Computer History Museum | Oral History of Christos Karamanolis @ComputerHistory | Uploaded September 2024 | Updated October 2024, 11 hours ago.
Interviewed by Dag Spicer on 2024-02-22 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum
Christos Karamanolis was born in Kavala, Greece and graduated in engineering from the University of Patras, Greece. While a student, he worked as a system administrator on DEC VAX clusters running Unix and VMS. After working for a year, in 1992 he applied to Imperial College, London for graduate school, completing his PhD in four years.
As is required of all Greek men, he returned up on graduation to serve in the Greek Armed Forces for 18 months, but then returned to Imperial College in 1998 as a research fellow. Karamanolis moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, starting work at HP Labs where he worked on distributed software-based storage systems.
In 2005, he moved to VMWare to work on code development of the company’s core technology: the hypervisor kernel. He has contributed to multiple VMWare products and services since that time including the blockbuster vSAN product and assisting in the acquisition of Daltrium, a maker of cloud-based disaster recovery services; and Nicira, a company focused on software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization. Following the acquisition of VMWare by Broadcom in 2023, he is now a Broadcom Fellow. In a career spanning three decades focused on distributed systems, fault tolerance, storage, and storage management. Karamanolis holds over 100 patents.
* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102808973
Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.
Catalog Number: 102808974
Acquisition Number: 2024.0021
Interviewed by Dag Spicer on 2024-02-22 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum
Christos Karamanolis was born in Kavala, Greece and graduated in engineering from the University of Patras, Greece. While a student, he worked as a system administrator on DEC VAX clusters running Unix and VMS. After working for a year, in 1992 he applied to Imperial College, London for graduate school, completing his PhD in four years.
As is required of all Greek men, he returned up on graduation to serve in the Greek Armed Forces for 18 months, but then returned to Imperial College in 1998 as a research fellow. Karamanolis moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, starting work at HP Labs where he worked on distributed software-based storage systems.
In 2005, he moved to VMWare to work on code development of the company’s core technology: the hypervisor kernel. He has contributed to multiple VMWare products and services since that time including the blockbuster vSAN product and assisting in the acquisition of Daltrium, a maker of cloud-based disaster recovery services; and Nicira, a company focused on software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization. Following the acquisition of VMWare by Broadcom in 2023, he is now a Broadcom Fellow. In a career spanning three decades focused on distributed systems, fault tolerance, storage, and storage management. Karamanolis holds over 100 patents.
* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102808973
Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.
Catalog Number: 102808974
Acquisition Number: 2024.0021
