2021 Storage Developer Conference Speakers

Tony Afshary

Sr. Director, Product Line Management, Pliops

Biography

Tony has many years of experience leading engineering and technical teams in the areas of FPGA, ASIC and storage systems design. In his current role at Pliops he is instrumental in identifying the technologies and requirements for developing next-generation data architectures.

Richelle Ahlvers

Senior Storage Management Architect, Intel Corporation

Biography

Richelle has spent over 25 years in Enterprise Storage R&D teams in a variety of technical roles, leading the architecture, design and development of storage array software, storage management software user experience projects including mobility, developing new storage industry categories including SAN management, storage grid and cloud, and storage technology portfolio solutions.

Richelle has been engaged with industry standards initiatives with SNIA and DMTF for many years. She served as the SNIA Technical Council Chair and has been engaged across a breadth of technologies ranging from storage management to solid-state storage, cloud, and green storage. She is Co-Chair of the Storage Management Initiative and leads the SSM Technical Work Group developing the Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API.

Irfan Ahmad

Founder & CEO, Magnition.io

Biography

Irfan is a tech entrepreneur and a successful early-stage investor with a passion is helping startup founders achieve traction earlier than most think possible. Irfan was the co-founder and CTO of CloudPhysics, and also worked for Transmeta, Autodesk, Toronto Stock Exchange, Canada Trust (now TD) and the Museum of Steam and Technology.

Irfan received his pink tie from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Mathematics & Computer Science. He holds 40+ patents and has authored several award-winning research papers. Irfan routinely serves as referee in peer-reviewed academic conferences and journals.

Gowtham Alluri

Staff Software Engineer, Nutanix Inc

Biography

Gowtham is a Staff software engineer working at Nutanix Inc for the past 6.5 years and is one of the founding engineers that have built "Objects" the object storage product at Nutanix from the ground up. Gowtham had been involved in architecture and development of the object data layout and management on top of a virtual storage subsystem and capacity scaling of the object storage to multiple clusters. More recently Gowtham has been the lead for the replication feature architecture and development that provides a near synchronous capability for Data Protection. Prior to the object storage journey Gowtham was part of the Nutanix distributed file system group where the contributions invovled memory management, Garbage reduction, Sequential Write Performance enhancements, and a Distributed Log infrastructure. Gowtham has more than 10 years of experience in the storage domain working at EMC and Nutanix, and have worked in block, file and object storage variants. Gowtham has filed for 4 patents as part of Objects and two other patents from prior efforts.

Rajalaxmi Angadi

Senior Engineer / Lead, Intel Corporation

Biography

Rajalaxmi Angadi is a Senior Engineer/Lead at Intel Corporation, she has over 14+ years of industry experience, architecting, developing of storage systems with fabrics technologies including NVMe & NVMe-oF. She has been heavily involved in development of schemas and mockups for SNIA swordfish in the Scalable Storage Management Technical Working group; She has co-authored multiple technical proposals and contributed to the NVM Express consortium. She is a key contributor of distributed endpoint manager, an open source tool for managing NVMe-oF resources.

Shankar Athanikar

Staff engineer, Samsung Semiconductor India Research

Biography

Professional with 10+ years of experience with technical contribution mainly in the field of product qualification and Field issue analysis. proficient in eMMC & UFS protocol , FTL verification , Host software analysis etc.

Duckho Bae

Principal Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Duckho Bae is principal engineer at Samsung Memory Business and currently is in charge of developing open-source NVMe-oF reference system called PoseidonOS. His expertise is in developing advanced SSD features for large-scale data management such as in-storage compute and novel I/F for E2E optimization . He holds a PhD in Electronics and Computer Engineering from Hanyang University, Korea.

Curtis Ballard

Distinguished Technologist, HPE

Biography

Curtis Ballard is a technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the HPE Storage organization. Curtis has over 20 years of experience in storage and storage interface technologies. While working at Hewlett Packard and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Curtis has worked in product design teams for magneto optical disk drives, medium changer devices, tape drives, disk arrays, and enclosure management devices. He has worked on hardware designs for storage interfaces and storage controllers as well as firmware for motion control, storage interfaces, user interface, and embedded operating systems.

Curtis currently is a technologist in the HPE Storage R&D organization as well as representing HPE in industry standards bodies. He is the vice-chair of INCITS/T10 SCSI Storage Interfaces Technical Committee and as is contributing member of NVM Express. Curtis is currently the technical editor for several of the INCITS/T10 standards. He is an inventor on over 40 US patents in the storage industry across electrical, software, and mechanical disciplines and works in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise architecture community on storage architecture, intellectual property, and storage strategy.

Stephen Bates

CTO, Eideticom

Biography

TBD

Charles Binford

Software Architect, NetApp

Biography

TBD

Ralph Böhme

Senior Software Engineer, SerNet / Samba Team

Biography

TBD

Rory Bolt

Principal Architect, Sr. Fellow KIOXIA America, Inc.

Biography

Rory joined KIOXIA America in 2017. He has founded, built teams, and delivered product at four storage startups which were acquired ($400M, $165M and two undisclosed). Rory has more than twenty-five years of experience in data storage systems, data protection systems, and high performance computing with tenures as VP software Engineering at Samsung, Technical Director/CTO counsel at NetApp, CTO counsel at EMC, Vice President, Chief Storage Architect, and Distinguished Fellow at Quantum. Rory has been granted over 12 storage related patents and has several pending. Rory has a BS in Computer Engineering from UCSD.

Murali Brahmadesam

Director of Engineering, Aurora Databases, Amazon

Biography

Murali Brahmadesam is the Director of Engineering that leads Amazon Aurora database and storage development teams. He and his team pioneered the development of cloud native relational database service by reimagining the traditional database stack for the cloud era. He is passionate about large scale distributed systems and has played a key role in delivering several such products for Amazon and Microsoft.

Rich Brunner

Principal Engineer and CTO of Server Platform Technologies, VMware

Biography

Richard A. Brunner is a Principal Engineer and the CTO of Server Platform Technologies at VMware. He is responsible for defining and driving future platform features that can benefit virtualization. Richard has been focused on computer technology since 1977 as a programmer, design engineer, and then instruction set architect for IBM, DEC, Intel, and AMD. At VMware since 2006, he has been recently focusing on Non-Volatile Memory, composition of disaggregated resources, CPU Security Vulnerabilities, and platform offline acceleration.

Paul Burnett

Principal Engineer, Seagate Technologies

Biography

Paul Burnett is a Principal Engineer in the Product Design and Development organization at Seagate Technologies and has been in storage industry for 40 years. Prior to joining the design organization, he held a lead engineer position in the Failure Analysis Organization. In this role he developed an understanding of how a disc drive can fail and how to identify signatures in the internal and external data sets. This is highly important in understanding how failures manifest themselves in customer environments as well as in internal reliability testing. This knowledge is now used in insuring information that is tracked in disc drives are informative and accurate to be able to assess potential failure mechanisms. His work with cross functional organizations in Seagate has led to a broad range of knowledge within a complex design of a disc drive.

Mark Carlson

Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, KIOXIA

Biography

Mark A. Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards at Kioxia, has more than 35 years of experience with Networking and Storage development and more than 20 years experience with Java technology. Mark was one of the authors of the CDMI Cloud Storage standard. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events. He is the co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage and Object Drive technical working groups, and serves as co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council.

Phil Cayton

Senior Staff Engineer, Intel Corporation

Biography

Phil Cayton is a Senior Staff Engineer at Intel Corporation, with 25 years’ experience developing and researching non-volatile local and remote storage and fabrics technologies, particularly NVMe, NVMe-oF, NVMe-MI, InfiniBand and iWARP architectures resulting in 25+ patents.

Luis Ceze

Co-founder and CEO, OctoML

Biography

Luis Ceze is a Co-founder and CEO at OctoML, Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group. His research focuses on the intersection between computer architecture, programming languages, machine learning and biology. His current research focus is on approximate computing for efficient machine learning and DNA-based data storage. He co-directs the Molecular Information Systems Lab (misl.bio) and the Systems and Architectures for Machine Learning lab (sampl.ai). He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the 2013 IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, the 2020 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award and UIUC Distinguished Alumni Award.

Daniel Chadash

Sr. Director DNA Data Storage, Twist Bioscience

Biography

Daniel co-founded Genome Compiler to democratize synthetic biology and enable scientists to focus on real science by giving them innovative software tools. Daniel was the VP Product of Genome Compiler before it was acquired by Twist Bioscience in 2016. At Twist, Daniel led the digital products and business systems and created a true end-to-end digital DNA e-commerce system to allow Twist to scale its business. Since late 2019 Daniel is leading the commercial side of Twist's DNA Data Storage product, including the product aspects and business development. Daniel is one of the founders of the DNA Data Storage Alliance that was launched in 2020 to accelerate the adoption and awareness of DNA as a storage medium.

Anjaneya ‘Reddy’ Chagam

Principal Engineer and Chief SDS Architect, Intel’s Data Center Group / Board Member at SODA Foundation, Intel Corp.

Biography

Anjaneya “Reddy” Chagam is a Senior Principal Engineer and Lead Cloud Storage Architect in Intel’s Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Group. He is responsible for developing software-defined storage strategy, architecture, and technology initiatives. He was a member of the Technical Steering Committee for the OpenSDS Project and he represents Intel on the Ceph board. He is a Chief Architect responsible for delivering software optimizations in Ceph via Intel upstream contributions. He is a regular speaker at major industry conferences, including Storage Developer Conference, OpenStack, CloudNativeCon and Red Hat Summit, has published several white papers on flash-optimized storage solutions. He earned an MS in computer science from Arizona State University.

Jayjeet Chakraborty

IRIS-HEP Fellow, IRIS-HEP and CROSS, UC Santa Cruz

Biography

I am an incoming Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I am currently an IRIS-HEP fellow working on SkyhookDM as a part of the DOMA team. My research interests include Big data processing and storage systems, storage systems, and distributed systems. I have been a Google Summer of Code student previously with CROSS, UC Santa Cruz, and a previous IRIS-HEP fellow.

Swati Chawdhary

Senior Manager, Samsung

Biography

Swati Chawdhary is a Senior Manager at Samsung. She has diverse experience in Storage domain. Her recent work focuses on the test and development of NVMe-oF/NVMe controllers and All Flash Array reference designs. Before joining Samsung, she worked at Chelsio Communications, where she contributed to the development of their Unified Wire Adapters. She has participated in conferences like IEEE Wintechcon, SDC India and NVMe developer Days. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Pune University.

Joseph Chen

CEO, ULINK Technology

Biography

Joseph Chen is the CEO at ULINK Technology. He has worked on the design and development of HDD’s and SSD’s supporting a variety of interfaces including NVMe, SATA, and SAS. He has also participated in defining TCG Opal specifications, as well as developing and testing TCG Opal hardware and firmware. Joseph was the Director of Engineering at Samsung SSD and HDD, Director of Engineering at Cirrus Logic, and Oak Technology.

