist for the company. While at NetFrame Walt developed software to bond multiple Ethernet NICs into a single large pipe, then lead the development of (patented) NIC teaming drivers for off-the-shelf PCI NICs. He also conceived ClusterData, a high availability file serving architecture that virtualized file shares using Directory Services.