Geoff Barrall

Chief Executive Officer, Drobo

Biography

Geoff Barrall, Chief Executive Officer of Drobo, has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, and executive, and has a dozen storage-related patents to his credit. He has founded five companies and currently serves on the boards of a number of startups in the storage space. Prior to Connected Data, Geoff founded Data Robotics – the makers of Drobo. As CEO, he transformed the brand into one of the most widely recognized in digital storage and grew the business to over $40 million in annual revenue during it's first two years in market. Geoff also founded BlueArc (sold to Hitachi Data Systems in 2011) and served in various roles there including SVP Marketing, CTO & VP Engineering. Geoff has severed on the boards and advisory boards of many companies including Data Domain (acquired by EMC), Tacit Networks (acquired by Packeteer), Nevex (acquired by Intel) and Nexsan (acquired by Imation). Geoff earned his Ph.D. in Cybernetics from the University of Reading.

Val Bercovici

Big Data and Cloud Czar, Office of the CTO, NetApp

Biography

Val joined NetApp in 1998 and leads the Strategic Planning Team within the office of the CTO. Working with customers, analysts, and alliance partners, Val focuses on next-generation research projects and is responsible for NetApp’s product vision.

As an early Big Data adopter, Val chairs the Enterprise Data Architecture Track of the Hadoop Summit. Val also introduced the first Cloud Standard to the industry as chairman of SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative, whose mission is to foster the growth and success of the cloud storage market. Previously, Val served as the vice-chair of SNIA’s Solid-State Storage Initiative.

Val has over 25 years of IT industry experience spanning NCR (AT&T) and Cognos (IBM), with 12 years in storage at EMC and NetApp. Previously, he worked as a consultant to private industry and government. Val holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Ottawa.

Bob Brennan

Senior Vice President, Samsung Memory Solutions Lab

Biography

Bob Brennan, a Samsung Senior Vice President, is leading Samsung's Memory Solutions Lab or MSL. MSL is chartered with leading the industry through the introduction of system and platform architectures that are aligned to the growth of Samsung's memory business. MSL also develops and enables world class products such as NVMe and PCIe Flash Drives. Prior to joining Samsung, Bob was the Lead Architect of Intel's Datacenter System on Chip products, with his most recent focus on Intel's Storage and "Microserver" line of products (code named Centeron, Briarwood, Avoton). Over the course of 22 years at Intel, Bob also led numerous design teams, including Notebook System Architecture, Mobile SoC Architecture, and Communication Architecture. Bob's educational background is mostly in computer architecture with a BSEE from Duke University and an MSEE from the University of Virginia.

Molly Rector

Executive Vice President, Product Management, DataDirect Networks

Biography

With 15 years of experience working in the HPC, Media and Entertainment, and Enterprise IT industries running global marketing programs, Molly Rector serves as DDN’s Chief Marketing Officer responsible for product management and worldwide marketing. Rector’s role includes providing customer and market input into the company’s product roadmap, raising the Corporate brand visibility outside traditional markets, expanding the partner ecosystem and driving the end-to-end customer experience from definition to delivery. Rector is a founding member and currently serves as Chairman of the Board for the Active Archive Alliance. She is also the Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) Vice Chairman of the Board and the Analytics and Big Data committee Vice Chairman. Prior to joining DDN, Rector was responsible for product management and worldwide marketing as CMO at Spectra Logic. During her tenure at Spectra Logic, the company grew revenues consistently by double digits year-over-year, while also maintaining profitability. Rector holds certifications as CommVault Certified System Administrator; Veritas Certified Data Protection Administrator; and Oracle Certified Enterprise DBA: Backup and Recovery. She earned a Bachelor’s of Science degree in biology and chemistry.

Diwakar Kasibhotla

Principal Architect, GE

Biography

Diwakar is a Principal Architect in GE and focuses on Big Data and storage challenges. He worked in Oracle and Chase prior to GE.

Shyam Nath

Principal Architect, GE

Biography

Shyam is Principal Architect for GE, working on the Industrial Internet solutions. He has 23 years of industry experience in large databases, data-warehousing and analytics area. Prior to GE, he has worked for IBM, Deloitte, Oracle and Halliburton. He is a regular speaker in several events like Oracle Openworld, Collaborate etc. He has started several Special Interest Groups (SIG) for technology users. Shyam has an MBA and MS (Computer Science) from Florida Atlantic University.

John Ousterhout

Professor, Stanford University

Biography

John Ousterhout is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His current research focuses on storage systems for large-scale datacenter applications. Ousterhout's prior positions include 14 years in industry, where he founded two companies (Scriptics and Electric Cloud), preceded by 14 years as Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley. He is the creator of the Tcl scripting language and is also well known for his work in distributed operating systems and file systems. Ousterhout received a BS degree in Physics from Yale University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received numerous awards, including the ACM Software System Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.

Greg Scott

Chief Cloud Storage Strategist, Intel

Biography

Greg Scott is the Chief Cloud Storage Strategist. He is responsible for defining Intel’s cloud storage and SW Define Storage strategy and setting the direction for Intel‘s storage division for the cloud segment by defining reference architectures and working with leading customers and ISV‘s. Greg has been at Intel for over 18 years, with over 10 years in the storage industry.

Ric Wheeler

Director of Red Hat Storage Engineering, Red Hat

Biography

Ric works at Red Hat as the director of Red Hat's Storage Engineering team and spent six years as the director of Red Hat's file and storage kernel engineering. He spent ten years at EMC in the Symmetrix and Centera groups, four years at The Open Group's Research Institute and four years at Thinking Machines working on the CM5 operating system. Ric is a frequent speaker at Linux Foundation events, past chair of the USENIX FAST conference and a member of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board.

Michael Adam, Software Engineer, SerNet GmbH

Michael is a mathematician working as software engineer for SerNet GmbH in Germany and leads the company's Samba department. As a member of the international Samba Team, Michael focusses on clustered Samba and development of SMB 2 and SMB 3.

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Anitha Adusumilli, Senior Test Lead, Microsoft

Anitha Adusumilli is Senior Test Lead in the File Server & Clustering team at Microsoft. She has worked at Microsoft for 9 years, focusing on public and on-prem cloud storage testing for around 6 years. Her team works on scalability and performance testing for cloud deployments. She has a Masters in Computer Science from University of Florida.

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Ankit Agrawal, Solution Developer, TATA Consultancy Services

Ankit Agrawal is a Solution Developer for Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

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Irfan Ahmad, CTO and Co-Founder, CloudPhysics

Irfan is a well-known speaker and VMworld regular having given numerous sold-out talks at VMworld starting back in 2005. He is also active in publishing his work at top-tier peer-reviewed research venues including FAST, USENIX ATC, SOCC and IISWC. His work on storage performance management received the best paper award at the SOCC '11 conference. Irfan was the Program Chair for HotStorage '11 and on the program committees for HotStorage '12, SYSTOR '12, HotStorage '10, ICDCS '10 and VPACT '09. He served as General Chair for VMware's innovation conference (RADIO) where he published 6 peer-reviewed papers from 2007 onwards.