Jacob Cherian

Chief Product Officer, ionir

Biography

As CEO and founder, Jacob is responsible for ionir’s overall vision and strategy. He brings over 20 years of industry experience in storage and data center technologies. Jacob was instrumental in driving the transition of Reduxio’s technology from legacy enterprise storage to software defined, and building the business strategy based on cloud storage and data management. Prior to that, Jacob spent 14 years at Dell, where he led multiple product and architectural initiatives in storage and other data center infrastructure. Jacob was named a Dell Inventor of the Year in 2005, and holds 50 patents in the areas of data storage and networking. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Cochin University of Science and Technology, a master’s degree in computer science from Oklahoma State University, and an MBA from Northwestern University’ Kellogg School of Management.

Tejas Chopra

Senior Software Engineer, Netflix, Inc.

Biography

Tejas Chopra is a Senior Software Engineer, working in the Data Storage Platform team at Netflix, where he is responsible for architecting storage solutions to support Netflix Studios and Netflix Streaming Platform. Tejas is an International Keynote Speaker and periodically conducts seminars on Software Development & Cloud Computing and has a Masters Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, with a specialization in Computer Systems.

Craig Ciesla

VP Advanced Engineering, Ilumina

Biography

Craig is currently the Vice President of Advanced Engineering in the Research and Technology Development group at Illumina Inc., the leading provider of DNA sequencing and array technologies. There he leads teams innovating in optics, microfluidics, electronics, nanofabrication, and deep-learning. Prior to Illumina Craig was Vice President of Engineering at Kaiam, where he was responsible for the development and production of 100G transceivers. He was also the founding CEO of Tactus Technology, an innovator in the user interface industry, where he was the co-inventor of Tactus’ morphing screen technology. Before Tactus he had a variety of roles at Intel, JDSU (now Lumentum), Bookham (now Oclaro) and Ignis Optics, developing a wide range of products in the fiber-optics market. He started his career at Toshiba Research Europe, where he performed early terahertz images of skin cancer. Craig holds a BSc (hons.) in Applied Physics and Ph.D. in Physics, both from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

Marthe Colotte

Platform Operations Manager, Imagene

Biography

Marthe Colotte is the Industrial Platform Operations Manager at Imagene, where she is in charge of the service platform of extraction and encapsulation of nucleic acids for room temperature storage (management, technical development, customer service, project leader for LIMS implementation, and more). Prior to this role, Marthe was title R&D project leader at Imagene. She earned her PhD in Room Temperature DNA Stability from Bordeaux University; https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=eenuCKcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Nick Connolly

Chief Scientist, MayaData / DataCore Software

Biography

Nick Connolly is the Chief Scientist at MayaData and a pioneer of storage virtualization with 20+ years of experience, holding patents ranging from highly scalable algorithms through to data protection techniques. As Chief Architect, his background in real-time computing and Unix multiprocessing led to the creation of DataCore’s world-class high-performance storage stack on Windows. Recently he has been working on the open source WPDK project (https://wpdk.github.io), bringing the power and performance of NVMe to Windows using SPDK.

Thomas Coughlin

President, Coughlin Associates

Biography

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a digital storage analyst as well as a business and technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and management positions at several companies.

Dr. Coughlin has many publications and six patents to his credit. Tom is also the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide, which is now in its second edition with Springer. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis as well as Data Storage Technical and Business Consulting services. Tom publishes the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, the Emerging Non-Volatile Memory Report and other industry reports. Tom is also a regular contributor on digital storage for Forbes.com and other blogs.

Tom is active with SMPTE (Journal article writer and Conference Program Committee), SNIA (including a founder of the SNIA SSSI, now CMSI), the IEEE, (he is an IEEE President Elect Candidate in 2021, Past Director for IEEE Region 6, Past President of IEEE USA, Past Chair of the IEEE New Initiatives and Public Visibility Committees and active in the Consumer Electronics Society) and other professional organizations. Tom is the founder and organizer of the Storage Visions Conference (www.storagevisions.com as well as the Creative Storage Conference (www.creativestorage.org). He was the general chairman of the annual Flash Memory Summit for 10 years. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a board member of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley (CNSV). For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications and activities go to www.tomcoughlin.com.

Sanil Kumar D

Chief Architect, TOC, Arch Lead, Huawei / SODA Foundation

Biography

TOC Member, Architecture Lead, SODA Foundation, Maintainer KubeEdge(CNCF) ; Chief Architect, Head India SODA Team, Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd; TSC Member Centaurus(LF Project). Product development expertise in the areas of Linux, Open Source, ARM Ecosystem, Cloud, Data Management and Emerging Technologies(like Edge Computing, Blockchain, Distributed Computing). He holds multiple patents, published papers & presented sessions and keynotes in international conferences; was Linux Foundation Yocto Project Advisory Board member; Active collaboration within Industry through LF, IEEE, CCICI, SNIA, OTF; Organizer of tech events and meetup groups (CNCF and SODA Foundation). Currently focusing on Open Source Ecosystem, Technology Roadmap for SODA Foundation Projects for Unified Data Framework. He does blog/creative writing at skdwriting.wordpress.com. Keen to work with developers and enable their careers through open source. Recipient of Zinnov Industry award for Senior Technical Role Model for technical contributions.

Active in social initiatives and founder of 123Life; Currently leading 123Covid support along with two other closely associated citizen volunteer groups.

Dr. Debendra Das Sharma

Intel Fellow, Intel Corporation

Biography

Dr. Debendra Das Sharma is an Intel Fellow in the Data Platforms Group and director of the I/O Technology and Standards Group at Intel Corporation. He is a leading expert on I/O subsystem and interface architecture. Dr. Das Sharma’s team delivers Intel-wide critical interconnect technologies in Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe), Compute Express Link (CXL), Intel’s Coherency interconnect, and multichip package interconnect. He is a key driver of external standards for PCIe and CXL, and internal proprietary interfaces, as well as implementation.

Dr. Das Sharma joined Intel in 2001 as a technical lead in the Advanced Components Division, designing server chipsets. He previously worked with Hewlett-Packard, where he led development of their server chipsets. He holds 137 US patents and is a frequent keynote speaker, distinguished lecturer, invited speaker, and panelist at the PCI-SIG Developers Conference, CXL consortium events, Open Server Summit, Open Fabrics Alliance, Flash Memory Summit, SNIA SDC, and Intel Developer Forum.

Dr. Das Sharma is a member of the Board of Directors for the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) and a lead contributor to PCIe specifications since its inception. He is a co-inventor and founding member of the CXL consortium and co-leads the CXL Technical Task Force. Dr. Das Sharma has a bachelor’s in technology (with honors) degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has been awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Kushal Datta

Senior Product Manager, Nvidia

Biography

Kushal Datta is the product lead for Magnum IO and focuses on expediting AI, data analytics and HPC applications on multi-GPU systems. His interests include creating new tools and methods to improve overall wall clock time of complex AI and scientific applications on large scale systems. He has published over twenty academic papers, several whitepapers, and blog posts. He holds five granted U.S. patents. He received his Ph.D. in ECE from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Bachelor's in Computer Science from Jadavpur University, India.

Claudio DeSanti

Distinguished Engineer, Dell Technologies

Biography

Dr. Claudio DeSanti is currently a Distinguished Engineer with Dell Technologies’ Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), focusing on Storage Networking and Edge configurations. He worked previously as a Senior Network Architect Lead in Google, responsible for creating an industry ecosystem around the Google Fiber developed ‘Super-PON’ access technology. Before that he was a Fellow in Cisco, where he contributed to the development and success of many Cisco products, including Cisco’s UCS, Cisco’s Nexus 7K and 5K, Cisco’s MDS, and Cisco’s Catalyst switches. He is the inventor of FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and many other Storage Networking technologies. He is highly recognized in Standards Bodies and industry associations, such as INCITS T11, IEEE 802.1 and 802.3, IETF, and ITU-T Q2/SG15. He is currently Chairman of the IEEE P802.3cs ‘Super-PON’ Task Force and has been Conference Chairman of Ethernet Technology Summit, vice Chairman of the INCITS T11 Technical Committee, Chairperson of various working groups, and technical editor of multiple standards. He is author of several patents and international publications and recipient of four INCITS technical awards. He is co-author of the book "I/O Consolidation in the Data Center", published by Cisco Press. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy.

Don Deel

Storage Management Architect, SNIA Member

Biography

Don Deel is a Senior Storage Architect, with over 30 years of industry experience working with storage, networking, server, and management technologies. He has been active in storage-related standards development activities for many years and has pioneering experience with the HIPPI, Fibre Channel, and SMI-S standards. He has held a number of positions within the SNIA since the early days of the organization and has been recognized for his contributions several times.

Jesper Devantier

Staff Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Jesper is a staff software engineer at Samsung Memory business. Jesper has explored the breadth of software development, from low-level work in the Linux kernel and embedded systems code to working on the pivotal services in a major ticket sales platform and back again.

Michael Dexter

CTO, Gainframe

Biography

Michael is a member of the SNIA Data Protection and Privacy Committee who provides independent OpenZFS-related storage support to clients of all sizes around the world.

Chet Douglas

Principal SW Architect, Intel Corporation

Biography

34 years of storage architecture experience
Currently working on persistent memory and RDMA SW architecture

Donald Dutile

Principal Software Engineer,Red Hat Inc.

Biography

Donald is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat.
Don has 40 years of experience in the computer industry.
His focus over those years has primarily been in I/O subsystems.
At Red Hat, he has worked in the areas of device-assignment for KVM, IOMMU, and PCI (SRIOV, RedHat's PCI-SIG representative) support.
He led the RHEL RDMA subsystem for a few years, and maintained the initial RHEL kernel package for ARM64.
Don moved on to the RHEL core kernel team focusing on the mm subsystem as well as dma-mapping and peer to peer DMA support.

Previous to Red Hat, he provided Linux kernel support for StarGe n's StarFabric and ASI fabrics.  Prior to StarGen, Don worked for DEC in its UNIX group, supporting new Alpha platforms, PCI and IOMMU support. During his first 10 years, he admits to being a hardware designer on DEC's cluster interconnect and a brief stint as a MIPS System architect.

Mounir Elmously

Executive, Consulting Services, Ernst & Young

Biography

Mounir is a Senior manager in the Consulting Services practice of Ernst & Young LLP. He leads the storage infrastructure services within the IT transformation practice. Mounir helps build trusted relationships as a strategic infrastructure technology advisor with clients, and works internally across teams to deliver business outcomes and end-to-end business and IT transformation services.

Mounir has over twenty-five years of industry experience in information technology with an emphasis around data protection and replication, business availability, disaster recovery, compute and storage technologies, He focuses on leading practices for enterprise technology architecture, shared IT services, storage, data center availability data protection, and disaster recovery strategy services. technical insight that better align IT capabilities with corporate strategy.

Andres Fernandez

Senior Director of Silicon Engineering, Twist Bioscience

Biography

Andres Fernandez is Senior Director of Silicon Engineering at Twist Bioscience. He is responsible for the development and production of semiconductor chips used to synthesize DNA for a wide variety of applications. His current focus is on developing chips to enable DNA data storage. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University. After a post-doc at the University of Maryland, he held positions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Etec Systems. He then went on to play central roles at three start-up companies – Glimmerglass Networks, Complete Genomics, and Twist Bioscience. His expertise is in nanofabrication, microfluidics, and MEMS devices.

