Brad Baker

Brad got his start working on sonar applications utilizing Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for the U.S. and Australian navies at General Dynamics. He moved on to help design and build the only secure multi-tenant workstation at the time: the Common Display System (CDS) for the U.S. Navy. Brad’s area of focus is on architecting complex systems that require more than a ‘Gimme three servers and a SAN’ approach. Examples include Lustre, Cloudera Hadoop, HPC, and VDI environments that utilize GPU technology. Brad is FlexPod certified.

Brad received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Washington State University and a master’s degree in acoustics from the University of Idaho. The technical nature of his degrees taught Brad that engineering schools are not necessarily there to teach people how to do specific things (they did, albeit narrowly), but rather how to apply the fundamentals of engineering to everything one does. Brad transitioned from pure engineering into a pre-sales engineering role, better fitting his personality and style. He spent five years at NetApp as both a sales engineer and later an account manager, and he then transitioned to the value-added reseller (VAR) world for an additional six years.