Moshe Yanai

 

Moshe Yanai (Hebrew: משה ינאי‎; born 1948 in Israel) is an Israeli electrical engineer (B.Sc., 1975, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology). He is also a technologist and inventor, businessman, entrepreneur, aviator (pilot), investor, multi-millionaire, and philanthropist. He is especially well known for leading the development of the EMC Symmetrix, the flagship product of EMC Corporation.

 

Biography

Mr. Yanai began his career in the 1970s, building IBM-compatible mainframe storage based on minicomputer disks for Elbit Systems (a joint project with Nixdorf Computer). He went on to develop high-end storage systems for Nixdorf in the United States. Yanai joined EMC in 1987, and managed the Symmetrix development, software and hardware, from its inception in the late 1980s until shortly before leaving EMC in 2001. His development team grew from several people, recruited among his former Israeli colleagues, to thousands, while he was holding the position of Vice President of EMC's Symmetrix group. The Symmetrix is the main reason for the rapid growth of EMC in the 1990s, both in size and value, from a company with a fading business of (minicomputer) computer memory boards, valued in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, to a tens of billions company. Before leaving he became an EMC Fellow.

He later funded and led an Israeli storage startup company, XIV, which was bought by IBM in January 2008 (IBM paid an estimated $300 million for a company invested in with an estimated $3 million). Moshe Yanai continued leading XIV and became an IBM Fellow. IBM XIV Storage System has become part of IBM's storage products portfolio. Shortly later, in April 2008, IBM bought Diligent Technologies, another storage company co-founded by Yanai. He left IBM in 2010 amid disagreement with IBM on the ways to advance the XIV product. In June 2011 his Alma mater awarded him the honor Distinguished Fellow of the Technion. He has been a board of directors member of several companies.

Awards

• EMC Fellow - 2001
• IBM Fellow – 2008
• IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award – 2010
• Technion Distinguished Fellow - 2011