CEI Interdisciplinary Seminar: Christian Belady

About the Speaker
Christian Belady is the general manager of CISA in Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure and Operations (MCIO) group. He is responsible for driving the strategy of datacenter development worldwide, including site selection, research, energy and sustainability. Recently Christian has also become responsible for developing all of the physical network infrastructure both undersea and terrestrial. The data center and network provide the foundational cloud infrastructure for over 200 Microsoft online and cloud services for consumers and businesses worldwide.
Previously, has led Global operations and helped Incubate and develop Microsoft’s cloud server and Christian has led GFS’ research and advanced development team that delivers new technologies for broad scale adoption in Microsoft’s data centers. Additionally, Christian earlier held the position of director of Hardware Architecture in the Extreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research where he managed the team that explored hardware opportunities related to the future of client plus cloud computing.

He joined Microsoft in 2007 as the Principal Infrastructure Architect for GFS to improve efficiency and cost in the company’s data center infrastructure. In this role, he drove initiatives for sustainability for the company and the infrastructure industry. He is also accredited with being one of the key architects for the company’s next generation modular data centers. Prior to joining Microsoft, Christian was a Distinguished Technologist for HP where he was responsible for driving the technology direction of HP’s server products and their environments, as well as industry data center initiatives. In addition, his earlier employers include Convex Computers (acquired by HP), Texas Instruments and IBM.

In 2010, SearchData named Christian as one of “5 People who changed the data center industry” and helped drive innovative thinking and quantitative benchmarking in the field. Christian has published several dozen papers, is frequently quoted in the press, and is a featured speaker on data center trends in the industry. Since the late 1990s, his publications have focused on data centers and the industry’s need for engineering efficient computing environments. Christian holds engineering degrees from Cornell University (BS) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (MS) and a business degree from the University of Texas at Dallas (MA) where he was honored with the 2010 Distinguished Alumni Award.