Doug Finke

Managing Editor, Quantum Computing Report

Biography

Doug Finke is Managing Editor of the Quantum Computing Report which he founded in 2015 so he could apply his wide breadth of experience to help accelerate the proliferation of quantum computing to the general marketplace. He started his career as a mainframe computer design engineer at IBM and subsequently served in a variety of executive roles in marketing, engineering, and operations at Intel, STEC, Western Digital, Corning and several startup companies. Doug holds degrees in computer engineering and management from the University of Illinois and MIT, respectively.

Steven French

Principal Software Engineer - Azure Storage, Microsoft

Biography

Steve French is a Principal Software Engineer for Microsoft Azure Storage, and the original author and maintainer of the Linux cifs/smb3 client, and a member of the Samba team, and former chair of the SNIA CIFS Working Group, and is a frequent speaker at Linux and Storage events.

Rémy Gauguey

Senior Software Architect, Kalray

Biography

Rémy Gauguey is a Senior Software Architect at Kalray, for the Data Center Business Unit. He develops advanced architectures for composable infrastructure, leveraging the MPPA manycore technology from Kalray. Rémy has been previously developing his expertise at Connexant, Mindspeed Technologies and the CEA labs. He holds several patents in the fields of software architecture and packet processing.

Jerome Gaysse

Senior Technology and Market Analyst, Silinnov Consulting

Biography

Jerome Gaysse is senior technology and market analyst at Silinnov Consulting, a consultancy based on emerging data storage technologies. He also drives the Cloud services offering at SPIE ICS, a leading IT French company. He has strong technical expertise in IP, NVM, FPGAs, and ASICs for the data center market. He successfully worked with major corporate companies, startups, and research institutes in both Europe and the USA. He is a regular presenter at international conferences such as those sponsored by IEEE and SNIA, as well as past Flash Memory Summits. Jerome earned an MSEE from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon (France) with a semiconductor specialty.

Turguy Goker

Director of Advanced Development LTO, Quantum, Quantum Corporation

Biography

Turguy leads Quantum’s Advanced Development Team focused on LTO technology and represents Quantum with LTO organizations. He’s a servo and signal processing technology expert, with more than 30 years of experience in researching and designing tape drives. He was a key member of the R&D team responsible for the original LTO project collaboration with HP and IBM, helping form today’s LTO organization and tape technology.

Turguy has more than 50 patents in the tape technology field, specifically in servo control, logical and physical tape formats, data detection and erasure coding. He was selected for the Technology Hall of Fame at both Seagate and Certance.

Javier Gonzalez

Principal Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

I lead Samsung Memory Solutions open-source activities and manage a distributed team of highly talented engineers. This includes defining strategy, internal / external communication, and day-to-day execution. I am also the founder and site manager for Samsung Semiconductor Denmark Research (SSDR) - Samsung’s Memory Solutions first R&D center in Europe and fifth worldwide.

I am a Ph.D in operating systems with a strong background in technical leadership, experimental research, and Linux Kernel development. My interests lay primarily in the hardware / software co-design space, where systems software, hardware architecture, and open-source meet. I am dedicated to defining safe environments for motivated software engineers to be creative and get things done. I am a contributor to a wide range of open-source projects including the Linux Kernel. I am a regular speaker at several top industry and academic conferences.

Specialties: Compassionate Leadership, Systems Software Development, Linux Kernel, NVMe, Hyperscale / Data Center / Enterprise Storage, Open-Channel SSDs, Zoned Namespaces (ZNS), SSD Architecture, Software Defined Storage, Computational Storage.

Joel Granados

Staff Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

I received my bachelors degree in computer science in 2006 where my dissertation was on wireless topology control mechanisms in mobile networks. After, I worked for the installer team at Red Hat where I was involved with general storage and the graphical user interface. In 2009 I moved to the IT University of Copenhagen where I focused on streamlining phenological data analysis processes through the use of computer vision, machine learning and data analysis. I was awarded my Ph.D. in computer science in 2013. After graduating I worked with high throughput phenotyping as a postdoc until the end of 2014. In 2015 I was hired in Optivation as a senior optimization specialist and worked for the maritime industry. In October 2020 I started at Samsung Electronics as a software engineer working for its research center in Denmark, this is where I currently work.

Sathya Gunasekar

Software Engineer, Facebook

Biography

I am a software engineer in the Cache Infrastructure at Facebook since 2012. Cache Infrastructure develops and operates services to provide efficient, online access to social graph and product data. It encompasses services like TAO, Memcache and libraries like CacheLib that enable building several cache services at Facebook. Before Facebook, I graduated with a Master’s in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin Madison.

Mukesh Gupta

Technical Staff, Dell Technologies

Biography

Mukesh Gupta is a storage veteran who has been working in the industry for 20+ years & associated with Dell-EMC for most of this time. He got his Bachelors in Engineering from Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, one of the prestigious institutions in India, & followed it up with Masters in Computer Science from Boston University. Mukesh is currently a network architect responsible for enabling NVMeoF technologies in PowerStore.

Jim Handy

Principal Analyst, Objective Analysis

Biography

Jim Handy, a widely recognized semiconduc-tor analyst, comes to Objective Analysis with over 30 years in the electronics in-dustry including over 20 years as an in-dustry analyst for Gartner Dataquest, Semico Research, and Objective Analysis. His background includes marketing and design positions at market-leading suppli-ers including Intel, National Semiconduc-tor, and Infineon.

Mr. Handy is a member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), a Leader in the GLG Councils of Advisors, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Flash Memory Summit. He is the author of three blogs covering memory chips (www.TheMemoryGuy.com), SSDs (www.TheSSDguy.com), and semicon-ductors for the investor (www.Smartkarma.com). He contributes to a number of other blogs.

A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his widespread in-dustry presence and volume of publica-tion. He has written hundreds of articles for trade journals, Dataquest, Semico, and others, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media.

Mr. Handy has a strong technical leaning, with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical En-gineering from Georgia Tech, and is a patent holder in the field of cache memory design. He is the author of The Cache Memory Book (Harcourt Brace, 1993), the leading reference in the field. Handy also holds an MBA degree from the Uni-versity of Phoenix. He has performed rigorous technical analysis on the eco-nomics of memory manufacturing and sales, discrediting some widely held theo-ries while unveiling other true motivators of market behavior.

Erich Hanke

Sr. Principal Engineer, Storage and Memory Products, IntelliProp

Biography

Erich has been a PGA/ASIC Design Engineer with IntelliProp since 2007. He specializes in high-speed storage interface protocols such as SATA, SAS, and PCIe. Erich also had deep expertise in storage SoC/ASSP architectures implementing embedded processors, hardware RAID engines, multiple DMA engines, Encryption, and data manipulation.

Jim Harris

Principal Software Engineer, Intel

Biography

Jim Harris is a principal software engineer in DPG’s Network Platforms Group and a core maintainer for the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK). SPDK is an open source project started by Intel that is being used across the industry to optimize storage applications in the cloud and appliances for current and next-generation non-volatile media. Jim has been at Intel since 2001, serving in a wide variety of storage software related roles. He has a BS and MS in computer science from Case Western Reserve University.

Paul Hartke

Principal Engineer, Xilinx

Biography

Paul Hartke is a member of the Xilinx CTO team working on architectures for heterogenous systems.

Alex Haser

Senior Industry Standards Engineer, Molex, Board Member, SCSI Trade Association

Biography

In her role at Molex as Senior Industry Standards Engineer, Alex assists in developing standards through preliminary design work and initial proposals to standards committees. She also serves as an active board member of the SCSI Trade Association. Alex earned a Master of Science in Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Festus Hategekimana

Senior FW Engineer, Trusted Computing Group

Biography

Festus is a technical lead at Intel NAND SSD Division where he focuses on driving the development and adoption of TCG Specifications for enterprise storage systems. He is a co-editor of the TCG’s Key Per IO SSC specification and holds a PhD in Computer Engineering with a focus on security isolation architectures and their application to multi-tenant cloud systems.

Steffen Hellmold

VP Strategic Initiatives, Western Digital

Biography

Steffen Hellmold is Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Western Digital. He is responsible for identifying & leading incubated disruptive innovation projects in support of storage adjacent growth opportunities. His current area of focus is Archive Storage with an emphasis on driving tape and DNA Data Storage innovation to address the growing demand for cloud-scale accessible and deep archive solutions providing improved density and longevity as well as lower product acquisition and operating costs. Before joining Western Digital in 2013, Hellmold was Vice President of Marketing at Everspin Technologies. Prior positions include executive management at SandForce, Seagate Technology, Lexar Media (a subsidiary of Micron), Samsung Semiconductor, Fujitsu and SMART Modular Technologies. Hellmold has been deeply engaged in various industry trade associations as well as industry standards organizations such as JEDEC, IEEE, USB-IF, CFA, SDA, and MMCA. He co-founded the USB Flash Drive Alliance and served as their president from 2003 to 2007. Hellmold holds an Economic Electrical Engineering degree (EEE) from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Basil Hess

Research Engineer, IBM Research Europe

Biography

Basil Hess is a Research Engineer at IBM Research Europe. His focus is on preparing the cryptographic infrastructure for the quantum era. He contributes to the NIST PQC standardization process as part of the SIKE submission team. He is also a team member of Open Quantum Safe, the OSS community’s initiative to support the development and prototyping of quantum safe cryptography. Basil holds a PhD in Information Systems and a MSc in Computer Science, both from ETH Zurich.

Eric Hibbard

Director, Product Planning – Storage Networking & Security, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

Biography

Eric A. Hibbard is the Director, Product Planning – Storage Networking & Security at Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. and a cybersecurity and privacy leader with extensive experience in industry (PrivSec Consulting LLC, Hitachi, Raytheon, Hughes, OAO Corp), U.S. Government (NASA, DoE, DoD), and academia (University of California). He has extensive exerperience architecting and auditing information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures and solutions involving a wide range of technologies (IoT, cloud, storage, big data, AI, smart cities, blockchain) in organizations throughout the world.

Mr. Hibbard holds leadership positions in standards development organization and industry associations, including ISO/IEC, the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), the IEEE Computer Society, the American Bar Association (ABA), the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). Hibbard is or has served in an editorship role on the following international standards projects: ISO/IEC 22123 (Cloud computing – Vocabulary/Concepts), ISO/IEC 27031 (ICT readiness for business continuity), ISO/IEC 27050 (Electronic discovery), ISO/IEC 27040 (Storage security), ISO/IEC PAS 20648 (TLS for storage systems), Rec. ITU-T 3500 | ISO/IEC 17788 (Cloud computing -- Overview and vocabulary), and IEEE 1619-2018 (XTS-AES).

Mr. Hibbard possesses a unique set of professional credentials that include the (ISC)2 CISSP-ISSAP, ISSMP, and ISSEP certifications; IAPP CIPP/US and CIPT certifications; ISACA CISA and CDPSE certifications; and CSA CCSK certification. He has a BS in Computer Science.

