Dr. Bernd Panzer-Steindel studied physics at the University of Mainz (Germany), where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1989. Since 1990 he is an employee of the European high energy physics research centre CERN in Geneva. After research activities in various physics experiments he changed in the nineties into the area of informatics, where he was decisively involved in the introduction of PC clusters, Linux, new storage strategies and the management of large storage scaling tests. Since 2006 he is the CTO and resource manager in the CERN computer centre.