Alex Vrenios is the founder and principal analyst at the Distributed Systems Research Lab, a technical consulting group specializing in the performance measurement and analysis of distributed computing architectures. He holds a BS and MS in Computer Science, is the author of numerous articles, and is a member of both the ACM and the IEEE. He started his computing career more than 30 years ago, working with communications and data transmission software on mainframe computers. He made the transition to a networked C/UNIX environment, learned about interprocess communications distributed algorithms and cluster computing, and never looked back.