Fibre Channel Industry Association Elects 2021 Board of Directors

With a focus on maintaining FC’s position in the industry as the network protocol of choice for data center storage, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced its 2021 board of directors.

The board serves in advisory and fiduciary roles for the purpose of marketing FC technology. In the most recent edition of its annual Solutions Guide, the association reports a resurgence of interest in FC, first experienced a few years ago, accelerated by companies repatriating their cloud storage back on premise and migrating to hybrid cloud solutions using FC.

“Millions of ports of FC are currently deployed by thousands of customers in their data centers around the world,” said Chris Lyon, president. “All indications are this trend will continue due to both the massive growth of structured data and the increased focus on security and data governance. We are grateful for the leadership of the talented group of FCIA board directors as we usher in the transition to the next level of storage network speeds with products capable of 64GFC in Gen 7 FC.”

The 2021 FCIA board of directors includes 4 officers and 4 directors, hailing from a diverse set of technology industry leaders.

FCIA Officers:

• President: Chris Lyon, Amphenol ICC

• Treasurer: Craig Carlson, Marvell Semiconductor
• Secretary and education chair: David J. Rodgers, Teledyne LeCroy

Directors:
• Marketing chair: Rupin Mohan, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• Patty Driever, distinguished engineer, IBM Corporation
• Kiran Ranabhor, product management, Cisco
• Martin Skagen, VP of technology and architecture, Broadcom Inc.
• Steven Wilson, T11 chair (non-voting)

“IT organizations are discovering that FC storage solutions are still the centerpiece in a balanced data center storage design, because they provide the security, reliability and performance for their organization’s most premium data,” said Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “There’s also clear indications that the industry has coalesced around NVMe over FC solutions with all of the component and fabric suppliers and most of the major array vendors now offering production NVMe over FC options.”

The year 2021 also marks 2 milestones regarding the leadership of FCIA. Mike Fitzpatrick received a lifetime achievement award and Mark Jones was bestowed the status of president emeritus.

Fitzpatrick founded and led the Fibre Channel Loop Community (FCLC) in 1995 that marketed FC technology to the world helping to create a $9 billion Industry. In 1999, he led the merger of the FCLC with the Fibre Channel Association (FCA) to form the FCIA.

“A real visionary, Mike really was the one who started it all,” said Lyon. “He drove the setting of the profiles and standards that built the FC industry into what it is today.“

Since 2009, Jones has served as the president of the FCIA has worked in enterprise computing industry for over 35 years. He remains instrumental in driving strategic engineering, product development and market adoption of FC technology.

“Mark has been one of the primary voices of the FC industry and a guiding influence of the FCIA,” said Mohan. “We look forward to his continued contributions in communicating the benefits of FC to the marketplace.”