Irfan is co-founder and vice president of engineering at CloudPhysics, a stealth-mode startup. Previously, Irfan worked at VMware for 9 years where he was the technical lead for two of VMware's flagship features: Storage DRS and Storage I/O Control. He also led work on high performance features like virtual interrucoalescing and asych i/o in addition inter-disciplinary endeavors in memory, storage, cpu and distributed resource management. Prior to VMware, he worked for Transmeta on optimizations in their Code Morphing Software based microprocessor.

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Mahesh Balakrishnan, Microsoft

Mahesh Balakrishnan works on storage systems at Microsoft Research. His current research focus is on a distributed, flash-based shared log called CORFU, and new storage systems that leverage it to provide strong consistency and atomicity guarantees at high speeds. In the past, he has worked on various aspects of block storage, including hybrid designs that reduce SSD wear-out, RAID variants that prevent correlated SSD failures, and log-structured designs that mitigate I/O contention. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.

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Rajesh Balwani, Software Engineer, Microsoft

Rajesh Balwani is Software Engineer in the System Center Virtual manager team. Before joining System Center, he was working as Backend Engineer for Hotmail team. He Joined Microsoft in 2006 after working at CapGemini for several years. He graduated from University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2001.

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Walter E. Baker, CEO/Founder, Gradient Systems, Inc

Walter E. Baker has been involved with the database, server and storage industries for 35 years. During that time, Walter worked in various teaching, senior technical and executive management positions at multiple academic institutions, end-user corporations and technology corporations. Walter is the CEO and a co-founder of Gradient Systems, Inc., as well as the auditor, administrator and a co-founder of the Storage Performance Council.

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Oskar Batuner, Expert Software Engineer, HP

Oskar Batuner is an expert software engineer working for Hewlett-Packard Storage Division. Prior to that he was working as principal software engineer in multiple software, database and networking companies, including Ibrix, Mirror Image Internet, FTP Software, Praxis and CompuServe Data Technologies. He was designing and implementing distributed files systems, content distribution systems, data base systems and networking software.

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Andrew Bartlett, Samba Developer, Samba Team

Andrew Bartlett is a Samba Developer for Catalyst IT, based in Wellington New Zealand. He has over 13 years experience as a member of the Samba Team and works regularly with valley-based storage vendors to make their products even better.

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Tejas Bhise, Director of Engineering, Calsoft

Tejas is Director of Engineering with Calsoft Inc. He has about 20 years of experience working with companies like IBM, HP and Gluster where he specialized in development of enterprise products in the storage and virtualization domain.

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Bianny Bian, Engineering Manager, Intel

Bianny is an Engineering manager in Intel’s Software and Service Group. She is focused on Big Data cluster modeling to provide services in cluster deployment, hardware projection and software optimization. Bianny has more than 10 years of experience in the industry with performance analysis experience that spans big data, cloud computing and traditional enterprise applications. She holds a master degree in Computer Science from Nanjing University in China.

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Mario Blandini, Sr. Director, Marketing Cold Storage Solutions Group, HGST

Mario Blandini is the Sr. Director, Marketing Cold Storage Solutions Group a HGST, a Western Digital company. Mario’s background includes a blend of experience and expertise in the critical areas of object storage, storage systems, and data center products. From his experience as VP of Marketing at SwiftStack, he provides HGST expertise in the object storage software market. As VP of Marketing for Drobo he gained valuable knowledge on storage systems and go-to-market experience for key storage-intensive vertical markets. He also provides extensive knowledge in enterprise data center storage solutions stemming from his experience in numerous director-level positions at Brocade. Prior to his time at companies that serve as technology providers, Mario started his career as a technology end user, serving as Systems Manager and Systems Engineer for several companies. Mario holds a BS in Business and Information Systems.

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Hong Cai, CTO of Cloud Computing, ZTE TX

Dr. Hong Cai is CTO of Cloud Computing, ZTE which is top 5 global telecomm equipment manufacturer and also IT hardware/software product provider. Under this role, he is responsible to introduce new technologies to the strategic product planning work. He is also responsible for business development work with key global partners to create innovative products. Before joining ZTE in 2012, he has been working within IBM R&D organization for 15 years. Dr. Hong Cai is a Senior Member of IEEE. He has published 50 papers and coauthored one book. He has been invited as program committee member or chair for tens of IEEE international conferences. He also filed tens of patents. He has often been invited to deliver speech on new frontier of Cloud&IT technologies by universities and international conferences.

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Robert Callaway, Reference Architect NetApp’s Cloud Solutions Group, NetApp

Bob Callaway is a Reference Architect with NetApp’s Cloud Solutions Group. He focuses on strategies, business development activities, and reference architectures that promote the benefits of NetApp storage and software into cloud computing environments. Prior to joining NetApp, he spent over 8 years in various roles within IBM focused on application integration middleware and cloud computing. He is an ATC on various OpenStack projects, and holds the PhD degree in Computer Engineering from NC State University. He also serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at NC State University.

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Mark Carlson, Senior Staff for Standards, Toshiba

Mark A. Carlson, Senior Staff for Standards at Toshiba, has more than 35 years of experience with Networking and Storage development and more than 18 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 technical working group, and serves on the SNIA Technical Council.

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Laura Caulfield, Firmware Dev. Engineer 2, Microsoft

Laura Caulfield loves the combination of hardware, software and physics found in the design of SSDs.  She recently completed a PhD focused on characterizing and using some weird variations in NAND, poking holes in SSDs' security, and revealing the "bleak" future of NAND.  About a year ago she joined Microsoft to design SSDs for cloud datacenters.

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Mallikarjun Chadalapaka, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Mallikarjun has contributed to the design and development of storage technologies and protocols for more than a decade. Mallikarjun was actively engaged in IETF since the early days of iSCSI protocol design effort, and had also contributed to RDMA/iWARP protocol designs in RDMA Consortium, and SCSI standardization efforts in T10. Mallikarjun is an editor/co-author/author of eight IETF RFCs, starting with the core RFC 3720 iSCSI protocol specification effort.

