Vincent Hsu IBM Fellow

IBM Corp. has elevated seven employees to IBM Fellow, its most prestigious technical honor, to acknowledge their contributions and innovations in developing some important technologies.

Among them is Vincent Hsu, IBM Systems and Technology Group, Storage Platform, Distinguished Engineer, CTO Disk Storage system, Tucson, AZ.

He has a long history of innovation in storage system architectures, creating workload optimized solutions through intelligent data placements. He is the founding architect for Easy Tier, the generation of storage virtualization that accounts for IBM’s leadership in storage efficiency and workload optimization. He is defining the next generation of storage platforms, designed to deliver data on demand. Intelligent storage and workload optimized solutions will be critical to IBM’s growth in newly designed data centers.

"To become a great technologist, you always have to be willing to challenge your own success," explained Vincent. "The second you finish a project, it’s time to think about the new idea to replace it. That’s a hard concept to learn, but it’s the difference between the leaders and the hundreds of others."

Early in his career, the future Fellow learned to be wary of the status quo. "When I joined our storage development team in Tucson in 1991, IBM dominated the storage market. EMC wasn’t even on the radar and then they came in with a different design and different price point and took big chunks of our disk business. It taught me a very important lesson about never being satisfied with your current technology and market position."

Vincent grew up in Taiwan 125 miles off mainland China, and inherited his knack for engineering from his father. "It was a poor yet hard-working country back then, and my father worked a lot of jobs. He was an engineer, artist, manager, tour guide and a cook owning a restaurant. He is a very hand-on guy and believed that there is nothing he cannot learn if he put his mind into it. My parents were always finding a way to move up despite the difficulties in their lives. They taught me a lot about resiliency and put your mind into everything you do."

After earning a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Taiwan, Vincent attends graduate school at the University of Arizona, where he studied computer engineering and earned his masters in computer and electrical engineering. Eager to stay in Tucson, the young immigrant was happy to score a job offer from IBM company with a prestigious reputation in stark contrast to the here-today, gone-tomorrow businesses he’d seen his father work for.

In 2001, he earned his stripes as a Senior Technical Staff Member after leading the team that delivered FICON support two years early, connecting System z with IBM’s storage systems, an advance that gave IBM a stranglehold on mainframe-attached storage. He followed that up by leading the development of the DS8000, which launched in 2005 and remains a key part of IBM’s storage portfolio.

Vincent, who earned an MBA at night to bolster his business know-how, is heads down on the fourth generation of easy tier, a storage virtualization function that automatically moves data to the right place at the right time to meet the right price and performance levels. "We are transforming storage from a passive device to a smart system that will be able to learn, adapt and communicate. The next step we are working on with research and software teams is content-aware storage, which can actually interpret the content of the data and its characteristics. It is the era of ‘smart storage‘."

Fluent in Mandarin, Vincent – who holds a black belt in karate – frequently flies to China to meet with IBM’s major storage clients there, as well as with young technical talent working at labs in Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei.

"The big China banks can millions and millions of customers to support," the new Fellow noted. "The scale is tremendous. They place a premium on business continuity in such a large scale. So the system design has to take the whole solution stack and the instability of the infrastructure into consideration and maintain the best level of quality of service. These are very difficult problems—scale, low latency, the ability to manage no matter what the contingency. These are the problems IBM likes to solve. And that is why IBM storage is number one in the GCG market."

Vincent, who mentors more than 30 next-gen IBMers worldwide, often brings young technologists along to client meetings. "I see a lot of myself 20 years ago in many of these engineers. They are ambitious and they work hard, but many of them lack confidence in front of the customer. I often remind them, you can’t learn problems in lab. You always have to be with people. Be willing to be uncomfortable. Be hungry to learn. You will become an invaluable asset to IBM because you understand customer problems."

Examples of technology
originated by IBM Fellows include:

• Thin-film heads, for high-density disk storage devices
• RAMAC, the world’s first disk drive