John Bent is currently in his second tenure at Seagate after previously serving as Chief Architect for Seagate Government Solutions. He has researched, designed, and built storage and I/O systems all throughout his multi-decade career. Before joining Seagate Resarch last year, his focus at Seagate was on distributed data platforms for highly efficient mass capacity object storage and building open source communities. A graduate of Amherst College with a focus on cultural anthropology, John served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Palau before earning a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John has previously worked at Los Alamos National Labs, EMC, Cray, and was the the Field CTO at DDN. John is bilingual in English and Palauan, is the author of 37 academic peer-reviewed articles and over 100 USPTO patents, and has a google scholar reported h-index of 23. John’s favorite place to be is in a boat at dusk heading out to the reef with a speargun in hand and a betelnut in mouth.