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Anjaneya Chagam, Principal Engineer, Intel

Anjaneya "Reddy" Chagam is a Principal Engineer in Intel Data Center Group. He is responsible for developing Software Defined Storage architecture and technology initiatives within Intel. He has 20 years of software development, architecture and systems engineering expertise in enterprise and cloud computing environments. He joined Intel in 1995 in Technology and Manufacturing division where he was responsible for delivering automation solutions across 8 process technology generations and was instrumental in delivering IA based mission-critical manufacturing solutions. He worked with several fortune 500 companies to deliver scalable data center solutions using Intel technologies. Reddy has a bachelor's and master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

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Deepti Chheda, Staff Engineer, Maginatics

Deepti Chheda is a Staff Engineer at Maginatics. She has been involved in design and architecture of the MagFS file system from day one and has implemented core features like leases, file system semantics, caching, transport, etc. Currently she leads the development of the MagFS Branch cache product. Before joining Maginatics, Deepti was a software engineer at Riverbed with the Storage and File system teams and helped develop a de-duplicated file system that implemented CIFS/NFSv4 protocols. Deepti received her Masters from Carnegie Mellon University with a focus on operating systems, virtualization, distributed storage and network file systems, and did her masters thesis at the Parallel Data Lab. She is also a winner of the IEEE Richard Merwin Award in 2004.

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Joel Coburn, Software Engineer, Google

Joel Coburn is currently a software engineer in the platforms group at Google. Prior to that, he completed a PhD in computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His latest work focused on the design of system support, in both hardware and software, for storage devices composed of emerging non-volatile memory technologies. He has also done research in the areas of FPGA-based coprocessor architectures and stream computing for multicore processors. Prior to joining UCSD, Joel worked at Xilinx building post-silicon FPGA verification systems and at NEC Laboratories developing CAD methodologies for low power and security in embedded systems. He received an MS from Stanford University in electrical engineering and a BS in computer engineering from Gonzaga University.

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Tom Cocagne, Senior Software Developer, Cleversafe

Tom Cocagne spent ten years at the Naval Air Warfare Center developing tools and infrastructure for state-of-the-art military flight simulators before joining Cleversafe in 2011 as a senior operating system developer. Since then he has been the lead architect of the upgrade process for Cleversafe's dispersed-storage system.

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Ira Cooper, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Ira Cooper is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. He is currently leading the Protocols Team for Red Hat Storage Server (RHSS) that is responsible for implementation of the SMB and NFS family of protocols for RHSS.

Ira earned his Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was also a member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon. As a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ira studied in the fields of Distributed Systems and Systems Engineering.

Ira is also a member of the Samba Team who focuses on performance and portability.

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Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a widely respected storage analyst and consultant. He has over 30 years in the data storage industry with multiple engineering and management positions at high profile 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 was published by Newnes Press. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis (including reports on several digital storage technologies and applications and a newsletter) as well as Data Storage Technical Consulting services. Tom publishes the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, and the Capital Equipment and Technology for the Hard Disk Drive Industry Report.

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Marty Czekalski, President, SCSI Trade Association

Marty Czekalski brings over twenty years of senior engineering management experience in advanced architecture development for Storage and IO subsystem design, ASIC, and Solid State Storage Systems. He is currently Sr. Staff Program Manager within Seagate’s Corporate Strategy and Planning Group. Previous industry experience includes engineering management roles at Maxtor, Quantum and Digital Equipment Corporation. Mr. Czekalski has participates in multiple interface standards committees and industry storage groups. He was a founding member of the Serial Attached SCSI Working Group during that lead to the development of Serial Attached SCSI. He currently serves as Vice President and member of the Board of Directors of the SCSI Trade Association. Mr. Czekalski is also an active member of T10, SNIA, and JEDEC. Mr. Czekalski earned his MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and his BE degree in Electrical Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

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Aaron Dailey, Senior Manager, Oracle Storage

Aaron Dailey manages the ZFS Storage Appliance Core NAS team at Oracle, and is responsible for the ZFS file system and data movement technologies. He's worked nearly his entire career in storage, from decoding FibreChannel bus traces to managing large projects. He has an MBA from the Beijing International MBA program at Peking University and a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

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Don Deel, Chair SNIA Technical Council

Don Deel is a Senior Technologist in the Office of the CTO at EMC, 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. He is currently serving as the SNIA Technical Council Chair, as the Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Chair, and as the Storage Management Initiative Technical Development Committee Chair.

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Krishanu Dhar, Software Engineer Manager, Dell

Krishanu Dhar is a storage professional with over 12 years of experience in the servers and storage industry. During this tenure he has been involved in qualifying server hardware, server attached storage, file and block protocols. Of late he has been involved in automating customer workflows and developing solutions for customers.

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Doug Dumitru, CTO, EasyCo LLC

Doug is the CTO and partner with EasyCo LLC. EasyCo produced Flash block management software for applications ranging from embedded devices to enterprise servers.

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Mary Dunn, Technologist, Seagate

As a Technologist in Advanced Drive Development for Seagate’s Colorado Design Center, Mary Dunn leads multi-disciplinary teams that develop, validate, and integrate innovative features and technologies for future product intercepts. In this role, Mary has led ADD projects such as Adaptive Fly-Height control, 512B Emulation of 4K sectors for Client products, and Shingled Magnetic Recording. She leads internal design efforts as well as identifying and supporting the Storage Ecosystem changes needed to enable industry transitions.

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Ali Eghlima, Director of Bioinformatic, Expert BioSystems

Expert BioSystems, Director of Bioinformatics, and member of science and technology board Ali is a Data Scientist and Software/System/IT architect. His primary technical expertise includes high performance computing, Numerical Analysis, Big Data Analytics, real time distributed computing, High Availability, Cyber Security, Cluster and Cloud Technology. He is a pioneer and advocate in cluster & cloud computing. Ali is aggressive problem solver, and dedicated to producing results. Ali professional experience includes, 20-year career as senior consulting Engineer at DEC, Compaq, and HP. Before joining EBS, Ali was Sr. Principal Engineer at Raytheon, leading R&D projects in Enterprise Architecture, Cyber Security, “Huge” Big Data Analytics, virtualization and storage systems designs and Real-Time Distributed Big Data Collection and Analysis. Currently, Ali leading multiple projects, to architect, design, develop, and implement a trusted and secure Cloud based solution for Omics related Big Data management and analytics for life sciences and healthcare organizations. Dr. Eghlima has received his Ph.D degree from RPI, MS and Engineering degrees from MIT.

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Adam C. Emerson, Software Engineer, CohortFS, LLC

Adam C. Emerson studied mathematics at the University of Michigan. While at CohortFS he has worked on the Ganesha NFS server, especially improving support for NFSv4.1 and pNFS. He also collaborated in the CohortFS design process for data placement, encryption, and metadata striping.

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Timothy Feldman, Technologist, Seagate

Tim Feldman works on drive design at Seagate's Colorado Design Center. His current work focuses on the Kinetic Open Storage Platform and drives with an Ethernet and key/value object interface, as well as shingled magnetic recording. He is a principal contributor to the Zoned Block Commands proposal in T10. Tim studied electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Colorado.

