Reza Taheri, VMware

Reza Taheri is a Principal Engineer at VMware, focusing on the performance of Tier 1 applications on VMware products. He also chairs the industry-standards committee that is developing a new TPC performance benchmark for virtualized databases.

After receiving BSEE and MSCS degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Reza started out at Bell Laboratories, working on the simulation modeling and performance tuning of AT&T’s 3B line of computers as well as one of the earliest RISC processors. He then spent 20 years at HP in the team that measured and optimized the performance of HP’s high-end commercial servers. He led the benchmarking teams; ran cross-functional teams; and worked alongside partners to design, evaluate, and optimize features for performance. Reza’s area of focus at HP was large SMP systems that ran databases and transaction processing workloads. He was responsible for publishing many record breaking, audited benchmark results.

At VMware for the past seven years, he has worked on tuning vSphere for Tier 1 applications to close the performance gap with native systems for the most challenging workloads. Reza enjoys investigating the interactions of the many components of a system, from processor architecture to database internals to storage array characteristics.