Mike Shapiro (programmer)
Michael W. Shapiro | |
|---|---|
| Occupation(s) | Computer programmer, technology executive |
| Known for | Development of pgrep, pkill, Modular Debugger (MDB), DTrace, fault management tools; leadership in storage engineering at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, EMC |
Michael W. Shapiro is a computer programmer from the United States with expertise in operating systems and data storage. He has held significant positions at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and EMC.
During his tenure at Sun Microsystems, Shapiro was instrumental in creating essential software components for the Solaris environment. His contributions include developing tools such as pgrep, the Modular Debugger (MDB), DTrace, and various fault management utilities. The commands pgrep and pkill that he authored have become standard tools across prominent Unix platforms like Linux, BSD, and macOS, extensively utilized by system administrators and software developers alike.
In recognition of their work, Shapiro and the DTrace development team received the Technology Innovation Award along with the Overall Gold Medal from The Wall Street Journal in 2006. Additionally, DTrace was honored with the USENIX Software Tools User Group award in 2008. Over the following years, DTrace technology was adopted by other leading operating systems, including BSD variants and Apple's macOS.
Starting in 2006, Shapiro led engineering efforts at Sun to create a commercial storage solution built on Solaris and the company’s ZFS filesystem. This initiative, named "Fishworks," functioned outside Sun’s conventional organizational framework and attracted attention from publications such as The New York Times and Fortune for its innovative methodology. The product was officially launched in 2008.
Following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Shapiro assumed the role of Vice President overseeing Storage engineering. Oracle announced that by 2015, the ZFS Storage product line had exceeded $1 billion in revenue.
Shapiro departed Oracle in 2010 before joining DSSD’s founding team after EMC purchased the startup. As vice president responsible for software, he collaborated with fellow Sun engineer Jeff Bonwick to design DSSD’s software architecture. DSSD introduced the industry’s first pooled storage system utilizing NVM Express technology capable of serving multiple hosts simultaneously, a breakthrough highlighted during a 2016 interview. This storage solution was implemented within the TACC 2015 "Wrangler" supercomputing cluster and earned HPCwire's Editor's Choice Award that same year.
When EMC was integrated into Dell Technologies, the DSSD team became part of EMC’s storage division in 2017.
Shapiro co-developed the NVM Express over Fabrics protocol, which was unveiled in 2014. By 2019, IDC analysts recognized this innovation as transformative within the SAN market due to its substantial improvements in performance for network-connected SSDs.
Publications
- Bryan M. Cantrill, Michael W. Shapiro, and Adam H. Leventhal, Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems, Proceedings of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
- Mike Shapiro, Self-Healing in Modern Operating Systems, ACM Queue, December 2004, Vol. 2, Issue 9, pp. 66–75
- Mike Shapiro, Purpose-Built Languages, ACM Queue, February 2009, Vol. 7, Issue 1, pp. 18–24
- NVM Express over Fabrics Protocol and Architecture Webcast