Acknowledgments
The teachers of Tehran's Armenian Kooshesh-Davitian school (now defunct), where one hour per day was dedicated to teach Armenian language, history, etc. (1952-64).
Univ. of Tehran and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship for the first and last two years of U. Tehran education (1964-68).
IBM System Engineers Massih Ettefagh and Jafar Namazi at IBM's World Trade Corp. - WTC in Tehran who involved me in their projects (1968-69).
Sahak Sahakian (rip) hired me at Tehran's Regional Electric Company - TREC to lead in modernizing its large scale billing system (1969-71).
Algirdas Avizienis supported my PhD studies at the Computer Science Dept. at Univ. of Calif. at Los Angeles - UCLA and served as my PhD advisor. Dr Maniel Vineberg for supervising my masters project.
Leonard Kleinrock for his excellent queueing theory courses at UCLA, which were the most helpful in my further research career.
https://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/index.html
Richard Muntz distributed his class notes and an early draft of (Williams and Bhandiwad, 1976) in his 212B course. These served as a starting point for my research in queueing network modeling.
Chuck Rose (rip) for hiring me as an assistant professor in the System Engineering Dept. at Case Western Reserve Univ. - CWRU in Cleveland, OH (1977-79).
George Bekey reporting to Sr VP and Dean of Engineering Zohrab Kaprielian (rip) hired me in the EE-Systems Dept. at Univ. Southern Calif. - USC on Melvin Breuer's (rip) recommendation (1979-1983).
PhD students at USC: Paul Bay, Behzad Nadji, and In Kyung Ryu tirelessly collaborated in joint research.
Jeffrey Buzen as editor of Computer Performance helped me publish my work in a timely manner.
Kayvan Kiamanesh at Alpha-Data Corp. who funded a performance analysis study of multiheaded disk arms in 1983.
Blaine Gaither hired me as a Sr. Staff Scientist at the Corporate Center for Performance Modeling - CCPM of Burroughs Corp. - now Unisys (1983-84).
Steve Lavenberg (rip) hired me as a Research Staff Member in his Systems Analysis Dept. at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center (1985-1998).
Harut Barsamian (rip) at Univ. of Calif. at Irvine - UCI approved my tutorial proposal for Int'l Conf. on Distr. Computing Systems - ICDCS'89. Erhard Rahm collaborated with me on the initial versions of the tutorial.
Collaboration with Peter Franaszek and John Robinson at IBM Research led to an OIA - Outstanding Innovation Award for the patent (Franaszek et al., 1993) and a top-rated RAID patent (Franaszek et al., 1996).
Robert Morris and Jai Menon hosted my assignment at IBM's Almaden Research Center - ARC to lead a RAID performance study.
Vittorio Castelli (Amazon Web Services - AWS) and Chung-Sheng Li (Accenture, PwC) collaborated with me in a NASA project at IBM Research which led to two patents (Castelli et al., 1997a,b) and (Castelli et al., 2003).
Joseph Leung (rip) who was hired as the chair of the Computer Science Department at New Jersey Institute of Technology - NJIT to improve its ranking hired me as a Full Professor as a step in that direction.
Yoav Raz (rip) and Amnon Namad hosted an extended version of my SIGMETRICS'98 tutorial on RAID performance analysis at EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, MA, December 2000.
Yavuz Oruc on assignment at National Science Foundation - NSF from U. Maryland approved funding for my proposal on performance analysis of 2-Disk Failure Tolerant - 2DTF arrays (2002-2005).
Spencer W. Ng (Sandisk, retired) at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - HGST provided funding for my research on evaluating RAID5 rebuild processing at NJIT in 2005.
Behzad Nadji (Blackberry/Research in Motion, retired) as director of AT&T Research provided funding for my research at NJIT via VURI - Virtual U. Research Inst. project in 2006.
NJIT PhD students Chunqi Han, Yue Li*, Lijuan (Catherine) Zhang*, and Jun Xu, and masters students Alex Branzoi, Gang Fu, Chang (Linda) Liu, Chintan Shah, Saman Zarandioon assisted me with my research on storage systems and high-dimensional indexing (*).
Mario Blaum (IBM Almaden Research Center - ARC) coauthored a paper on RAID1 reliability analysis (Thomasian and Blaum, 2006) and a survey on 2-disk-failure-tolerant - 2DFT disk arrays (Thomasian and Blaum, 2009).
Student Jose Pagan (https://www.XKL.com) installed Sun Solaris on a Dell Desktop (2007).
Lionel Ni (Hong Kong U. of Science and Technology - HKUST) serving as a director at Shenzhen Inst. Science and Tech. - SIAT hosted my stay as an Outstanding Int'l Visiting Scientist (2010-2011). Dr Yujie Tang (algomau.ca) with a masters from Harbin U. assisted me in my research.
Yuhui Deng at Jinan U. in Guangzhou invited me to present my research.
Fulbright fellowship award to teach at American Univ. of Armenia - AUA (AUA.am) for the first half of 2015. I collaborated with Victor Ohanyan at AUA/Yerevan State Univ. - YSU and was invited to lecture at YSU by Samvel Shokourian. I was befriended by cryptography expert Gurgen Khachatrian (http://www.qdsc.us/QDSC/GK.html). All three are members of National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia.
Tamer Ozsu (U. Waterloo) as Editor in Chief - EIC of ACM Book Series encouraged me to submit a book to ACM, but stepped down in May 2019.
Chris Katsaropoulos, Sr. Acquisitions Editor at Elsevier approved my book proposal in November 2020. I am working with Elsevier's publishing team Rafael G. Trombaco (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and Omer Mukthar (Chennai, India).
Numerous persons have responded to my questions: Mario Blaum (IBM ARC), Ilias Iliadis (IBM ZRL), Dieter Gawlick (Oracle), Randy Katz (Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley), Harold Stone (IBM Research, NEC, consultant), Joshua Knight (IBM Research, retired), Ken Shirriff. http://www.righto.com/
Physical therapist Sue Ock Glynn, PhD at Burke Rehabilitation center in White Plains, NY dealt with my BPPV or vertigo condition expertly.
My dedicated and loving wife Ling Li Thomasian took care of most mundane matters, while I was working on the book, especially as after the pandemic started. I owe her an apology for not being helpful with the household chores. Our son Chenglin tried to be less annoying with his interruptions during the book writing.