Jeff Hilland

Distinguished Technologist, President DMTF, DMTF; HPE

Biography

Jeff Hilland is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in the CTO organization working on infrastructure management architecture with a focus on servers. Jeff served as VP of Technology for DMTF for 6 years before being appointed President of DMTF. Jeff has served in various leadership roles in DMTF since 2003, including chair of the Executive Committee, Technical Committee, Platform Subcommittee and co-chair of both the Server Management Work Group and the Desktop & Mobile Work Group. Jeff is one of the chief architects behind Redfish and contributed significantly to SMASH & DASH. Jeff also co-chairs the Security Task Force in PMCI. Jeff has spent the last 23 years driving industry standards and has also served in chairing roles in the Gen-Z Consortium, RDMA Consortium and the InfiniBand Trade Association.

John Hoffman

Lead Scientist, QS-2

Biography

John Hoffman is a Lead Scientist at Quantitative Scientific Solutions (QS-2) where he serves as a subject matter expert in synthetic and molecular biology, bioinstrumentation, and nanofabrication. In this role he serves as the technical lead managing advanced research and development programs in Molecular Information Storage for the Federal Government as well as supporting technical roadmapping and strategy development for commercial clients. John has a background in polymer chemistry, DNA synthesis and sequencing, and CMOS based bioinstrumentation. Prior to joining QS-2, John was a senior scientist at Stratos Genomics in Seattle, Washington developing novel DNA sequencing chemistries on CMOS based nanopore sequencers and has also held management positions at Medtronic Physio Control and Philips Medical Systems. He received his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Washington in 2010.

Robert Hummel

President, Group 47, Inc.

Biography

ROB HUMMEL is President of Group 47, the company behind DOTS; the 100-year plus digital preservation media. His career has revolved around Cinematography, motion picture labs, formats, restoration, archiving, animation, post-production, digital cinema, visual effects, and Stereoscopic 3D.

Recognized as a SMPTE Fellow, he has reputation for coming up with solutions to motion picture technical challenges. His career began in the Camera Department for Technicolor, working closely with cinematographers, editors, and producers overseeing dailies processing, and shepherded films in post production up to answer print. He also served in production, postproduction and technology positions at Disney, DreamWorks, Sony, & Warner Bros. At Warner Bros. he also oversaw digital restoration of “Gone with the Wind,” and “The Wizard of Oz,” among others.

Hummel spearheaded tests and seminars on different film formats and comparisons of early digital cameras vs. film.

Awarded NATO’s Pioneer of Digital Cinema, he led Technicolor’s establishment of some of the first Digital Cinemas (precisely, screens 13 through 47).

He has served on DCI, and the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards Committee, Science and Technology Council and co-chaired its Public Programs Committee, and hosted several programs.

He edited and contributed to the 8th edition of the American Cinematographer Manual, and is currently co-editing the 11th edition.

Latchesar Ionkov

Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Biography

Latchesar Ionkov is a Scientist in Los Alamos National Laboratory's HPC division. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018 with a research focused on divergent replicas of scientific data storage. He is currently working on the design and the implementation of a codec for DNA storage as part of the IARPA MIST project.

Shyamkumar Iyer

Distinguished Engineer, Dell

Biography

Distinguished Engineer in Dell's Office of CTO experienced at Researching, Designing, Developing, Debugging, Validating, Leading and Driving System and Software solutions that have an industry-wide impact. Experienced in leading research concepts that turn into industry-first products or influence roadmaps significantly. With 37 granted patents and 21 pending, Shyam has wide experience with Kernel, Device Drivers, Operating Systems, Virtualization, FPGA/Hardware device definitions, system architecture, performance tuning, Simulation, characterization, Storage Networking protocol stacks, OS/BIOS interfaces, Systems management, CPU micro-architecture, etc. He regularly presents/reviews solutions internally and externally with C-level execs/customers/developer-oriented audiences. Shyam writes code/reviews them for relief and enjoys a healthy smattering of technical and business-oriented discussions.

Shyam is also the Chair for SDXI(Smart Data Acceleration Interface), a newly formed SNIA TWG which aims to develop, extend and drive an extensible, virtualizable, forward-compatible, memory to memory data movement and acceleration interface standard.

Lokesh Jain

Software Engineer, Cloudera

Lokesh Jain is a Senior Software Engineer at Cloudera. He is an early developer of Apache Ozone(Object Store) and Apache Ratis project(Raft Consensus Protocol implementation) and has been contributing for the past 4 years. He holds committer and PMC privileges for Apache Hadoop, Apache Ozone and Apache Ratis. He has pursued M.Sc.(Hons.) Mathematics and B.E.(Hons.) Computer Science from BITS Pilani. Lokesh has experience with distributed computing, data replication, data pipeline and storage systems.

Kornel Jakubczyk

Tech Lead, 9LivesData

Technical leader, member of the HYDRAstor development team. Expert in NEC HYDRAstor integration with Veritas NetBackup, with 12 years of experience in disk storage area. Involved in integration and compatibility testing of different backup applications. Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Warsaw.

Klaus Jensen

Staff Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Klaus Jensen is a software engineer with a background in academia. He has worked in the state-of-the-art area of High Performance Computing, avoided users as an old school conservative UNIX sysop, taken a stint in an IT consultancy shop, written a Ph.D. thesis on tape and been involved in the OpenChannel SSD community, and recently, in the proliferation of NVMe Zoned Namespaces. He is involved in the NVMe community as a technical proposal co-author and a co-maintainer of the QEMU emulated NVMe device. As a Staff Software Engineer at Samsung Semiconductor Denmark Research, he is working on NVMe emulation and the NVMe software stack.

Mahmoud Jibbe

Technical Director, NetApp

Biography

Dr. M. K. Jibbe is responsible for the quality of E-series products at the design, firmware development, and QA levels at NetApp ESG in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Jibbe is an Adjunct Professor at the Wichita State University teaching engineering classes at the BS and MS levels in the areas of Protocols, SAN, NAS, chip development, and cloud applications.

Alan Johnson

Director of Emerging Technologies, Supermicro

Biography

Alan Johnson holds the position of Director of Emerging Technologies for Super Micro Computer Inc. Prior to this he has held senior roles within other organizations including Eurologic Systems, Adaptec and LSI. He has been involved in data storage for the last 40 years and during this time has seen individual hard drive capacities grow from 5 MB to 18TB. More recently he has been navigating the many facets of Software Defined Storage responsible for developing optimized solutions and test plans.

Alan has been a long time contributor to the industry, being involved in many storage related forums such as the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the SCSI Trade Association (SCSITA). In the past he has served for a number of years as a board member within the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA Europe). He holds BSc and MSc degrees from Dublin City University in Ireland.

Howard Johnson

Technology Architect, Broadcom BSN, Member, Fibre Channel Industry Association

Biography

Howard Johnson began his career in 1984 developing configuration applications for 3270 Cluster Controllers for McDATA Corporation in Boulder, Colorado. In 1993, in partnership with IBM, Howard was part of the team that created the ESCON Director Models 3/4/5 as well as the FICON to ESCON Bridge. As technical leader, he directed the efforts of the technical teams that expanded IBM’s original storage-area networks (SAN) from ESCON to FICON.

In 2007, Howard joined Brocade, a Broadcom company, as a member of the Fabric Operating Systems Architecture group and is responsible for the technical strategy relating to Brocade’s mainframe infrastructure offerings. His industry experience lead to a featured interview in Enterprise Executive (2019, issue 6), where he discussed the future of the mainframe, FICON, and Fibre Channel.

Howard is actively involved in the Fibre Channel standards development as part of the INCITS/ANSI T11.3 organization representing Broadcom and is the technical liaison with many of Broadcom’s Fibre Channel industry partners. Utilizing these relationships, Howard orchestrated standardization of the Fabric Notifications architecture for the Fibre Channel industry and worked with ecosystem partners to develop solutions leveraging Fabric Notifications in the formation of autonomous SAN technology.

Today, Howard is an active member of the Brocade SAN Networking division of Broadcom Limited and continues his technical leadership in enterprise networking solutions. With more than 37-years of professional experience in high-end processing environments, Howard remains an active advocate of Fibre Channel and enterprise solutions.

Kanchan Joshi

Staff engineer, Samsung Semiconductor India Research (SSIR)

Biography

Kanchan is Staff Engineer at Samsung, where he currently works on developing advancements in Linux I/O stack, making storage features consumable for host, and contributing to Linux kernel. He has engaged in system software development across operating systems, worked on various ideas involving host-storage co-design, and published technical papers.

Deepika K

Software Senior Engineer, Dell Technologies

Biography

Deepika K is a Senior Software Engineer at Dell EMC R&D. She has 9 years of total experience with 6 years in gaming, 1 year in GPU designing and 2 years in server administration at Dell. She is a technology enthusiast and accepts and implements emerging technology initiatives. She is a music lover with incredible patience and energy.

Padmakar Kalghatgi

Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Padmakar Kalghatgi is a software engineer based out of Bangalore, India working in SSIR, Semiconductor division of Samsung Electronics. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science Engineering. In his stint at Samsung, he has primiarily worked on developing validation tools for storage device like eMMC, NVMe, SAS etc. His primary interest being NVMe, NVMe-MI. Due to the interest in NVMe, he recently started working on the NVMe emulation of QEMU and contributed to various features of NVMe 1.4 specification. He looks forward to contributing more to the emulation of NVMe in QEMU. In his previous stint, he has worked in developing printer drivers.

Jayamohan Kallickal

Distinguished Engineer, Broadcom

Biography

Spearheading NVMe over Fabrics primarily with VMware. Working on performance improvement especially with multiple Virtual Machines and Containers.

Looking into various architectures that would be suitable for major Enterprises with need for high speed storage and high density compute

Vishnu Murty Karrotu

Automation Technologist, Dell Technologies

Biography

Automation Technologist at DellEMC, is a Masters in Software Systems with 15+ years’ experience in Automation Development efforts. The domains I have worked on include Server, Storage and System Management Software. Responsible of Delivering Zeno - Continues Test Automation framework, JAAS(JMeter As A Service), ICEMAN Tools. 9 Patents Granted by USPTO and 128 Disclosures recognized by Dell.

Speaking Experience:
https://www.snia.org/events/sdcemea/agenda/abstracts#Murty
https://testingstage.com/speakers/vishnu-murty-karrotu/
https://www.tesena.com/en/distributed-workload-generator
https://www.softwaretestpro.com/training/distributed-workload-generator-...
https://targetingquality2019.sched.com/event/QZSA
https://twitter.com/ConDaysEU/status/1118439176339435522
http://stepinforum.org/hyderabad_conference_2011/plenaries/kaliraj_vishn...
http://in.pycon.org/2009/talkfull/79/
http://in.pycon.org/2009/talkfull/75/
http://in.pycon.org/2010/talks/55-web-based-power-management-tool

Kishore Kasi

Software Engineer in Data Platform, Netflix

Biography

Kishore Kasi is a Senior Software Engineer in Data Platform@Netflix building large-scale distributed storage systems and cloud services. Kishore is leading the Netflix Studio Cloud initiative by architecting storage and data transfer solutions for globally distributed Netflix Studios, partners, and vendors. Prior to Netflix, Kishore worked at startups and large enterprises such as Salesforce and NetApp building SAN and NAS storage systems. Kishore is also an active IEEE senior member and storage researcher with publications in many storage journals.

