Manualshelf

ISS Technology Focus, Volume 10, Number 2

ManualsBrandsHP ManualsServerHP ProLiant SL165z G6 Server
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Meet the Expert—Kevin Leigh
Kevin Leigh is a Distinguished Technologist for HP Industry Standard Servers and a Blade
Server and Infrastructure Architect Lead. His responsibilities include designing future
blade infrastructure architecture and developing cost-efficient photonic components for
the next era of computing. The photo shows Kevin holding the backplane for the
BladeSystem C7000 Enclosure.
A long road to HP
While growing up in Burma, Kevin and other kids had to create their own games and
toys from commonly available materials. Looking back, those were probably his first
steps to becoming an inventor. He earned his undergraduate degree from the Rangoon
Institute of Technology. After coming to the U.S. in 1981, he received an M.S.E.E. and
Ph.D. from the University of Houston, where he also met his wife, Chi. Kevin started his
hardware engineering career at a seismic data acquisition system OEM and worked as
a firmware engineer at a geosciences software start-up. In 1987, he joined Compaq as
an electrical engineer in the Advanced Architecture Group. His first job at Compaq was
to reverse-engineer the IBM Micro Channel bus timings specification. His notable
contributions at HP include the first ProLiant DL360 server and the BladeSystem c-Class
infrastructure architecture.
Gene Freeman, Kevin’s manager, says, “Kevin has been a fundamental contributor to
two of our most successful products [the DL360 and BladeSystem] because he has
extreme patience while solving critical, complex problems. One of his most compelling
attributes is his ability to overcome massive obstacles to create the right solution. When
the smoke clears, Kevin is left standing and the problem is slain.”
You can’t do that!
Kevin says, “It’s very rewarding to create something useful for HP and customers starting with a blank piece of paper under
challenging conditions.” He added that victory is especially sweet if someone says, “You can’t do that!” That’s the way it
was with the pre-boot configuration of network interface devices. The idea was to let customers change the hard-wired
network addresses in the Ethernet and Fibre Channel interface chips. Conventional wisdom said that it couldn’t be done. But
Kevin and the project team knew that their success would lead to new opportunities in how HP provides connectivity
mechanisms. The technology they developed became one of the key enablers for Virtual Connect (VC) in the BladeSystem c-
Class. VC virtualizes the connections between servers and the network infrastructure. To do this, VC manager hands over
customer-selected hardware addresses to the iLO processor. iLO then collaborates with the system firmware and the device
Option ROM codes to reconfigure the Ethernet and Fibre Channel addresses in the hardware chips prior to the OS boot.
It was an amazing achievement—HP’s competitors are still years behind. But he believes that a remarkable aspect of the
project was the collaboration among software and hardware engineers and marketing. They published a portion of the pre-
boot configuration method as an industry-standard specification. And they specified HP suppliers to integrate the method in
high-volume components. It is one of the good working models for integrating HP innovation into off-the-shelf components.
HP leadership is by design
Listening to customers concerns helps to shape Kevin’s thoughts during the early architecture and design phases. He thinks
customers should also know that “Our leadership goes way beyond the current product portfolio. We design systems to
intersect technologies in later timeframes to protect our customers’ investments.”
When asked about leading technologies that customers should be aware of in future HP products, Kevin replied:“We are
working towards converging server, storage, and networking products under a holistic system architecture called Converged
Infrastructure.”