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Dany Felzenszwalbe, Senior Systems Engineer, Intel

Dany Felzenszwalbe is a senior Systems Engineer with Intel IT. His primary focus is NAS/NFS data and storage solutions. Dany has been with Intel for 13 years and holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

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Sam Fineberg, Distinguished Technologist Hewlett-Packard Company

Dr. Fineberg is a Distinguished Technologist in the HP Storage Chief Technologist Office. In that role he leads technical strategy for big data, the cloud, and analytics storage. He helped develop the MPI2-I/O API and has over 20 years of experience in storage and high performance computing I/O. Dr. Fineberg is currently co-chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Long Term Retention Technical Working Group, and he is a member of the SNIA Analytics and Big Data Committee.

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Steven French, Principal System Engineer, Samba Team / Primary Data

Steve French has been developing file systems for over 20 years. He is a member of the Samba team. He was the co-author of the SNIA CIFS Specification. He was the original author, and is maintainer of the Linux cifs/smb2/smb3 kernel client. Currently he is a Principal System Engineer for Primary Data.

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Jerome Gaysse, Consultant, Jerome Gaysse Consulting

As an expert in emerging technologies for data center, Jerome Gaysse works as a consultant focusing on product and technology innovation. He has experience in collaboration between US and European companies. Jerome successfully worked with startups, major companies and research institute. In addition to his creativity and innovation skills, he has strong technical knowledge in Memories, IP, FPGA and ASIC with a focus on Storage, Data Center and High Performance Computing. Jerome earned a master degree from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon with a semiconductor specialty, and he presented papers at IEEE international conferences.

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Roger Goff, Senior Product Manager, DataDirect Networks

Roger Goff is the Senior Product Manager at DDN, focused on HPC storage and data management solutions for research computing environments. He has worked in the high performance computing business for over two decades, designing HPC clusters that debuted in the top 100 systems of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers list.

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Sachin Goswami, Solution Architect and Storage COE Head Hi Tech, TATA Consultancy Services

Sachin has 9 year of industry experience in soft development, QA & sustenance primarily in storage Product Engineering and also in Insurance domain, currently he heads SPE-storage team in HTSC part of Hi-tech Industry Unit. SPE-Storage team focuses on development CATS (CDMI Automated Test Suit). He is solution architect in CATS team, taking care End to end solution and delivery. Previously he has worked on behalf of TCS with EMC, NetApp and MetLife International UK. He has 8 year experience in Java /J2ee technologies, Java and storage certified.

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Kevin Greenan, Staff Software Engineer, Box

Kevin Greenan is a Staff Software Engineer at Box, where he works in the Backend Engineering team on a variety of storage-related projects. Kevin is a co-author on 20+ peer-reviewed articles in storage architecture, reliability and erasure codes. Kevin is also a co-author on a handful of open source projects related to erasure coding and has served on the program committee of many IEEE computer systems conferences. Kevin obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2009, where his focus was on reliability and erasure codes in storage systems.

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Sagi Grimberg, Senior Software Engineer, Mellanox Technologies

Sagi Grimberg is a Sr. Software Engineer and development team leader at Mellanox Technologies. Sagi works on storage technologies with a focus on Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and I/O acceleration. He develops iSCSI RDMA extensions (iSER), SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) and optimizes network device drivers to improve storage performance. Sagi was the key implementer of T10 PI (T10 DIF) in the Linux iSER initiator and Linux iSER LIO target and has contributed his work to the Linux community. He also added inline data integrity offloads to the RDMA verbs layer, which is being used today for RDMA communications by at least two enterprise storage vendors. Prior to Mellanox, Sagi worked on signal processing technologies for the Israeli Defense Force.

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Ed Grochowski, Computer Storage Consultant

Ed Grochowski, Computer Storage Consultant: Ed Grochowski is a well known speaker on storage technology. He has a 50+ year career association with the computer industry, 41 of which were with IBM. Ed worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center where his interests included hard disk drive and component evolutionary trends. Ed’s charts are frequently used to describe HDD and storage progress by numerous industry presenters at many conferences. He holds twelve patents and has authored and presented numerous articles on HDD, Flash memory and component technologies. Ed served as Executive Director of DISKCON and the Symposium series for many years. He was a long time coordinator of the 4K-byte sector standards committee, and is a member of the IEEE. For more information see http://edwgrochowski.com

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Poornima Gupte, Senior Staff Software Engineer, IBM

Poornima Gupte is a Senior Software Engineer in IBM India's Storage Group. She is currently focusing on NFS-Ganesha and its integration with Clustered NAS products. Her prior experience includes clustered and distributed file systems and storage. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from Binghamton University.

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Jim Handy, Director, Objective Analysis

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon. A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his technical depth, accurate forecasts, widespread industry presence and volume of publication. He has written hundreds of market reports, articles for trade journals, and white papers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media. He writes the Chip Talk blog for Forbes, www.TheMemoryGuy.com, and www.TheSSDguy.com.

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Yosuke Hara, Lead Technologist, Rakuten, Inc.

Yosuke Hara is a lead technologist who has been heavily involved in the development of LeoFS with Erlang at Rakuten and its implementation since Feb of 2010. Yosuke's particular interests are the R&D of cloud computing technologies such as distributed computing, distributed database and storage.

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Christoph Hellwig, Consultant

Christoph Hellwig has been working on Linux kernel and related system components for almost 15 years. In 2004 he founded his own business focusing on consulting, training and contract work, specializing on Linux file systems and storage. He has worked for well known customers such as Dell, SGI, IBM, Red Hat, but also for smaller companies and startups. He also helps guiding the direction of Linux kernel development and speaks frequently at Linux conferences.

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Christopher R. Hertel, Storage Architect, Samba Team / Red Hat

Christopher R. Hertel is a long-haul member of the Samba Team, a founding member of the jCIFS project, and the lead author of most of the truly useful SMB1 protocol documentation available today (the SMB2 docs are someone else's fault). Chris has also been adjunct faculty, and is now a member of the academic advisory board, for the Information Technology Infrastructure (ITI) program at the University of Minnesota's College of Continuing Education.

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Eric Hibbard, CTO Security & Privacy, Hitachi Data Systems

Eric Hibbard is the CTO Security and Privacy in Hitachi Data Systems where he is responsible for product security strategies. Mr. Hibbard is a senior security professional with 30+ years of experience in ICT, working for government, academia, and industry.

Hibbard serves as the International Representative for INCITS/CS1 Cyber Security, Vice Chair of the ABA Cloud Computing Committee, Co-chair of the Cloud Security Alliance International Standardization Council, Chair of the IEEE Information Assurance Standards Committee, Chair of the SNIA Security TWG, and the Editor of multiple ISO/IEC daft standards. He is also a SME on the new (ISC)2 cloud security credential.

Mr. Hibbard currently holds the (ISC)2 CISSP certification as well as the ISSAP, ISSMP, and ISSEP concentrations. He also holds the ISACA CISA and the SNIA SCSE certifications. His educational background includes a B.S. in Computer Science and a Certificate of Proficiency in Data Communications.