Yang Seok Ki

Sr. Director, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Dr. Yang Seok Ki is Senior Director of Memory Solutions Lab (MSL) at Samsung Semiconductor Inc. in San Jose, California. Since joining Samsung 2011, he has led in-storage computing projects including smart SSD and key-value SSD, and led the NVMe key-value standard, SNIA key-value API, and SNIA compute storage API at Samsung. He is also a member of the Open Computing Project (OCP) Future Technology Initiative (FTI). Prior to joining Samsung, he worked in Oracle's Server Technology Group. Prior to his industrial career, he was involved in high performance computing (HPC), grid, and cloud research at the Institute of Information Sciences at the University of Southern California and the Center for Networked Systems at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D., Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University, and completed the Engineering Leadership Professional Program (ELPP) at University of California, Berkeley.

Jungsoo Kim

Staff Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Jungsoo Kim is in charge of designing and developing SSD reference system in Samsung Electronics Memory. He is also an evangelist of Open Compute Project (OCP) technologies to the company. Previously, he developed SATA-based all-flash storage systems, SCube AF-Media, which contributed to OCP Foundation at SK Telecom. Prior to SK Telecom, he spent 6 years at Naver Business Platform, an internet portal and search company in South Korea. At Naver, he worked on analyzing hyper-scale infrastructure and adopting next generation server technologies for building most efficient computing infrastructure. He was one of the key members of developing power efficient Naver server. He received his B.S. in 2005 and M.S. in 2008 both in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Andrew Klein

Principle Storage Cloud Evangelist, Backblaze

Biography

Mr. Klein has over 25 years of experience in cloud storage, computer security and email security. Prior to Backblaze he worked at Symantec, Checkpoint, PGP, and PeopleSoft, as well as startups throughout Silicon Valley. During his career, he has shared his expertise at events, symposiums, and panels at RSA, MSST, MIT, the Federal Trade Commission, the Commonwealth Club, and hundreds more. He currently writes and rants about drive stats, Storage Pods, cloud storage, and more.

Frederick Knight

Principal Standards Technologist, Trusted Computing Group

Biography

Frederick Knight is a Principal Standards Technologist at NetApp Inc. Fred has over 40 years of experience in the computer and storage industry. He currently represents NetApp in several National and International Storage Standards bodies and industry associations, including T10 (SCSI), T11 (Fibre Channel), T13 (ATA), IETF (iSCSI), SNIA, and JEDEC. He was the chair of the SNIA Hypervisor Storage Interfaces working group, the primary author of the SNIA HSI White Paper, the author of the new IETF iSCSI update RFC, and the editor for the T10 SES-3 standard. He is also the editor for the SCSI Architecture Model (SAM-6) and the Convenor for the ISO/IEC JTC-1/SC25/WG4 international committee (which oversees the international standardization of T10/T11/T13 documents). Fred has received several NetApp awards for excellence and innovation as well as the INCITS Technical Excellence Award for his contributions to both T10 and T11 and the INCITS Merit Award for his longstanding contributions to the international work of INCITS.

He is also the developer of the first native FCoE target device in the industry. At NetApp, he contributes to technology and product strategy and serves as a consulting engineer to product groups across the company. Prior to joining NetApp, Fred was a Consulting Engineer with Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq, and HP where he worked on clustered operating system and I/O subsystem design.

Randy Kreiser

Storage Specialist/FAE, Supermicro

Biography

Randy has been in the High Performance Computing industry for over 3 decades specializing on high speed storage architecture and file systems. His vast experience puts him in a unique position to understand needs of the HPC customer. Randy has primarily supported the DoD and Intelligence Community for the majority of his years in HPC.

Full-filling both pre and post-sales roles along with benchmarking, technical writing and speaking, Randy helped to architect some of the largest data ingest high performing storage systems in the world. The advent of solid state disk has created new opportunities and his focus remains in high speed file systems using the latest technology available across the Super Micro product line.

Prior to joining Super Micro Computer, he worked for Data Direct Networks Federal, LSI/Engenio, Silicon Graphics Federal and Data General/Clariion.

Naveen Krishnamurthy

Sr. Product Manager, VMware

Biography

Responsible for external storage solutions such as NVMe-oF, vVols, CNS, VMFS, NFS, Clustering and iSCSI.

Ramya Krishnamurthy

Senior QA Architect, HPE

Biography

Have 18 years’ of strong hands-on experience in the storage domain across companies like HPE, NetApp, EMC (Wipro/Mindtree). Working as QA architect in HPE currently for HPE storage solution with 3PAR /Primera.

Vikram Krishnamurthy

Senior Software Engineer, Netflix

Biography

Vikram Krishnamurthy is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix working on building solutions for Netflix’ Studio in the Cloud initiative. Vikram has been working in storage software design and development spanning from the early days of direct attached RAID systems to Cloud Filesystems with stints at IBM, NetApp and Komprise before joining Netflix. Vikram holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and has 9+ patents.

Ajay Kumar

Test Expert, HPE

Biography

Have almost 13 year of industry experience in server and storage domain currently at HPE. Had been part of Ecosystem team to qualify latest Windows Server OS. Working on Protocols like FCP,NVMoFC and iSCSI. Prior to HPE have worked with NetApp on Data Protection solution like Backup/Snapmirror/Snaplock/Snapvault.

Ashit Kumar

Lead Architect, SODA Foundation/Huawei Technologies

Biography

Ashit Kumar is a technologist and Open Source evangelist with 15 years of experience and has worked for companies like Symantec, Veritas, and Huawei. Currently, he is working with Huawei Technologies as a Lead architect and is one of the Maintainers of SODA Foundation Projects. He is also SODA Foundation India Outreach Committee member.

Over the years, he has developed and designed several solutions and products for Server and Storage Resource Management, DRaaS, Host-Based replication, Orchestration, multicloud, Container Storage, Backup and Archival etc..

He has presented papers and has been speaking on different international platforms. He has also got US patent on his name. He is the India Outreach Committee Member of SODA Foundation. Apart from this, he loves to write technical blogs and share knowledge. He has been teaching for the last 12 years and is one of the Visiting Faculty at Pune University Computer science department.

Mohan Kumar

Intel Fellow, Intel

Biography

Mohan Kumar is Intel Fellow in Intel Data Products Group and Senior Director of Cloud Architecture! He has over twenty six years of experience in Cloud Architecture, server architecture, pathfinding of RAS features, and has played key roles in many industry initiatives such as ACPI, PCI, PCIe, Redfish…He is also a regular presenter at industry forums such as SNIA, OCP…

Mohan holds over 200 issued patents, and author of a book titled “A Vision for Platform Autonomy”.

David Landsman

Director Industry Standards, Western Digital

Biography

Dave is Director of Industry Standards at WD, responsible for WD’s storage standards efforts across data center, client, and mobile/removable markets. Dave has driven storage standards efforts for WD (and SanDisk prior) in NVMe, PCI-SIG, T10, T13, SATA-IO, SNIA, JEDEC, TCG, USB-IF, IEEE, SDA, CFA, and others. Dave is currently on the Board of Directors for NVMe, SATA-IO, and the Compact Flash Association, chair of two workgroups within JEDEC, co-chair of OCP Storage Project, and advisory member of the SNIA Technical Council. Prior to his standards work, Dave’s background includes business development, product planning, and IT, for SanDisk, mSystems and Intel, as well as software development in device driver, network, and real time OS. He was also VP Product Marketing at a startup in Seattle, where he resides today. Dave has a BA in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. He has 30+ years of experience in the semiconductor industry, and holds a US patent in storage security.

Sebastien Le Duc

Software Engineering Director, Kalray

Biography

Sebastien started his professional career in 1998 at STMicroelectronics where he worked on compilers for a proprietary VLIW DSP targeted at multimedia applications. He then joined ST-Ericsson in 2006 where he spent 8 years managing Multimedia Software development teams. He continued his career back at STMicroelectronics as Lead Software Architect on set-top box products. Together with his technical background that ranges from low-level software development to middleware integration, his team management and product development experience, Sebastien brings outstanding Software Engineering leadership to Kalray.

Damien Le Moal

Director, Western Digital

Biography

Damien Le Moal manages the System Software Group within Western Digital Research. Damien has over 20 years of experience in the area of system software, operating systems and storage software solutions. Damien is involved in research activities including block device management, file systems, distributed systems, solid state and emerging NVM technologies. He is a regular contributor to the Linux kernel (I/O stack, file systems, device mapper) and is the author and maintainer of several open source projects and kernel components.

Yadong Li

Principal Engineer, Intel

Biography

Yadong Li is a Principal Engineer and leads the overall Software Architecture for the high performance SmartNIC/IPU programs in the Ethernet Products Group at Intel.  Yadong is also a storage architect with an ongoing focus on NVMe-oF and Cloud storage technologies and architectures in the SmartNIC/IPU products. Yadong holds 11 patents granted on Ethernet Controller design and several pending. Yadong earned two master’s degrees, one in Computer Science from Wright State University and one in Information and Signal Processing from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. 

Chris Lionetti

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Biography

Chris Lionetti is a veteran of the storage industry who has been building complex systems and SANs for over 25 years. Chris has long been actively involved with the Storage Network Industry Association, SNIA. He is currently a reference architect on the HPE Nimble Storage team. Earlier in his career, he worked as an engineer for HP, Dell, Microsoft, and NetApp. Chris holds 9 patents on topics related to data centers, networking, and storage.

Chun Liu

Chief Architect, Futurewei Technologies

Biography

Chun Liu is a Chief Architect at Futurewei Technologies, focusing on the persistent memory and storage software stack. His work includes the persistent layer abstraction and design for both persistent memory and storage devices, research and development of indexing engine and transaction engines optimized for persistent memory, many of which are implemented in Huawei’s current storage products. Prior to joining Futurewei/Huawei in 2017, Chun worked on All-Flash Arrays at Nimble Storage and Violin Memory, and microprocessor design in AMD. Chun received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, and MS and BS in CSE from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Simon Lund

Staff Engineer, Samsung

Biography

Simon Lund is a Staff Engineer at Samsung. His current work revolves around reducing the cognitive load for developers adopting emerging storage interfaces. Before Samsung, he worked at CNEX Labs designing and implementing liblightnvm: the Open-Channel SSD User Space Library. Simon received his Ph.D. on High Performance Backends for Array-Oriented Programming on Next-Generation Processing Units at the University of Copenhagen. He has given several talks on programming language, interpreter, and compiler design for HPC during his Ph.D. Most recently, in the storage industry at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference 2020 and Linux Vault 2020. Regardless of the topic, Simon's focus is the same, to bridge the gap between high-level abstractions and low-level control and measuring the cost and benefit of doing so.

Kim Malone

Storage Software Architect, Intel Corporation

Biography

Kim is a storage software architect at Intel Corporation, and has over 20 years of industry experience developing software for distributed high availability clustered systems for storage and networking products. Kim is engaged with computational storage standards initiatives with SNIA and NVMe, and is Co-Chair of the NVMe Computational Storage Task Group.

