Charles Fan is Senior Vice President of R&D at VMware, leading the global R&D team of VMware's Application Storage and Data products. Charles and his team are responsible for the software-defined storage and big data strategy and execution at VMware, a leader in cloud infrastructure.
Prior to this role, Charles was the founder and leader of both the VMware China R&D Center, and the EMC China Center of Excellence. Today, Over 2000 engineers work in those R&D Centers, and both centers are among the most respected R&D groups in China. Prior to his China roles, Charles was a co-founder and CTO of Rainfinity, which was acquired by EMC in 2005. He led the creation of Rainfinity's industry leading file virtualization and high availability products.
Charles is an expert in distributed systems and network storage technologies. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union.