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Walt Hubis, Storage Standards Architect, Hubis Technical Associates

Walt is a Storage Standards Architect with Hubis Technical Associates. He provides expertise related to storage interface and storage security standards organizations with a focus on protocols and software interfaces and how innovative and disruptive computer storage technologies impact these standards. Walt has over twenty-five years of experience in storage systems engineering in both development and managerial positions and has authored several key patents in RAID and other storage related technologies. He is the vice-chair of the SNIA SSSI Initiative and has served as the Chair of the Trusted Computing Group Key Management Services Subgroup, Chair of the IEEE SISWG P1619.3 Key Management subcommittee, and Secretary of the IEEE Security in Storage work group (SISWG). Walt holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering.

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Arshad Hussain, Lead Developer, Calsoft

Arshad Hussain is a systems enthusiast who enjoys all things that are related to systems & technology, specially experimenting with newer ones. He has contributed patch to the Linux kernel iSCSI subsystem. Arshad is also a member of team that has developed iSCSI Protocol Conformance Test Suite.”

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Abhinav Jawadekar, Sr. Director, Symphony Teleca

Abhinav has about 20 years of professional experience playing various roles in the storage technology industry.

During his professional career, he incubated and managed several teams to work on software products at Symphony Services, Pune, India and designed high profile storage area networks and developed storage array software at Digital Equipment/Compact/HP Corporation, Colorado Springs, USA. He started his software career by writing firmware and device drivers for storage devices.

He has presented at many conferences and forums including SNIA Storage Developers Conference 2009 (Santa Clara CA, USA), INTEROP 2009 (Mumbai). Abhinav possesses M. Sc. (Comp. Sc.) from the Department of Computer Science, University of Pune.

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Dr. M. K. Jibbe, Director of Quality Architect Team, NetApp

Dr. M. K. Jibbe is a Technical Director at NetApp (EPG). At the technical level, he leads the Quality Architect Team in US as a test technologist and a quality Czar. As an architect lead, Dr. Jibbe and his group define the quality requirements for development and test organization for all the NetApp EPG Storage products. Dr. Jibbe has been awarded 27 US / Canada patents, 23 others in Patent Pending State, and published over 54 papers in different technical Conferences held in USA, South America, Europe, and India. Dr. M. K. Jibbe is an Adjunct Professor at The Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, USA. Dr. Jibbe teaches classes related to SAN, NAS, hardware simulation, Failover Drivers, Interface protocols (FC, FCOE, iSCSI, SAS, and IB), Computer Architecture, Programming Languages and Standards, and other Basic Electrical and Computer engineering classes.

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Sanjay Joshi, CTO Life Sciences, EMC Isilon

Based in Seattle, Sanjay's 25+ year career has spanned the entire gamut of life-sciences from clinical and biotechnology research to health care informatics to medical devices. His current focus is Big Data in Genomics and Proteomics. Recent experience has included Electronic Medical Records; Proteomics and Flow Cytometry; FDA and HIPAA validations; LIMS; Translational Genomics research and Imaging.

Sanjay was the recipient of an NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant and has been a consultant or co-PI on several NIH grants. He is actively involved in non-profit biotech networking and educational organizations in the Seattle area and beyond.

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Venkateswararao Jujjuri, Sr. Software Engineer, IBM

Venkateswararao Jujjuri (JV) works in IBM’s Linux Technology Center as Sr. Software Engineer, Storage and FS Architecture. Currently leading an effort to develop NFS-Ganesha. Prior assignments include, VirtFS pass-through filesystem over KVM and QEMU using 9p. Real-Time Linux, Distributed File Systems (SANFS), Clusters(HACMP) and storage virtualization (SANVC).

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Hiroki Kashiwazaki, Assistant Professor, Osaka University

Hiroki Kashiwazaki was received Ph.D degree in the field of Synergetic Information Science from Hokkaido University, Hokkaido Japan, in 2014. I am now an assistant professor of Osaka University. My research interest includes software defined network, adaptive traffic engineering, cloud computing, big data and more.

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Dieter Kasper, CTO Data Center Infrastructure, Fujitsu

Dieter Kasper has a diploma of Study of Mathematics at the Technical University Munich. He has worked as a developer, manager development, principal consultant and architect. He has 26 years in the IT development, mainly Enterprise Storage, working for Siemens, SNI, FSC, Fujitsu. Has invention + development of a distributed, scale-out VTL system for Mainframe & OpenSystem. He is a member of the CTO team in FTS (Fujitsu Technology Solutions GmbH) and worked as CTO of Data Center Infrastructure and Services, International Business.

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Ravi Khadiwala, Software Developer, Cleversafe

He owns 2 famous French Storage blogs (http://filestorage.blogspot.com/ and http://continuousdataprotection.blogspot.com/), #1 independent storage blog in France, with 2000+ blog posts and 9+ years of existence.

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Tanuj Khurana, Senior Software Engineer, EMC Isilon

Tanuj Khurana is a Senior Software Engineer in the protocols group at EMC Isilon. Currently, he is responsible for the design and implementation of the HDFS protocol on the OneFS distributed file system. Tanuj has a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stony Brook University.

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Eden Kim, CEO, Calypso Systems, Inc

Eden Kim is CEO of Calypso Systems, Inc and is Chair of SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Working Group; Chair, SNIA SSSI PCIe SSD & TechDev Committees; Member Governing Board SNIA SSSI. Author of several technical white papers on the SSS PTS, NAND Flash Performance, IO workloads, PCIe SSDs and more.

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John Kim, Director of Storage Marketing, Mellanox Technologies

John Kim is Director of Storage Marketing at Mellanox Technologies, where he helps storage customers and vendors benefit from high performance interconnects and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). After starting his high tech career in an IT help desk then as a network administrator, John worked in enterprise software product management for 6 years, followed by 12 years of solution marketing, product management, and alliances development at NetApp and EMC. Follow him on Twitter: @Tier1Storage.

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Vishal Kirpalani, Director, Symphony Telec

Vishal has about 14 years in the field of user experience and design specializing in product ideation and product strategy definition. His focus is to provide a unique and creative approach in today's mature and complex product environment. During his professional career he has helped a number of companies either find new markets or new consumers to grow current product landscape. Vishal has helped a number of storage companies such as backbone, Quest/Dell to completely revolutionize a maturing and end of life products.

During this talk, Vishal would focus on the users side of the story and how business users today expect more from their storage providers.

Vishal's key areas of specialization include: Retail, Energy, Systems & Storage.

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Fred Knight, Principal Engineer - Office of the CTO, NetApp

Fred has been working on storage technologies for more than a decade. To this end, he has been an active contributor to T10, T11 and IETF standards bodies. Fred is also the co-author of RFC 7144.