Shailesh Manjrekar

Head of AI, Weka

Biography

Shailesh Manjrekar, a Forbes Technology Council contributor, is responsible for https://www.weka.io/ AI strategy and technical alliances, aligning Weka's product roadmap and validating the software on key platforms in our target markets and use cases, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), genomics, finance, and high-performance computing (HPC). Before joining Weka, Shailesh was head of AI at SwiftStack, where he was responsible for product, solutions, and corporate development. Prior to SwiftStack, he held roles at Vexata, EMC, NetApp, Brocade, Force10 Networks, and he also held positions at Hewlett Packard and Aarohi Communications. Manjrekar holds an MBA from San Jose State, College of Business, Certification in Mastering Product Management from Haas School of Business, UC Berkley, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mumbai.

Adam Manzanares

Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Adam Manzanares is a software engineer at Samsung Electronics focused on open-source systems software. He has worked in the storage industry for a decade focused on systems integration of emerging storage hardware. His current focus is on ecosystem enablement for ZNS SSDs.

Jean-François Marie

Chief Solution Architect, Kalray

Biography

Jean-François has more than 30 years of experience in the high tech industry. He started his career dealing with real time systems, before joining Sun Microsystems as a data center architect, then EMC² and finally NetApp in 2006, where he had various roles in a 13-year career. He held various roles, from Chief Technologist and Product Marketing Director for EMEA, to French Expert team manager to handle new technology introduction. He also managed global and regional accounts, alliances and partners.Jean-François was also an active SNIA member for 10 years and French SNIA President for 2 years.He has a Masters degree in Electronics, specialized in microprocessor design and embedded systems.On a personal note, he has been a Basket Ball player, a coach and head coach for 25 years.

Bill Martin

SSD IO Standards, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Biography

Bill has been involved in the storage industry for over 35 years serving on industry consortiums and standards bodies for storage including SNIA, INCITS T11, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, SATA-IO, and NVMe. He has demonstrable skills in gaining industry agreement in a variety of technologies and bringing together competitors for the advancement of the industry.

In addition to his role representing Samsung in SSD IO Standards, Bill currently holds the following industry leadership roles: co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, Board member of the NVMe Board of Directors, Chair of INCITS T10, and Secretary of INCITS T13.

Bill is: editor of the SNIA Computational Storage Architecture Model; editor of the SNIA Computational Storage API; editor of the SNIA Key Value Storage API; editor of SCSI Block Commands – 5 (SBC-5); and author of numerous proposals to: NVMe, SNIA, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, and INCITS T11.

Bill has received numerous industry recognitions for his contributions to the storage industry over the past decades including: SNIA Volunteer of the Year award 2021, INCITS Gene Milligan award for effective committee management 2016, INCITS Merit award 2013, FCIA Achievement award 2010, INCITS Outstanding Leadership Team award 2007, INCITS Technical Excellence award 2005, FCIA Lifetime Achievement award 2005, and SNIA Outstanding Theme lead for the interop lab 2004.

Mohiuddin Mazumder

Principal Engineer, Data Center Group, PCI-SIG, Intel

Biography

Mohiuddin Mazumder is a Principal Engineer in Data Center Group at Intel Corporation. He leads pathfinding and development work for high-speed serial links such as PCIe and Intel’s UltraPath Interconnect. He is a co-chair of the PCI-SIG Electrical Work Group. Mohiuddin joined Intel in 1996 after obtaining his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Yale University.

Joe McCormick

Software Engineer, NetApp

Biography

Joe is a software engineer at NetApp focused on developing storage solutions for high performance computing and artificial intelligence at scale. Joe has been at NetApp for almost a decade and contributes to a number of open-source projects, particularly around integrating NetApp storage with open-source automation and monitoring solutions. He is currently responsible for leading development on the BeeGFS CSI driver.

Dr. Jai Menon

Chief Scientist, Fungible

Biography

Dr. Jai Menon is Chief Scientist at Fungible, a Santa Clara-based startup providing at-scale, next-generation solutions for the data center, cloud and IT industries. Menon previously served as the CTO for both Dell and IBM. At Dell, Dr. Menon served as VP and CTO for the Dell Enterprise Solutions Group and became head of research and chief research officer for Dell in 2013. In 2016, he was appointed chief scientist of Cloudistics, a superconverged enterprise cloud platform company, where he drove new innovations in storage, networking, compute scaling and cloud management. Dr. Menon holds over 50 patents and played an integral role at IBM during the development of its revolutionary RAID storage technology. An IBM Master Inventor and IBM Fellow, he has received industry-wide recognition as the winner of the IEEE Wallace McDowell Award and the Reynold B. Johnson Information Systems Award.

Dr. J Metz

Chairman, SNIA

Biography

J is the Chair of SNIA’s Board of Directors and Technical Director for Systems Design for AMD where he works to coordinate and lead strategy on various industry initiatives related to systems architecture. Recognized as a leading storage networking expert, J is an evangelist for all storage-related technology and has a unique ability to dissect and explain complex concepts and strategies. He is passionate about the innerworkings and application of emerging technologies.

J has previously held roles in both startup and Fortune 100 companies as a Field CTO, R&D Engineer, Solutions Architect, and Systems Engineer. He has been a leader in several key industry standards groups, sitting on the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). A popular blogger and active on Twitter, his areas of expertise include NVMe, SANs, Fibre Channel, and computational storage.

J is an entertaining presenter and prolific writer. He has won multiple awards as a speaker and author, writing over 300 articles and giving presentations and webinars attended by over 10,000 people. He earned his PhD from the University of Georgia.

Stefan Metzmacher

Developer, SerNet/Samba-Team

Biography

Stefan Metzmacher is working for SerNet and is a member of the international Samba Team. His focus is spread into all areas of Samba including WINS-Replication, DRS-Replication, Authentication, SMB*, DCERPC and a lot of architectural [re-]designs of common code.

Jason Molgaard

Co-Chair, Computational Storage TWG; Senior Principal Storage Device Architect, Arm Inc.

Biography

Jason is a flexible, experienced, lead ASIC/SoC Design Engineer, and Architect with proven architecture, design, verification, and design leadership experience in Fortune 500 and Global Technology companies. Extensive experience developing enterprise storage ASICs, including microprocessor and microcontroller design and integration. Effective ASIC and team lead who prioritizes and assigns tasks, tracks progress, and collaborates with local, remote, and international engineers. Skilled at communicating, explaining and instructing

Sarthak Moorjani

Member of Technical Staff, Nutanix Inc

Biography

Sarthak is a member of technical staff and has been working at nutanix for close to 2 years. Sarthak has worked as part of data protection team and has developed infrastructure for version management and replication feature where was involved in multipart object replication.

Binitha MT

Software Senior Engineer, Dell Technologies

Biography

Binitha MT is a Software Senior Engineer at Dell EMC with a total of 6 year of experience in System Administration domain. She is responsible for prioritizing feature development, analyzing and driving opportunities for improvement, and delivering projects on-time and with high quality. She is passionate about data mining and search engines. Besides this, she is a core member of Women in Action and an NGO activist. A happy to go person and a great Team player.

Naveen Nagar

Software Engineer, Samsung

Biography

TBD

Ashish Neekhra

Senior Test Specialist, HPE

Biography

I am Ashish Neekhra, with 13+ yrs. of experience in working with different technologies like operating systems, storage, virtualization, containers and cloud. Currently I am part of HPE Primary Storage QA team working on System testing.

Chandra Nelogal

DMTS (distinguished member of technical staff), Trusted Computing Group

Biography

Chandra Nelogal is a DMTS (distinguished member of technical staff) at Dell Technologies, and represents Dell at the TCG storage work group, contributing to several standards by the work group. He has contributed to standards such as TCG Opal, TCG SIIS and related specifications works. His expertise is in RAID data storage with focus on performance, reliability, availability and serviceability.

Chandra works on end to end aspects of the storage technologies all the way from storage devices to system management applications and interfaces including storage controllers, host OS device drivers, etc. He also focuses on adoption of security features for data storage products and solutions. Chandra is a prolific innovator with more than 30 granted US patents.

Philip Ng

Sr. Fellow, AMD

Biography

Philip Ng is a Sr. Fellow at AMD where he works on I/O subsystem architecture including technologies such as PCI-Express and I/O virtualization. He holds a B.A.Sc and M.Eng from the University of Toronto.

Myoungwon Oh

Staff Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Myoungwon is a system software engineer at Samsung electronics. He has developed deduplication/tiering and misc patches as a member of Ceph committer. Also, He has published papers regarding the performance and deduplication for distributed storage systems such as Ceph. He is currently working on scale-out storage system project focusing on high performance and scalability for NVMe storages

Peter Onufryk

Intel Fellow, Intel

Biography

Peter is an Intel Fellow in the Design Engineering Group at Intel. He has been active in NVMe standardization as an NVMe Board Member, NVMe Management Workgroup Chair, and NVMe Technical Workgroup Chair. Peter holds over 40 patents and has written several published articles and books. Before Intel, Peter was a Fellow in the Data Center Solutions business unit at Microchip responsible for storage product architecture. He was previously Director of Engineering at Integrated Device Technology (IDT) and a research staff member at AT&T Bell Labs. Peter earned a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rutgers University and an MSEE from Purdue University.

Michael Oros

Executive Director, SNIA

Biography

Michael is the Executive Director at Storage Networking Industry Association, where he oversees the group, industry collaboration and standards work of the organization. Michael brings 20 years of strategy, planning and development experience in IT services and high-tech industry to SNIA. Before joining the organization, Michael held roles at Intel including oversight of technology initiatives and collaboration on open standards, as well as the deployment of storage, backup, and disaster recovery services for the organization. He led the storage and networking components vendors through the biggest I/O transitions of the past decade, while playing a key role in the introduction, adoption and ramp of PCI Express, InfiniBand, OpenFabrics, and various storage/memory technologies in server, cloud, HPC and storage industries. Michael holds an MBA in strategic management, marketing and international business from USIU.

Kannadasan Palani

Senior Test Manager, MSys Technologies

Biography

Kannadasan is a Senior test manager with 14+ yrs of Testing experience in the Storage domain. He carries good experience in testing multiple storage vendor products and qualifying them by testing with 3rd party software. He is a certified Scrum Master and having good experience in handling multiple projects. At MSys, Kannadasan is working on Cloud Storage with AI/ML projects and having with very good experience on Red Hat Ceph Storage, Kubernetes, and managing multi-cloud infrastructure by using Terraform.

Sung Kyu Park

Staff Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Sung Kyu Park is a staff engineer at Memory Division of Samsung Electronics, and currently working on building SSD ecosystem by cloud infra-based performance engineering and storage system software development. He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D degree in the Division of Electrical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2007, 2009, and 2014.

Sumeet Paul

Staff Engineer, Samsung Semiconductor India Research

Biography

Professional with 12+ years of experience in technical leading and managing teams for Product qualification and Claim handling for flash products ranging from MicroSD, eMMC and UFS. Expertise in FTL testing, Failure analysis, NAND reliability, JEDEC specification, Platform testing etc.

Oscar Pinto

Principal Engineer, Samsung Semiconductor Inc

Biography

Oscar Pinto is a Principal software architect at Samsung Semiconductor Inc, California. He is a key contributor to the SNIA CS API definitions. At Samsung he leads software architecture for computational storage related activities. His interests include computational storage architecture and interfaces, disaggregated and distributed environments. He has 20+ years of industry experience and has contributed to NVMe, NVMe-oF and RDMA definitions and solutions.

