Moshe Yanai (; born 1949) is an Israeli

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

. He is an

inventor An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea, or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...

, businessman,

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

aviator An aircraft pilot or aviator is a person who controls the flight of an aircraft by operating its directional flight controls. Some other aircrew members, such as navigators or flight engineers, are also considered aviators because they a ...

investor An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future Return on capital, return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital the investor usually purchases some species of pr ...

,"EMC transfers its R&D to Diligent"
''HA'ARETZ'', November 12, 2002 (for a printer friendly version clic
here
. Retrieved 11-13-2010. and

philanthropist Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives for the public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private good, focusing on material ...

."New bird research fund to take flight next week"
''The Jerusalem Post'' 11/29/2010. He led the development of the

EMC Symmetrix The Symmetrix system was an EMC's enterprise storage array. It combined dozens of hard drives into a single virtual device that was then directly attached to a computer or I/O channel, or shared on a storage area network or a local area net ...

, the

flagship product A core product or flagship product is a company's primary promotion, service or product that can be purchased by a consumer. Core products may be integrated into end products, either by the company producing the core product or by other companie ...

EMC Corporation EMC Corporation (stylized as EMC²) was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which sold data storage device, data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other pro ...

in the 1990s, which prevented, to some extent, financial chaos in

New York Stock Exchange The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is the List of stock exchanges, largest stock excha ...

and certain

bank A bank is a financial institution that accepts Deposit account, deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital m ...

s after the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

, as further detailed below.

Biography

Moshe Yanai was born in 1949 in

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

, and earned a

B.Sc. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

in 1975 from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

Elbit-Nixdorf project

Yanai began his career building IBM-compatible mainframe

data storage Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are con ...

based on

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

disks for

Elbit Systems Elbit Systems Ltd. is an Israel-based international military technology company and defense contractor. Founded in 1966 by Elron, Elbit Systems is the primary provider of the Israeli military's land-based equipment and unmanned aerial v ...

(a joint project with

Nixdorf Computer Nixdorf Computer AG was a West German computer company founded by Heinz Nixdorf in 1952. Headquartered in Paderborn, Germany, it became the fourth largest computer company in Europe, and a worldwide specialist in banking and point-of-sale syste ...

). He went on to develop high-end storage systems for Nixdorf in the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

EMC Corporation

Yanai joined

in 1987, and managed the Symmetrix development,

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

and hardware, from its inception in the late 1980sAxxana board of directors
See Moshe Yanai. Retrieved 2-26-2011. until shortly before leaving EMC in 2001.EMC Company Web site, November 29, 2001

See paragraph about Moshe Yanai. Retrieved 10-24-2010. His development team grew from several people, recruited among his former Israeli colleagues, to thousands, while he was vice president. As a result, EMC grew in the 1990s, both in size and value, from a company with a fading business of (

)

computer memory Computer memory stores information, such as data and programs, for immediate use in the computer. The term ''memory'' is often synonymous with the terms ''RAM,'' ''main memory,'' or ''primary storage.'' Archaic synonyms for main memory include ...

boards, valued in several millions of

dollars Dollar is the name of more than 25 currencies. The United States dollar, named after the international currency known as the Spanish dollar, was established in 1792 and is the first so named that still survives. Others include the Australian d ...

, to a hundreds-of-billions company. Before leaving Yanai became an EMC Fellow. Yanai led the development of the

, the

in the 1990s, which was a first scalable network storage system in the market.

hardware and its SRDF (Symmetrix remote data facility) software placed

as "the most dominnat force in all of the storage industry". The Symmetrix network storage scalability made it the father of current

cloud storage Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which data, said to be on "the cloud", is stored remotely in logical pools and is accessible to users over a network, typically the Internet. The physical storage spans multiple servers (so ...

