Mohamad EL-Batal

Mohamad El-Batal is the Seagate Cloud Systems Group (CSG) Chief Technologist, and part of the overall Seagate Office of the CTO team of Technologists. In his role at Seagate, Mohamad is given the opportunity to help shape the CSG strategy and its future storage product technology roadmap.

Mohamad holds a BS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and did Graduate work on Digital Signal Processing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In his career, since 1990, Mohamad charted new grounds in various fields of enterprise and modern datacenter storage architectures that spanned from Storage-Array, SSD and HDD controller silicon architectures to Flash Translation Layer (FTL) firmware innovation, storage system Virtualization, Caching and Tiering architectures and software solutions. Mohamad also led teams of talented startup focused architects with various disciplines, who pioneered various storage and memory innovations in the industry.

Mohamad is on the Board of Directors of the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), Flash Memory Summit (FMS), and Open Compute Project (OCP). Mohamad is currently the chair of the NVMe-HDD working group and driving its requirements specification. He is also the chair of the OCP PCIe External Connectivity Workstream enabling PCIe to evolve with NVMe and Computer Express Link (CXL) into the Ultra-Low-Latency of optical fabric of choice. He was the author and chair of the Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) specification and was on the SBB board of directors for multiple years. Mohamad participated technically and influenced various industry groups including the FC, SAS, NVMe, CXL and GenZ consortiums.

In his career, Mohamad worked at leading enterprise storage technology and cloud provider companies, including Tandem, EMC, Mylex, IBM, LSI, Engenio, NetApp and now Seagate. Mohamad has 30+ year history of enterprise and cloud storage architecture knowledge, experience, and innovation. Mohamad holds 50+ issued and 20+ pending patents, covering: High-Availability/Resiliency Storage and Memory solutions, SSD controller and Systems architecture focus areas.