Murali Murali Rajagopal

Director of Technology, VMware

Biography

Murali Rajagopal works in the Office of the CTO at VMware and is responsible for enabling NVMe technologies and related specifications in the VMware storage stack. He has worked in the storage industry for the last 25 years in the areas of Fibre Channel and iSCSI related products. He has contributed to storage standards in T11, T10, IETF and DMTF.

Aravind Ramesh

Principal Engineer, Western Digital

Biography

I am currently Principal Engineer at WDC Research. Working on Zoned Namespaces from last 3 years and OCSSD for a while before that. I have worked on enabling the ZNS SSDs in F2fs filesystem and in other applications across the software stack.

I have worked on distributed systems, high availability systems, replication technologies and storage controller software and caching solutions. I have around 15 years of experience in storage domain and have worked across the stack from storage controller software development, kernel, filesystems, user space applications including databases and distributed systems and other replication software. I have presented a ZNS presentation in SDC India(2020).

Abirami Ravichandran

Senior DevOps Engineer, MSys Technologies

Biography

Abirami is a Devops Engineer with 4+ years of hands-on experience in building and supporting web SaaS solutions based on Linux/Unix platform in a cloud especially on AWS and GCP. In her previous stints, she worked on Configuration and Management of Web and Application servers including Apache, Nginx , Tomcat JBOSS and Wildfly. She has distinguished experience on different Version Control systems, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing and Continuous Monitoring Tools. She helped to choose the best tools and technologies which best fit the business needs. She has also been an active member of the Organisation internal GDPR committee and trains employees on Data , Source code security and Privacy. She has been the operations team head and contact for SSAE audits held on the organisation.

At MSys, she is responsible for automating and supporting CI/CD in product development. She is employed by Python for Automation. And also using Jenkins for automation Jobs and writes Ansible Playbook for configuration Management. She is having close coordination with the development team such that the application is in line with performance according to the customer's expectation

Byju Ravindran

Associate Director, Samsung Semiconductor India Research

Biography

Byju Ravindran is Storage System Test Associate Director at Samsung Semiconductor India Research, responsible for system testing efforts across Data center, Client, Software, cerftiication and Project Poseidon (NVMeoF Array). Prior to responsibility at Samsung, Byju's experience spans across Servers, Storage, System Management, embedded system design and Substrate design for Dell, Intel and Wipro. He has 22 years of experience in IT Product development (Server/Storage) industry and was instrumental in more than 35 Server qualifications over years for Dell.

Eric Ries

SVP Memory and Storage Strategy Division, KIOXIA America Inc.

Biography

Eric Ries joined Toshiba Corp. in June 2013 as the General Manager of Corporate Development and Strategy for the Semiconductor & Storage Products Company in Tokyo.  He  returned to the United States in 2016 as the Sr. Vice President for Memory and Storage Strategy for Toshiba Memory America (now KIOXIA). The Memory and Storage Strategy group, among other things, is exploring methods and technologies to better integrate memory with storage and storage with software aiming to provide a more compelling and fluid way to manage data in world where systems are now scaled and integrated in an unprecedented manner. Eric is a graduate of Brigham Young University.

Thomas Rivera

Strategic Success Manager, VMware

Biography

Thomas Rivera, CISSP, CDPSE, has over 25 years of experience in data storage architectures, with specialties in data protection and data privacy. Thomas is currently at VMware Carbon Black, working on advancing Cybersecurity & Data Privacy standards. Thomas also co-chairs the SNIA Data Protection and Privacy Committee (DPPC), and is an active member of SNIA’s Security Technical Working Group. Thomas also serves as the Secretary for the Cybersecurity & Privacy Standards Committee within IEEE, as well as secretary for Cybersecurity INCITS Technical Committee (CS1).

Ajitha Robert

Cloud Stack Engineer, MSys Technologies

Biography

Ajitha is a Dynamic Cloud Stack Engineer with 8 Years of progressive IT Experience in Cloud Service Development. She has worked on assignments involving implementation and testing with Technical expertise for clients in Delivering Optimal Results across multiple domains like Security Auditing, Cloud Technologies, DevOps and Storage. At Msys, She has been working on Openstack Cinder driver and CI maintenance. She has good exposure in Openstack cloud, Ceph storage, java development and DevOps tools.

Alexandre Romana

Principal System Architect, ARM

Biography

Alexandre Romana is an experienced, hands-on system architect who has been involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of complex system-on-chips at companies like Texas Instruments or Intel, with a strong focus on performance and energy-efficiency. At Arm, he focuses on the future of virtualization, and was an architect for The Revere Accelerator Management Unit (Revere-AMU) System Architecture

Bikash Roy Choudhury

Technical Director, Pure Storage

Biography

Bikash is a Technical Director at Pure Storage. He is responsible for designing and architecting solutions with EDA/HPC and SWDev/DevOps workflows relevant across industry verticals including high tech, financial services, gaming, social media and web-based organizations in Private/Hybrid/Public Cloud environments. He has also worked on validating solutions with Rancher/TKG/Kubernetes on Portworx, GitLab, Jenkins, JFrog Artifactory, Prometheus/Grafana, IBM Cloud Private and Perforce using RESTful APIs and integrating them with data platforms in private, hybrid, and public clouds. In his current role, Bikash drives integrations with strategic DevOps partners like Rancher, D2iQ/Konvoy, VMWare, Perforce, Cloudbees and JFrog.

Andy Rudoff

Persistent Memory SW Architect, Intel

Biography

Andy Rudoff is a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, focusing on Non-Volatile Memory programming. He is a contributor to the SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group. His more than 30 years industry experience includes design and development work in operating systems, file systems, networking, and fault management at companies large and small, including Sun Microsystems and VMware. Andy has taught various Operating Systems classes over the years and is a co-author of the popular UNIX Network Programming textbook.

Marek Rychlik

CEO of Xoralgo Inc., Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona, co-inventor of a patented RAID and ECC technology, Xoralgo, Inc

Biography

Marek Rychlik received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. He pursued research in several fields of mathematics as part of his employment at several major universities and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Currently he is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. He published his research in most prestigious journals. He is a recipient of Monroe Martin Prize for a best paper in Applied Mathematics by a mathematician under 35 years of age. His paper completely solving the Equichordal Point Problem, a problem that eluded mathematician for 80-years, was published in Inventiones Mathematicae, one of the two renowned journals in the field.

Professor Rychlik has pursued a number of problems of applied nature, which led him to become an entrepreneur and inventor, and a CEO of a University start-up company, Xoralgo. Inc. Professor Rychlik investigated the problem of finding an error correcting code which is as efficient as the 30-year old RAID 6 error correcting code, without a computational overhead, for over a decade. In 2017, in collaboration with his Ph.D. student Mohamand Moussa, he succeeded at finding such a code. This code, based on quintuple parity, extends the mean time to data loss (MTDL) from days for current RAID 6 to 100 quadrillion years (20 orderd of magnitude), and it as computationally efficient as RAID 6. The invention led to a US utility patent issued in May 2021, and is the cornerstone of Xoralgo's new RAID implementation, called PentaRAID.

Josh Salomon

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Biography

Josh has more than 30 years of experience in software development, more than 15 years in architecture positions and 5 years of experience as an architect in the storage development industry (in ScaleIO and Red Hat).

Cathleen Scerbo

VP, Chief Information Officer, International Association of Privacy Professionals

Biography

Cathleen Scerbo is Vice President, Chief Information Officer at the International Association of Privacy Professionals, a non-profit professional membership association whose mission is to define, promote and improve the privacy profession globally. Prior to joining the IAPP team in February 2019, she held various executive technology leadership positions at Liberty Mutual across infrastructure, applications and technology services. Cathy is an advocate of Women in Technology, and passionate about technology literacy for business executives. She earned a B.S. in Mathematics from the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

Scott Schweitzer

Sr. Mgr Product Planning - SmartNICs, Achronix

Biography

Since his baptism on the altar of the TRS-80, Scott has been a lifelong technology. He's written profitable software products for Apple's App Store, built hardware, and formally managed programs for IBM, NEC, Myricom, Solarflare, Xilinx, and now Achronix. After two decades plugging along with single socket computing platforms, in 2003, Scott joined NEC to manage their new Intel Itanium multi-core 64-bit Super Computing Server.

In 2005 Scott shifted his focus to clustering for Super Computing and extreme performance networking. As 10GbE adoption ramped up, in 2009, he launched his wildly popular 10GbE.net blog. With market changes in 2017, Scott rolled this property into the TechnologyEvangelist.co. This blog now sees thousands of monthly page views, and the accompanying podcast is growing in success. Daily as a System Architect at Xilinx focused on acceleration, Scott works with customers and partners to recognize new opportunities and define innovative solutions.

Brad Settlemyer

Storage Researcher, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Biography

Brad Settlemyer is a Senior Scientist in Los Alamos National Laboratory's HPC Design group. He received his Ph.D in computer engineering from Clemson University in 2009 with a research focus on the design of parallel file systems. Before coming to Los Alamos National Laboratory he spent 5 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory researching and implementing high-performance storage systems. He currently leads the storage systems research efforts within Los Alamos' Ultrascale Research Center and his team is responsible for designing and deploying state of the art storage systems for enabling scientific discovery. He is the primary investigator on projects ranging from ephemeral file system development to archival storage systems using molecular information technology and he has published papers on emerging storage systems, long distance data movement, system modeling, and storage system algorithms. His team’s work has been featured in national media, in 2019 his team won an R&D100 award for their work on DeltaFS, and in 2020 their work on computational storage was recognized with a Government Innovation Award for innovation within the public sector.

Scott Shadley

Co-Chair, Computational Storage TWG; VP Marketing, NGD Systems

Biography

Scott has spent over 25 years in the semiconductor and storage space in MFG, Design, and Marketing. His experience spans 17 years at Micron. He spent time at STEC, where he was critical to the growth of the startup to acquisition. His efforts have helped lead to products in the market with over $300M in revenue. With over $2B in overall program revenues over the last 10 years, Scott is now driving NGD Systems to a new forefront of success.

Karthik Shivaram

Storage Engineer, Facebook

Biography

Karthik Shivaram is a Storage Hardware Engineer at Facebook. He has over 11+ years of storage experience in developing Solid State Devices. At Facebook, he works on Flash Storage for Facebook Infrastructure.

David Sietz

Systems / Solution Architect, IAPP

Biography

David Sietz is a system architect at International Association of Privacy Professionals with more than 20 years of hands-on experience. Starting his IT career in Munich Germany, his professional history as a data architect, system designer, and adult educator, instilled in him a sense of IT with the business customer in mind.

David's specialty is architecting, designing, and constructing of viable solutions that are properly engineered for their purpose and longevity. His breadth of knowledge of data management, microservice architecture, and building cloud platforms allows him to bridge disciplines and provide MVP solutions.

Erik Smith

Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Dell

Biography

Erik Smith is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff working for Dell’s CTIO group. Over the past 23 years, Erik has spent the majority of his time working on Storage Area Networks; first as an integration Engineer working for EMC’s E-Lab where he lead the Interoperability team, and later as an active participant in the Fibre Channel standards body (T11). Most recently Erik has been focused on defining a Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) that is intended to address what he refers to as “NVMe-oF’s discovery problem”, especially as it relates to NVMe/TCP.

