1. James M. O’Reilly
408-230-7338 joreilly@pacbell.net
SUMMARY
Jim is a recognized expert in storage and computer systems. He has realized a number of major
accomplishments in business and engineering, has led some of the industry’s major advances,
such as SCSI, and is today one of the creative leaders in the industry. Having run several start-up
companies and large divisions, Jim has substantial expertise not only in engineering and product
management, but additionally in operations, quality and administration/finance.
Delivering mainly complete systems, in hardware he has been involved in components, ASICs and
PCBs. On the software side, he has delivered software for storage, operating systems and
enterprise-level mission-critical applications, as well as the tools required to make hardware useful,
such as drivers and management tools.
CV
Currently
Consulting as SME for cloud systems responsible for defining infrastructure for a $20 Billion
deployment by a major Telco. Areas of responsibility include containers and associated heating,
cooling and power; systems, storage and LANs; and virtualization.
2006 to 2011
Held executive-level positions at several startups, creating storage business units and engineering
teams. Companies are Germane (Extended environment systems), and Rackable and Verari (both
scale-out storage and storage appliances for the cloud).
Recently delivered a substantial set of scale-out storage appliances covering large-scale Object
Storage, Block storage and NAS.
Recent Notable Accomplishments
• Germane 2010
 Delivered highest-density storage servers and compute servers in the industry,
capable of running at 45C to allow ambient air-cooling in containerized data
centers worldwide. Among other things, this kit is used for missile launch
control on the US Ballistic Missile Fleet.
 Created patent-pending half-high slot in servers for SSD drives
• Rackable 2008
 Delivered storage appliances for the cloud running leading storage software,
anticipating the current Unified Storage appliance trend in the industry by 2
years and delivering large-scale object, block and NAS storage
 Asked by Intel to co-announce their first SSD product line
 Set up JV with NetApp to overcome “boot-storm” problems in VDI, developing
a method for booting 40ft containers of virtual machines in just a few minutes
• Verari 2007
 Delivered 70 Petabytes of Web 2.0 media-streaming appliances in 9 months –
As an early containerized product, this is the platform for Microsoft’s Virtual
Earth cloud
 Won Bronze Product of the Year award from TechTarget
 Delivered first SSD storage blade and first 10G Ethernet based NAS/iSCSI
appliance in the industry
2002 to 2005
Provided C-level consulting to struggling companies in roles such as acting CTO, VP Engineering
and “executive without portfolio”. One company was acquired. At others, Jim brought a RAID ASIC
James O’Reilly CV Page 1 jim/oreilly@volanto.net 408.230.7338

2. to market, and ran a team in Israel designing IB-based storage appliances. A couple of companies
were beyond hope.
Prior to 2002
Founded Scalant Systems in 1997 & was CEO to 2002, delivering pioneering blade systems.
Before that, Jim held executive roles at Metalithic Systems, CDS, Memorex-Telex (running the
$350M annual revenue PC unit), PC Brand, and NCR (running the Peripherals Division – now
Engenio)
Notable Accomplishments
• Scalant
 Won e-Week Editor’s Choice for industry-first 1/4U blade system
 Delivered Industry’s first Virtual Tape Library (VTL) appliance
 Completed three rounds of financing
• Achieved exit success for CDS (merger) and PC Brand (acquired)
• NCR
 Led development of SCSI, creating a multi-billion dollar industry
 Designed the first SCSI chip, and has first working part in the Smithsonian
 Created and delivered a $2 Billion mini-computer, the 9100
 Built first clone of the IBM PC
 Created Printer Business Unit and grew it to $40M annual revenue
• Early career
 Designed first ASIC disk controller in industry
 Chaired ECMA sub-committee for Floppy Disk and was primary author of
the first industry standard, seminal in creating a stable market
Education
MA, BA in Physics, Cambridge University
US Citizen
James O’Reilly CV Page 2 jim/oreilly@volanto.net 408.230.7338