Randy Howard Katz

Co-developer of the redundant array of independent disks (RAID) concept for computer storage, Katz is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He received an A.B. from Cornell University in May 1976, an M.S. from UC Berkeley in June 1978, and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in June 1980, all in Computer Science. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and received the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal in 2010.

Katz, along with David A. Patterson and Garth A. Gibson, developed the redundant array of independent disks (RAID) concept for computer storage in their 1988 SIGMOD Conference paper. RAID is now used as an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple physical drives. The physical drives are said to be in a RAID, which is accessed by the operating system as one single drive. The different schemes or architectures are named by the word RAID followed by a number (e.g., RAID 0, RAID 1). Each scheme provides a different balance between two key goals: increase data reliability and increase input/output performance.

He was the author of "Contemporary Logic Design" (1994), The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, doi:10.1016/0026-2692(95)90052-7, ISBN 0-8053-2703-7, and co-author with David Patterson and Garth A. Gibson of "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)" (1988), SIGMOD Conference, pp. 109–116, http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-391.pdf.

In 1985, Katz created the First Snooping Multiprocessor Cache Coherency Protocol. In 1993 he established whitehouse.gov, [email protected], and [email protected], and funded development of the first Internet firewall technology while at DARPA. In 1996 he introduced vertical handoffs and efficient transport protocols for mobile wireless networks, and in 2011 he was the 12th most cited author in Computer Science, per http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=2&topDomainID....