# Björn Kolbeck

> Björn Kolbeck is the co-founder and CEO of Quobyte, a software-defined storage company shaped by his research on fault-tolerant distributed file systems and his experience as a Google engineering lead. After helping build the open-source XtreemFS project and earning a doctorate at Humboldt University of Berlin, he co-founded Quobyte with Felix Hupfeld in 2013 to make hyperscale storage operable by small teams. His work now sits at the intersection of AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, hybrid cloud, and the practical economics of keeping expensive compute continuously supplied with data.

- **Role:** Co-Founder and CEO at Quobyte
- **Organizations:** Quobyte, Google, Zuse Institute Berlin, XtreemFS
- **Education:** PhD in Computer Science; thesis: A fault-tolerant and scalable protocol for replication in distributed file systems, Humboldt University of Berlin, Diplom in Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin
- **Known for:** Co-created and led development of XtreemFS, an open-source distributed file system developed through European and German research programs., Earned a doctorate for research on fault-tolerant, scalable replication in distributed file systems., Served as tech lead for Google's Hotel Finder project from 2011 to 2013.

## Career timeline

- **2006-2011** — Worked as lead developer on the open-source distributed file system XtreemFS and as a research assistant at Zuse Institute Berlin.
- **2011-2013** — Worked at Google as tech lead for the Hotel Finder project.
- **2012** — Completed a PhD in Computer Science at Humboldt University of Berlin on fault-tolerant replication in distributed file systems.
- **2013** — Co-founded Quobyte with Felix Hupfeld to build a new software-defined storage system informed by XtreemFS research and hyperscaler operations.
- **2024** — Quobyte introduced its distributed File Query Engine for high-speed file-system metadata queries.
- **2025** — Led the launch of Quobyte 4 with ARM support, cloud data management features, and expanded observability for AI infrastructure.
- **2026** — Discussed Quobyte's GPU-converged storage work and a shift in AI infrastructure demand from model training toward inference and context loading.

## Achievements

- Co-created and led development of XtreemFS, an open-source distributed file system developed through European and German research programs.
- Earned a doctorate for research on fault-tolerant, scalable replication in distributed file systems.
- Served as tech lead for Google's Hotel Finder project from 2011 to 2013.
- Co-founded Quobyte in 2013 and has led the company as CEO through successive generations of its storage platform.
- Co-authored academic work on object-based file-system architecture, Paxos-based fault-tolerant leases, and wide-area file replication.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — Described a rapid market shift from AI training toward inference and multi-turn agent context, and explained how Quobyte's GPU-converged approach is being used to move persistent context back toward host memory.
- **2026-01** — Outlined Quobyte's support for on-premises, edge, public-cloud, and hybrid deployments across x86, ARM, and Nvidia Grace CPUs, including CPU-attached storage on GPU servers.
- **2025-06** — Discussed Quobyte's internally run MLPerf Storage 3D U-Net results; the reporting explicitly noted that the results had not been officially submitted to or verified by MLCommons.
- **2025-04** — Announced Quobyte 4 with native ARM support, S3 and Azure cloud integration, end-to-end observability, and governance and identity features.
- **2024-06** — Announced a distributed File Query Engine designed to query file metadata in parallel without a separate database layer.

## Links

- Website: https://www.quobyte.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjorn-kolbeck-37925033/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/bjorn-kolbeck
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-18