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Greg Kramer, Sr. Software Engineer, Microsoft

Greg Kramer is a Senior Software Engineer in the Windows File Server Team. Greg joined Microsoft in 2007 as a member of the Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) team where he was responsible for adding cluster support to the Windows Server 2008 R2 replication engine. Greg joined the SMB/CIFS team in 2010 and has been working on SMB Direct (SMB3 over RDMA) and other performance-related improvements ever since. Before joining Microsoft, he worked on a variety of autonomous robotics and genetic algorithm research projects for the US Air Force Institute of Technology and Wright State University.

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David Kruse, Software Developer, Microsoft

David Kruse is a Lead Software Developer at Microsoft, and has been working on SMB/CIFS at Microsoft for all major releases from Windows 2000 through Windows Blue. He has also worked on related storage technologies at Microsoft, including the Offline Files abilities in Windows and the WebDAV redirector.

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Chethan Kumar, Member of Technical Staff, PernixData

Chethan’s current work focuses on understanding and improving the performance of a hypervisor based I/O acceleration tier built using server side high-speed I/O media. He also spends time on understanding the impact of the I/O acceleration tier on various enterprise applications such as databases and mail servers. His past work has focused on understanding and quantifying performance of storage stack of vSphere hypervisor, studying behavior of enterprise applications such as databases, mail servers, java and few custom applications when virtualized.

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Wesley Leggett, Senior Software Architect, Cleversafe

Wesley Leggette has been a Software Architect for Cleversafe for more than 8 years and has had a key role in the development of its dispersed storage technology. Cleversafe’s approach to solving the growing storage needs of unstructured data presented Wesley with the unique opportunity to work on an emerging technology and bring it to full fruition. Today, Cleversafe is one of the few innovative companies capable of solving the complex needs of exabyte-scale storage. Wesley will continue to move well beyond those capacity needs in his development efforts for the company.

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Volker Lendecke,Co-Founder of SerNet, GmbH

Volker Lendecke is member of the international Samba Team and co-founder of SerNet GmbH in Goettingen, Germany

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Chuck Lever, Linux Kernel Architect, Oracle

Since 2001 Chuck has worked on various features of the Linux NFS implementation, among them TI-RPC, NFS on IPv6, and NFS/RDMA. Chuck is the key developer of FedFS on Linux and the current editor of the IETF FedFS proposed standards.

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Hector Linares, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Principal Program Manager in the System Center team responsible for storage management scenarios (SAN, NAS, and FC fabric devices using SNIA SMI specification), disaster recovery, and backup scenarios. Joined Microsoft in July of 2007 after working for several financial institutions on Wall Street.

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Paul Long, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

Paul Long is a Senior Program Manager with the Message Analyzer team for the last 6 years. He focuses on the end to end solutions as they apply to protocol, network, and systems analysis. Previously he worked as a networking support specialist in the Critical Problem Resolution (CPR) group for 10 years where he provided corporate level support for the most difficult customer issues.

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Paul Luse, Senior Staff Engineer, Intel

Paul is a Software Architect/Development Lead in the Storage Division for Intel. He has been working in storage-related technologies for most of his 20+ year career at Intel. Paul is currently one of the leading contributors to the OpenStack Swift Erasure Code Project. Paul completed his undergraduate in Mathematics/Economics at Arizona State University and is currently pursuing a Master's Degree in Software Engineering also from ASU. Paul is one of the OpenStack Swift Core Developers.

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Sujee Maniyam, Big Data Consultant/Trainer, ElephantScale

Sujee Maniyam is a hands-on Big Data expert and trainer. His current focus is Hadoop, NOSQL and Cloud technologies.He stays active in Hadoop / Open Source community. He runs a developer focused meetup called 'Big Data Gurus'. He has presented at variety of meetups. Sujee contributes to Hadoop project and other open source projects. He writes about Hadoop and other technologies on his website.

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Dennis Martin, President, Demartek

Dennis Martin is the founder and President of Demartek (www.demartek.com), a computer industry analyst organization with its own ISO 17025 accredited test lab. Demartek focuses on lab validation testing and performance testing of storage and related hardware and software products and is recognized by the EPA as an official test lab for ENERGY STAR Data Center Storage. Dennis has been working in the Information Technology industry since 1980, primarily involved in software development and project management in mainframe, UNIX, and Windows environments. These include a variety of large and small end-user customers, and engineering and marketing positions for storage vendors such as StorageTek. Dennis has made numerous presentations at conferences and has authored many industry articles. Dennis has been a Microsoft File System Storage MVP since 2005.

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Jim McDonough, Consulting Software Engineer, SUSE and Samba Team

Software Engineer and the Samba team lead at SUSE Linux. He has developed various areas of Samba since 2000 and is a member of the Samba Project Leadership Committee.

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Stefan Metzmacher, Developer, Samba Team / SerNet

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.

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Stephen Morgan, Senior Staff Research Engineer, Huawei Technologies

Stephen Morgan has been researching and developing advanced and production systems for over 30 years. He is at present a Senior Staff Research Engineer for Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., in Santa Clara, where he works on advanced storage systems and database systems. He has 18 patents and several publications. He received an S.B. from MIT in computer science and engineering.

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Masood Mortazavi, Distinguished Engineer, Huawei Technologies

Masood Mortazavi is a distinguished engineer at Huawei’s US Innovation Center, where he leads teams working on data warehousing, storage and file systems. Prior to Huawei, he was the senior principle architect of cloud databases, scalable messaging and service platforms at Yahoo. At Sun Microsystems, he led teams of engineers working on open-source technologies such as Apache/Derby, MySQL and PostgreSQL. He was a member of the original J2EE engineering team. He studied computational fluid dynamics at UC Davis (PhD) and did several years of post-graduate work in logic and methodology of science at UC Berkeley where he also studied business and journalism (MBA, MJ).

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Pradip Mukhopadhyay, Member of Technical Staff, NetApp

Pradip has about 14 years of experience in system and application side software development. He has been working with NetApp for last 3½ years and the present work area touches upon the user centric storage manageability platform building.

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Peter Murray, Sr. Product Specialist, Load Dynamix

Peter Murray is an expert with more than 25 years of experience in testing, implementing and maintaining secure, fast and highly-available networks and applications. Prior to joining Load DynamiX, Peter worked with leading vendors including F5 Networks and Spirent Communications, and was extensively involved with stateful device and network testing products and engagements.

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Dilip Naik, Software Engineer, HvNAS Pty

Dilip Naik worked at Microsoft 14+ years and authored "Inside Windows Storage" as well as co-authored the original CIFS RFC for Microsoft. Dilip has been a Microsoft File System/Storage MVP since 2006 and is currently working on a non GPL implementation of the SMB 3 protocol for Unix/Linux platforms

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Youngjin Nam, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle

Youngjin Nam, as a principal software engineer, has been working on performance optimization of shadow migration & remote replication in the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance.