Selvakumar Somasundaram

Engineer, Samsung Semiconductor India Research (SSIR)

Biography

Selvakumar is Software Engineer at Samsung Electronics. As part of Samsung's open-source team, his main interest is into Linux storage stack with focus on nvme driver advancement. In past, He has worked in zoned block devices particularly NVME Zoned namespace area.

Karin Strauss

Senior Principal Research Manager, Microsoft

Biography

Karin Strauss is a Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Corporation and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. She co-leads the Molecular Information System Laboratory, working on using molecules, currently DNA, to benefit the IT industry. Her background is in computer architecture, systems, and molecular biology. Her research interests include emerging storage technologies, scaling of computation and storage, and environmental sustainability. Selected as one of the "100 Most Creative People in Business in 2016" by Fast Company Magazine and for the 2020 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, she got her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2007.

Sridharan "Sri" Sudarsan

Director, Ciphertrust Transparent Encryption Engineering, Thales Group

Biography

I joined Thales Group when it acquired my prior employer Vormetric Inc, a Silicon Valley startup specializing in data security and encryption products & solutions. Prior to Vormetric, I was a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems primarily working on data storage and computer systems software. At Thales, I have 10+ years experience in managing the Ciphertrust Transparent Encryption products. I'm experienced in Linux & Unix kernel engineering, file systems, block devices, NAS, object storage and enterprise databases from onprem to cloud environments. I'm also experienced in data security, cryptography, data encryption, identity and access controls towards engineering secure and performant products and solutions.

Steven Tan

VP & CTO Cloud Solution, Storage at Futurewei / Board Chairman at SODA Foundation, Futurewei Technologies

Biography

Steven Tan is VP & CTO Cloud Solution, Storage at Futurewei where he is responsible for open source strategy and collaboration. Steven brought together leaders across industries, and founded the SODA Foundation which he currently serves as chair. SODA Foundation is a transformation of the Linux Foundation OpenSDS project which he initiated previously. Steven’s career brought him across Singapore, US, China and Taiwan, and includes roles as founder and CTO at Cloudena, VP Engineering at ProphetStor, and VP Engineering and Technology at CipherMax. Steven is an alumnus of Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore.

Steven Tran

Software Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

Biography

Steven is a member of the Microsoft SMB team since 2020. He has been working on advanced SMB features and protocols.

James Tuck

Professor, NC State University / DNAli Data Technologies

Biography

Dr. James Tuck is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State University and Co-Founder of DNAli Data Technologies, along with Dr. Albert Keung and Kyle Tomek. For the last 5 years, he has co-led a project on DNA-based Data Storage with Dr. Keung. He joined NC State in 2007 as an Assistant Professor and has since been promoted to Professor. He received his Ph.D. and MS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He earned a BE in Computer Engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1999. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and IEEE.

Paolo Valente

Assistant Professor, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Biography

Paolo Valente is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, and a collaborator of the Linaro engineering organization. Paolo's main activities focus on scheduling algorithms for storage devices, transmission links and CPUs. In this respect, Paolo is the author of the last version of the BFQ I/O scheduler. BFQ entered the Linux kernel from 4.12, providing unprecedented low-latency and fairness guarantees. As for transmission links, Paolo is one of the authors of the QFQ packet scheduler, which has been in the Linux kernel until 3.7, after that it has been replaced by QFQ+, a faster variant defined and implemented by Paolo himself. Finally, Paolo has also defined and implemented other algorithms, part of which are now in FreeBSD, and has provided new theoretic results on multiprocessor scheduling.

Arie van der Hoeven

Principal Product Manager, Seagate Technology

Biography

Arie has 20 years of industry experience in storage technologies, system busses, power management, OS internals and firmware.

Jason Vanvalkenburgh

Technical Product Management, Fungible

Biography

Jason has 15+ years of hands-on experience in leading the design, build, and operation of data centers and application uptime at large service providers, digital broadcast facilities, and in Finance and Government. In this journey, Jason has worked toward the goal of what today is composable infrastructure while being accountable for delivering on time, on budget, and within the bounds of an overarching business initiative. This experience balancing these competing interests directly informs this presentation.

Lucas Villa Real

Research Software Engineer, IBM Research

Biography

At IBM Research Brazil since 2011, Lucas works with data management for scientific and geospatial workloads. Prior to joining the lab, Lucas was a member of IBM Almaden Research Center, where he contributed to the creation and implementation of LTFS, a filesystem for magnetic tapes that became an ISO standard and, to date, is the only filesystem that has received an Emmy Award by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Lucas is also a principal developer of GoboLinux, a research Linux distribution that uses an alternative filesystem hierarchy. He holds a MsC from the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Daniel Waddington

Principal Research Staff Member, IBM Research

Biography

Dr. Waddington is currently a researcher in the Storage Systems Research Group, IBM Research Almaden, California. His current focus is around non-volatile memory and high-performance distributed storage systems. Dr. Waddington holds a Ph.D. from Lancaster University, UK and has over thirty research publications across a broad range of topics pertinent to systems building and performance optimization. He has twenty years of industrial research experience and has previously worked at Bell Labs, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs, and Samsung Research America. During his career he has applied his research to a broad array of applications including telecommunication switches, mission control and avionics systems, and mobile services. He is a senior member of the ACM.

Manoj Wadekar

Senior Storage Architect, Facebook

Biography

28+ years in Server, Storage, and Networking industry.

Specialties: Transforming hyper-scale infrastructure to drive performance and efficiency (proven for ""ebay servers"". Technology Research and Innovation. Product and Technology Strategy. Product Roadmaps. Business cases. High-level architecture, and IP development. Cross-industry initiatives and collaborations.

Benjamin Walker

Technical Lead, Intel

Biography

Ben is a Technical Lead in Intel's Storage Software Acceleration Group. He has been at Intel working on storage-related projects since 2011. Prior to Intel, Ben was a Software Engineer working on high-frequency trading infrastructure.

Currently, Ben is a core maintainer for the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK). His areas of expertise include NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics, RDMA, Computational Storage, Cloud Storage, and networking offloads.

Outside of work, Ben spends his time playing with his three young daughters who keep him very busy.

Mike Walker

Storage Management Architect, Storage Networking Industry Association

Biography

Mike Walker's professional experience includes over 38 years at IBM Corporation where he most recently served as a senior technical staff member before retiring. His job history includes working as a programmer in Ad Tech and working on the VM operating system. He has served on numerous SNIA committees since 2003 and was instrumental in developing the SMI-S specification.

Tim Walker

Principal Engineer, Seagate Technology

Biography

Tim has over 20 years experience in storage. His focus areas have included performance, defect detection, NVME, SMR, Multi-Channel drive enablement, and storage system integration.

Stephen Wallo

CTO, Vcinity

Biography

Steve currently serves as Vcinity’s CTO, overseeing resources related to the insertion of advanced technologies and strategies into customer architectures and future IT decision methodologies. He is responsible for bridging future IT trends into the companies existing portfolio capabilities and future offerings. Prior to Vcinity, Mr. Wallo was CTO at Brocade Federal, responsible for articulating Brocade’s innovations, strategies and architectures in the rapidly evolving federal IT space for mission success. Mr. Wallo has served the U.S Government, as the Chief Architect for the NAVAIR Air Combat Test and Evaluation Facility High Performance Computing Center.

Orit Wasserman

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Biography

Orit is an experienced software engineer and architect who is passionate about open source and infrastructure with extensive experience with distributed systems and storage. Currently she is OpenShift Data Foundation architect at Red Hat, focusing on storage for containers, hybrid cloud, multi cloud and edge

Eric Weber

Software Engineer, NetApp

Biography

Eric is a software engineer with the NetApp E-Series group. His high-level focus is around storage solutions for high performance computing (HPC) applications and infrastructure, and he is specifically interested in integrating HPC technologies with cloud-native/containerized workflows. Eric has made storage-related contributions to Kubernetes and is one of the primary creators/maintainers of the BeeGFS CSI driver.

Joseph White

Fellow, Dell

Biography

Dr. Joseph L. White is currently a Fellow with Dell’s CTO office focused on disaggregated infrastructure and storage networking including NVMe-oF. Prior to joining Dell in 2013 Dr. White worked for Juniper Networks as a Distinguished Engineer in data center networking, Decru (NetApp) as a Technical Director and McDATA as a Technical Director in the CTO office. He joined McDATA in 2003 through the Nishan Systems acquisition. In 1998, he co-founded Nishan Systems, one of the first companies to champion IP storage within the industry and deliver enterprise quality, high performance, multi-protocol SAN switches, routers, and gateways. Prior to Nishan, Dr. White worked as a physicist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center focusing on data acquisition, data analysis, and control systems programming for high energy physics experiments. He holds a PhD in High Energy Particle Physics from Rice University.

Jason Wohlgemuth

Partner Software Engineering Lead, Microsoft

Biography

Jason Wohlgemuth is a Partner Software Engineering Lead in the Windows Core OS team who manages a group of engineers that aid in the implementation of OS support for emerging hardware and silicon technology. He is a key architect and technical leader for system and OS architecture, representing Microsoft in various industry forums and technical boards.

Carlos Wong

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Ciphertrust Transparent Encryption Engineering, Thales Group

Biography

TBD

David Woolf

Senior Exec Technology Office, UNH-IOL

Biography

David Woolf is the Senior Executive of Technology Offerings at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL). He has developed dozens of industry-reviewed test procedures and implementations as part of the team that has grown the UNH-IOL into a world-class center for interoperability and conformance testing. David has also helped to organize numerous industry interoperability test events at both the UNH-IOL facility and off-site locations. David has been an active participant in a broad array of industry communities addressing conformance and interoperability covering a diverse set of technologies including NVMe, NVMe-oF, MIPI D-PHY, C-PHY, A-PHY, DSI, CSI, SAS, SATA, CXL, OCP.

Wen Xin

Software Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

Biography

Wen is a member of the Microsoft SMB team since 2017. He has been working on advanced SMB features and protocols. He graduated from Georgia Tech in 2017 with B.S. in Computer Science. He has presented at SDC and other industry events.

Ziye Yang

Staff software engineer, Intel

Biography

Ziye Yang is a staff software engineer at Intel and involved in SPDK (storage performance development kit) development work. Before that, Ziye worked at EMC for 4.5 years. Ziye is interested in system virtualization, file system and storage related research and development work. Ziye currently has 15 issued patents in US and 7 issued patents in PRC. Ziye holds a master’s degree in computer science from Fudan University in 2009. 

Tomek Zawadzki

Cloud Software Engineer, Intel

Biography

Tomek is a Cloud Software Engineer at Intel and a core maintainer for the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK). His recent focus areas include NVMe, NVMe-oF and blobstore (persistent, power-fail safe block allocator).

Qing Zheng

Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Biography

Qing Zheng is a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Lab's High-Performance Computing Division. Before joining Los Alamos, Qing was a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department, focusing on High-Performance Computing storage. Qing's research has won R&D 100 and Supercomputing Best Paper awards.