About
Silicon Valley based serial entrepreneur Joel Harrison has been at the leading edge of creating value in computer hardware and software for several decades which has resulted in 19 US patent awards. As a co-founder of Quantum (1980 – hard disk drives) and Plus Development (1984 – Hardcard – consumer hard disk drives), Joel was a key architectural innovator in evolving the hard disk drive from an expensive “washing machine” size product into a ubiquitous, small and inexpensive consumer product. The street price per byte of disk drives has dropped by 5,000,000 times since working on his first disk drive development project at HP.
After owning several small related businesses in the early 1990’s Joel returned to Quantum in the mid 1990’s and led Quantum into the NAS (Network Attached Storage) server business. During this NAS period, Joel had the epiphany that most storage management problems can be most easily solved through advanced metadata (data about data) management software.
Recently focusing directly on metadata management software, Joel co-founded Categoryware (2000 – Advanced metadata management), became CTO of Acirro (2002 – Global Distributed File Systems using a NAS Switch), and most recently co-founded Abrevity (2003). At Abrevity he has been able to fully implement this vision into a world class metadata management software engine which has become the technology foundation for Abrevity.
Joel received his BS from CalPoly in Pomona, CA and his MS from Caltech in Pasadena CA.