Howard Johnson

Howard is actively involved in the Fibre Channel standards development as part of the INCITS/ANSI T11.3 organization representing Broadcom and is the technical liaison with many of Broadcom’s Fibre Channel industry partners. Utilizing these relationships, Howard orchestrated standardization of the Fabric Notifications architecture for the Fibre Channel industry and worked with ecosystem partners to develop solutions leveraging Fabric Notifications in the formation of autonomous SAN technology. Howard began his career in 1984 developing configuration applications for 3270 Cluster Controllers for McDATA Corporation in Boulder, Colorado. In 1993, in partnership with IBM, Howard was part of the team that created the ESCON Director Models 3/4/5 as well as the FICON to ESCON Bridge. As technical leader, he directed the efforts of the technical teams that expanded IBM’s original storage-area networks (SAN) from ESCON to FICON. In 2007, Howard joined Brocade, a Broadcom company, as a member of the Fabric Operating Systems Architecture group and is responsible for the technical strategy relating to Brocade’s mainframe infrastructure offerings. His industry experience lead to a featured interview in Enterprise Executive (2019, issue 6), where he discussed the future of the mainframe, FICON, and Fibre Channel. Today, Howard is an active member of the Brocade SAN Networking division of Broadcom Limited and continues his technical leadership in enterprise networking solutions. With more than 38-years of professional experience in high-end processing environments, Howard remains an active advocate of Fibre Channel and enterprise solutions.