In 2024, Oluwatosin Oladayo Aramide, a Senior Network Engineer at NetApp (Ireland), was honoured with a City People 2024 Award in recognition of his exceptional contributions to the development of high-performance, automated, and secure data-centre networking systems, which have become increasingly central to how modern organisations design reliable platforms for artificial intelligence and large-scale data operations.
The City People Awards have, over the years, emerged as a respected platform for spotlighting professionals whose achievements combine innovation with tangible real-world impact, particularly within STEM and technology-driven fields.
A Stringent Selection That Rewards Substance
City People’s selection process is guided by demonstrable impact rather than visibility alone. According to the organisation’s published criteria, honourees are evaluated on originality, measurable outcomes, leadership excellence, and credible achievements, including notable projects and scholarly contributions.
For Aramide, the 2024 recognition reflects a body of work positioned squarely at the heart of AI-era infrastructure challenges, lossless Ethernet, RDMA at scale, congestion control, observability, automation, and multi-vendor interoperability areas, where seemingly minor configuration decisions can determine whether systems perform reliably or collapse under pressure.
Building Reliability at AI Scale
At NetApp, Aramide operates within experimental R&D environments, integrating enterprise switching technologies with ONTAP storage systems while engineering resilient, scalable, and automated platforms for high-performance workloads.
His work spans multi-vendor certification initiatives, reference architecture development, and advanced protocol validation across technologies such as VXLAN EVPN, MLAG, BGP, VRRP, and related control-plane behaviours that must remain predictable even under failure conditions and massive scale.
Making Lossless Ethernet Practical
Among Aramide’s most visible technical contributions is his hands-on leadership in RDMA and RoCEv2 enablement capabilities that are notoriously difficult to implement consistently across production environments.
Within NetApp’s R&D framework, he designed and validated end-to-end RoCEv2 infrastructures across Nexus, Broadcom, and Arista environments for storage clusters using NVIDIA ConnectX NICs. By integrating PFC, ECN, and DCQCN, his work delivered a lossless fabric for RDMA-based ONTAP workloads, producing measurable reductions in tail latency and microbursts while significantly improving replication performance.
Beyond performance optimisation, Aramide pioneered automation frameworks for secure configuration management, developing tooling for remote configuration zeroisation and resilient RCF upgrades with built-in rollback and self-healing mechanisms—solutions later adopted internally as engineering standards.
Why City People Recognised Him
City People’s 2024 recognition reflects three defining pillars of Aramide’s professional impact:
Infrastructure innovation that ships: from vendor collaboration and switch certification to practical architectures that resolve real deployment challenges.
Operational excellence under real-world constraints: including measurable improvements in deployment speed, reliability, and incident resolution through refined tooling, runbooks, and escalation processes.
Thought leadership rooted in engineering practice: translating the “why” of AI infrastructure into the “how” of secure, resilient, and scalable network design.
AI Workloads Are Redefining Network Expectations
Across the global technology sector, AI training and data-intensive workloads are pushing Ethernet fabrics into unprecedented territory, where latency spikes, microbursts, and congestion behaviour quickly escalate from technical nuisances into material business risks.
It is within this environment that Aramide’s work distinguishes itself not as abstract research but as applied engineering that converts complex concepts such as lossless networking, deterministic performance, and automated recovery into dependable, repeatable production systems.
Research That Shapes Industry Conversation
In 2024, Aramide further reinforced his technical leadership through a series of widely referenced publications addressing the same challenges confronting modern infrastructure teams. His works include:
Ultra Ethernet vs. InfiniBand for AI/ML Clusters: A Comparative Study
Programmable Data Planes (P4, eBPF) for High-Performance Networking
Future-Proofing AI Storage Infrastructure: Managing Scale, Performance and Data Diversity
Autonomous Network Monitoring Using LLMs & Multi-Agent Systems
Designing Highly Resilient AI Fabrics: Networking Architectures for Large-Scale Training
Zero-Trust Identity Principles in Next-Gen Networks
Collectively, these publications reflect a consistent mission: building networks that remain secure, observable, and resilient under extreme load, the defining challenge of the AI era.
A Voice in the Public Knowledge Space
Aramide’s influence also extends through his technical learning platform, LevelUp I.T. (LevelUpIT.xyz), where he publishes practical engineering deep-dives and structured learning series, bridging the gap between theoretical design and operational reality for engineers across the globe.
Conclusion
Oluwatosin Oladayo Aramide’s City People 2024 Award shines a light on a form of leadership that grows more critical each year: rigorous, disciplined engineering excellence, the kind that transforms complex infrastructure into systems that are predictable, secure, and scalable.
As AI continues to redefine performance expectations worldwide, Aramide’s 2024 achievements across NetApp’s R&D initiatives and global research publications mark him not only as a professional keeping pace with the future but as one actively helping to build it.