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Hitoshi Noguchi, General Manager, FUJIFILM Corporation

Hitoshi Noguchi is a general manager of the Recording Media Research Laboratories at FUJIFILM Corporation, where he is responsible for the development of new linear tape technologies and products. He has successfully developed some high-capacity tape products using barium ferrite technologies in cooperation with several drive makers. He was awarded the Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2011 for the publication of “29.5-Gb/in2 Recording Areal Density on Barium Ferrite Tape.” He received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Polymer Chemistry from Kyoto University.

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Wael Noureddine, Vice President of Technology, Chelsio

Wael has been with Chelsio since 2002, where he is responsible for protocol implementation and hardware architecture, technical marketing, and leads the research and development efforts. Wael holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University.

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Gary Ogasawara, VP Engineering, Cloudian

Gary Ogasawara heads up Cloudian's global development and QA team, with operations in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Beijing. Gary has over 15 years of hands on engineering management experience at startups and larger companies. Gary has led the development of all of Cloudian's products and their worldwide carrier deployments. Prior to Cloudian, Gary was Director of Engineering at e-Centives, an e-Commerce search engine company. He also led the development of real time commerce and advertising systems at Inktomi, a leading Internet search engine and CDN gateway company. Gary holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized in Bayesian decision theory, uncertainty reasoning and machine learning.

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Diego Ongaro, PhD, Stanford University

Diego has recently completed his PhD with John Ousterhout at Stanford. During his PhD, he worked on RAMCloud (a 5-10 microsecond RTT key-value store), Raft, and LogCabin (a coordination service built with Raft).

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Stan Park, Research Engineer, HP Labs

Stan Park is a research engineer at HP Labs. His interests range across all things storage from hardware (primarily SSDs and NVM) to file systems and operating systems to user-facing APIs. He received his PhD from University of Rochester, focusing on operating system techniques for managing Flash-based SSDs. His current work focuses on next-generation file systems and NVM.

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Martin Petersen, Linux Storage Architect, Oracle

Martin K. Petersen has been involved in Linux kernel development since the early nineties. He is Oracle's Linux Storage Architect and focuses on future I/O and enterprise storage technologies.

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Nick Principe, Senior Software Engineer, EMC

Nick Principe is a Senior Software Engineer at EMC working on customer-focused performance engineering. Nick has worked in the performance engineering field for over 9 years, focusing on the performance measurement and analysis of NAS systems. Nick has also contributed to the development of two SPEC SFS benchmarks. Nick has a B.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.

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Mark Rabinovich R&D Manager, Visuality Systems

With more than 30 years of software development experience Mark heads the development of the NQ CIFS Products range and CAX, both being an CIFS/SMB protocol family implementation . Prior to joining Visuality Systems in 2002, Mark managed the completion of three large scale development projects. Mark holds an MD in Electronics.

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Sanjay Radia, Architect / Founder, Hortonworks

Sanjay is founder and architect at Hortonworks, and an Apache Hadoop committer and member of the Apache Hadoop PMC. Prior to co-founding Hortonworks, Sanjay was the chief architect of core-Hadoop at Yahoo and part of the team that created Hadoop. In Hadoop he has contributed to several areas including HDFS, MapReduce schedulers, Yarn's design, high availability, compatibility, etc. He has also held senior engineering positions at Sun Microsystems and INRIA, where he developed software for distributed systems and grid/utility computing infrastructures. Sanjay has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

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Anand Rangaswamy Sr. System Engineer, Mellanox Technologies

Anand Rangaswamy is a seasoned network engineer with extensive Engineering experience in Ethernet and InfiniBand networks for both server and storage connectivity. Anand has designed and built cutting edge Enterprise and Data Center solutions for large customers using different networking topologies and supporting different applications. He has over 10 years experience in networking with Force10, Brocade and Mellanox. Anand has a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

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Da Qi Ren, Staff Research Engineer, Huawei Technologies

Dr. Da Qi Ren, a staff research engineer in Futurewei Technologies in Santa Clara, CA, USA, received his Ph.D. degree from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. His research interest includes formal methods, parallel and distributed processing, big data analytics, software design and optimization, high performance computing, and computational electromagnetics. He has published more than 50 journal and conference papers, also has 9 patents. He is a member of IEEE and ICS.

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José Rivera, Software Engineer, Red Hat

José Rivera spends his time at Red Hat working on improving clustered SMB and integrating SMB with distributed filesystems. Prior to Red Hat he was part of the team responsible for creating and overhauling the official SMB1 specifications ([MS-CIFS] and [MS-SMB], published by Microsoft). José went from zero to SMB expert in less than a year and has yet to run away screaming.

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Hasnain Rizvi, CIO and Agile Coach, AAA University

Dr. Hasnain Rizvi has managed troubled and mission critical complex programs and projects for key clients in North America. Hasnain is Co-Founder, CIO and Agile Coach at AAA University. Prior to this role, he was managing IBM’s Project Management practice in Saskatchewan, Canada. He has provided extensive project management services to The Premier’s Office in The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. He was with Amdocs Consulting, where he managed a US$1.1 Billion Business Transformation Program for Rogers Communications. Hasnain has also managed project portfolios for ESRI, Inc, a leading global software solutions provider headquartered in California. He also has spent several years in the insurance technology space catering to leading insurance carriers in the US and Canada. Hasnain is a graduate of Caltech’s Project Management Program.

Hasnain is an adjunct faculty member with several universities. He also provides the following certification training: PMP, PMI-ACP, CBAP, PMI-RMP, Lean Six Sigma and ITIL Foundations.

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Nate Rosenblum, Architect, Maginatics

Nate Rosenblum is an Architect at Maginatics. He had broad interests in operating systems, distributed systems, network file system security and authentication. Nate received his PhD in 2011 from the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, working with Professor Barton P. Miller on the Paradyn Project.

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Mark Santaniello, Sr. Performance Engineer, Microsoft

Mark Santaniello has been obsessed with making computers "go fast" for 15 years. After 10 years at AMD, he joined Microsoft and began designing server hardware to power Microsoft's cloud services. Lately he's been thinking a lot about SSDs.

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Leah Schoeb, Sr. Partner, The Evaluator Group

Leah Schoeb is a Senior Partner at the Evaluator Group bringing expertise ranging from cloud infrastructure and virtualization to system and storage performance. Her latest work with solid state technology. She draws from over 20 years of experience in the computer industry helping systems companies with performance engineering and optimization, market positioning, benchmark evidence creation, and guiding industry standards development for server, virtualized, and storage solutions. Leah has served in several leadership roles for performance for companies, such as, VMware, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Intel, and Amdahl. She has developed and executed long-term plans for the generation of new solid state technology and cloud computing performance.

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Dhishankar Sengupta, Test Architect, Dell

Dhishankar Sengupta is a Test Architect at Dell. As an architect he helps define and design the test requirements and test processes for Dell’s Storage platforms.