, essential in mamy avenues of

online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity, and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed as "on lin ...

and

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

technologies. The role of Yanai's contribution was described by 2001 ESG report by : ”the person most responsible for architecting the single most successful product in subsystem history (Symmetrix) has been Moshe Yanai". Enterprises such as banks who depend on performance and big data found Symmetrix to be essential for their work. Later on, Symmetrix remote replication feature prevented financial chaos in

and certain

s after the

, as described by Barron's who called the SRDF “the true hero of 9/11”. This appreciation of Symmetrix and SDRF is based on the fact that "EMC has 25 customers in the World Trade Center... with another dozen in the immediate vicinity". The

and several important banks were among these 25 customers.

Diligent Technologies and XIV

Yanai co-founded Diligent Technologies in Israel as an R&D center for EMC. Yanai also funded and led an

i storage

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an Entrepreneurship, entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses tha ...

, XIV, which was bought by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

in January 2008.

paid an estimated $300 million for a company invested in with an estimated $3 million."Why did IBM buy XIV? IBM's XIV Purchase background"
''TecWorld'', January 4, 2008. Retrieved 11-11-2010. Shortly later, in April 2008,

also bought Diligent Technologies.IBM Company Web site: Press release 18 April 200
IBM Acquires Storage Company Diligent Technologies
Retrieved 3-1-2011. Yanai continued leading XIV and became an

IBM Fellow An IBM Fellow is a position at IBM appointed by the CEO. Typically only four to nine (eleven in 2014) IBM Fellows are appointed each year, in May or June. Fellow is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. Over ...

,IBM Company Web site
IBM Fellow Moshe Yanai
Retrieved 11-11-2010. while

IBM XIV Storage System The IBM XIV Storage System was a line of cabinet-size disk storage servers. The system is a collection of Modular programming, modules, each of which is an independent computer with its own computer memory, memory, interconnections, disk drives, a ...

became an IBM storage product.IBM Company Web site
IBM XIV Storage System
Retrieved 3-1-2011. Yanai left IBM in 2010.
''Calcalist'', September 7, 2010 (In Hebrew; a printer friendly versio

for an English version use, e.g., Google Web-page translation). Retrieved 11-11-2010.

INFINIDAT

In 2011, Yanai founded Infinidat, a

computer data storage Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The cent ...

company. In 2011, Infinidat announced Moshe became its CEO. In April 2015, Infinidat announced a $150 million investment led by

TPG Capital TPG Inc., previously known as Texas Pacific Group and TPG Capital, is an American private equity firm based in Fort Worth, Texas. TPG manages investment funds in growth capital, venture capital, public equity, and debt investments. The firm in ...

. This investment placed it among the most valuable privately held companies.Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2015
"Data Storage Startup Infinidat Raises $150 Million at $1.2 Billion Valuation"
Retrieved 04-30-2015. He also has been a

board of directors A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

member of several companies.

Patents

Yanai is an inventor or co-inventor of about 40 US patents in the field of electronic data storage. For example only, two patents granted to EMC and invented by Yanai ''etal'' are: # US 5,390,313 granted February 14, 1995, titled "Data storage with data mirroring and reduced access time data retrieval". # US 5,544,347 granted August 6, 1996, titled " Data storage controlled remote data mirroring with respectively maintained data indices".

Awards and recognition

* EMC Fellow – 2001 *

– 2008. * IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award – 2010, awarded "for sustained innovation and legendary leadership in development of clustered global cache storage architectures and business continuity solutions that have defined the enterprise storage industry". * Distinguished Fellow of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology – 2011. The Technion is Yanai's

Alma mater Alma mater (; : almae matres) is an allegorical Latin phrase meaning "nourishing mother". It personifies a school that a person has attended or graduated from. The term is related to ''alumnus'', literally meaning 'nursling', which describes a sc ...

. *

Honorary Doctorate An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or '' ad hon ...

, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology – 2012

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yanai, Moshe Living people 1948 births Technion – Israel Institute of Technology alumni IBM Fellows Israeli businesspeople Israeli inventors