Alan is a long-time IT professional, having managed computer systems for over a decade, and written innovative system management software for more than 20 years. He wrote his first computer program a very long time ago, and was blessed to have participated in a number of really interesting and groundbreaking projects in his long career – having worked at Bell Labs, SuSE and IBM for much of that time.He founded the open source Linux-HA project (sometimes called Heartbeat, now called Pacemaker) and led it for nearly 10 years. It has been incorporated into a number of commercial products, and is estimated to be used in over 100,000 systems over the world including by some of the largest companies in the world, and in critical roles like air traffic control and health care. He is now leading work on the Assimilation project, which was inspired by his work on the highly custom 2.2 million million core Cyclops64 system for the US intelligence community.

He has spoken frequently on availability, monitoring, discovery, scalability, and raising Geek Girls – over 35 conferences all over the world. He connects exceptionally well with his audiences.

He has a sometimes-irrepressible sense of humor, and is blessed to be the husband of a beautiful and intelligent wife for many years, with whom he has two wonderful grown daughters – both of whom work in IT.s