Nolan is the co-founder and CTO of Cumulus Networks. Prior to Cumulus, he founded a distributed storage start-up called Tile Networks. His work there led him to realize how unsuitable existing networking equipment is for the data-center of the future (which Cumulus Networks aims to rectify). Prior to that, he had a research role at Nuova Systems, and a technical leadership role at cluster-virtualization pioneer 3Leaf Systems. He did early work on virtualization at VMware. Nolan loves systems software, hardware and high-power rocketry.