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Spencer Shepler, Architect, Microsoft

Spencer Shepler has been in the distributed file systems industry for more than 2 decades. For most of that time, his primary focus has been on the development and deployment of the Network File System (NFS), building implementations at IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft. Spencer has always been fascinated with performance measurement and improvement. First by leading the SPEC SFS committee to a release of the SPEC NFS benchmark and more recently with the work at Microsoft to characterize workloads for Windows applications..

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Mayur Shetty, Senior Solutions Architect, Seagate

Mayur Shetty is a Senior Solutions Architect at Seagate Technology working in the Advanced Storage organization. He is responsible for driving Seagate Kinetic solutions with the Swift, Ceph, and other Object Storage software. Prior to joining Seagate, Mayur was the Lead ISV Engineer at IBM working on solutions around Oracle database, and IBM Systems and Storage. He has been in the industry for over 15 years, and has worked on Sun Cluster software and the ISV Engineering teams at Sun Microsystems.

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Osamu Shimizu, Research Engineer, FUJIFILM Corporation

Osamu Shimizu is a research engineer at the Recording Media Research Laboratories, FUJIFILM Corporation, where he specializes in magnetic recording technologies. His current interest is the development of high-capacity magnetic tape media with barium ferrite particles. He is an expert member of the Technical Committee of Magnetic Recording & Information Storage at The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers. He has published dozens of papers in international journals and conference proceedings on magnetism and/or magnetic recording technologies. He was awarded the Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2011 for the publication of “29.5-Gb/in2 Recording Areal Density on Barium Ferrite Tape.” He received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Material Science from the University of Electro Communications and a Ph.D. degree from Ibaraki University.

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Paul Speciale, Sr. Director of Product Management, Scality

Paul leads Product Management for Scality, where he is responsible for defining RING functionality, solutions and roadmaps. Before Scality, he was fortunate to have been part of several exciting cloud computing and storage companies, including Appcara, focused on cloud application automation solutions; Q-layer, one of the first cloud orchestration companies (acquired by Sun Microsystems); and Savvis, where he launched the Savvis VPDC cloud service. In the storage space, Paul was VP of Products for Amplidata focused on object storage, and Agami Systems, building scalable, high-performance NAS solutions. Paul has over 20 years of industry experience that spans both Fortune 500 companies such as IBM (twice) and Oracle, as well as venture-funded startups, and has been a speaker and panelist at many industry conferences. He has Masters and Bachelors degrees in Applied Math & Computing from UCLA.

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Shashwat Srivastav, Director Software, EMC

Shashwat is Senior Director of Software Engineering. He leads the team that develops the cloud storage engine in ViPR. Before that he had worked in Windows Azure Storage team for 5 years. He obtained his MS in CS from Indiana University.

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David Slik, Technical Director, Object Storage, NetApp

David Slik is the Technical Director for Object Storage at NetApp, Inc. He has been involved in object storage for over a decade, both at Bycast and NetApp, is the Co-Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group, a member of the LTFS technical working group, and is a principal author of the CDMI standard.

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Kamal Srinivasan, Product Manager, EMC

Kamal Srinivasan is a Principal Product Manager at EMC working on Software Defined Storage. Prior to his current role he held various stints at Microsoft. Kamal has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of Wisconsin.

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Rafal Szczesniak, Principal Software Engineer, EMC Isilon

Rafal Szczesniak is a Principal Software Engineer at EMC Isilon Storage Division. His area of development work covers SMB server and Authentication and Security subsystems as well as their respective RPC interfaces in Likewise Storage Stack. Rafal holds M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland.

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Page Tagizad, Senior Product Marketing Manager, SanDisk

Page Tagizad is a senior product marketing member of SanDisk’s Enterprise Storage Solutions group, specifically focusing on the company’s PCIe and memory channel storage solutions. Tagizad has more than 12 years of senior product management and marketing experience, including past tenures Broadcom, Emulex and Altera. Prior to joining SanDisk, Tagizad served as product line director at Broadcom, where he helped grow revenues to a $100 million annual run rate. Tagizad earned his bachelors of science in electronics engineering at Pacific States University.

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Doron Tal, Chief Architect, Kaminario

Doron Tal is a technology expert with responsibility for leading the architectural design of Kaminario's core K2 products. Doron joined Kaminario in 2008. Prior to joining Kaminario, Doron was at IBM Research Labs in Haifa where he conducted research in advanced document processing. Prior to IBM, Doron worked for Mellanox where he worked on the company's leading chip technology architecting and designing post silicon verification framework and tools. Doron holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Engineering from the Technion Institute.

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Tom Talpey, Architect, Microsoft

Tom Talpey is an Architect in the File Server Team at Microsoft. His responsibilities include SMB 3, SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), and all the protocols and technologies that support the SMB ecosystem. Tom has worked in the areas of network filesystems, network transports and RDMA for many years and recently has been working on storage traffic management, with application not only to SMB but in broad end-to-end scenarios. He is a frequent presenter at Storage Developer Conference events.

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Kuok Hoe Tan, Senior QA Engineer, NetApp

Kuok Hoe Tan is a Senior QA Engineer at NetApp (APG). He is part of the main QA team within EPG which is responsible for product testing and validation. He has experience in the areas of QA, engineering process and project management. He enjoys pushing the boundaries on how we choose to approach work by figuring out a better way on how to get things done.

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Eno Thereska, Researcher, Microsoft

Eno Thereska is a Researcher at Microsoft Research. He has broad interests in storage systems. For the past few years he has worked on making storage performance more predictable and enabling storage QoS. Eno was co-chair of FAST 2014. He graduated with a PhD from CMU in 2007.

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Rajagopal Vaideeswaran, Principal Software Engineer, Symantec Software

Rajagopal is Principal Software Engineer from Symantec Software India and has been working with Symantec/Veritas Volume Manager, an Enterprise Storage product in the UNIX/Linux platform for the last 10 years. He has done his MSc (Tech) Information Systems from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, INDIA and is interested in researching on the relevance of Phase Change Memory in the current Data Centers. His wish is to grow as a Technical Expert in designing and implementing high quality and cost efficient solutions for Global 2000 customers. He has prior experience in presenting Storage and High Availability solutions to Customers and troubleshooting product issues in mission critical environments.

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Apurva Vaidya, Principal Architect, iGate

Apurva Vaidya is a Principal Architect at iGATE in the Storage, Networks and Computing (SNC) Team and is responsible for architecting storage solutions. Apurva has around 11 years of storage domain experience with iGATE, and has held various technical and engineering leadership positions. He has worked on Windows and Linux drivers, File systems, Firmware and management applications. Apurva holds a master’s degree in Software Engineering and a bachelor's degree in Information Technology.

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Sreedhar Varma, Director, SW Development, Vedams

Sreedhar Varma has 20+ years of experience in the storage industry developing storage software and solutions .He has worked on various storage technologies like SCSI, SAS, SATA, FC HBA drivers (Adaptec, Emulex, Qlogic, Promise, etc), RAID, storage stacks of various operating systems and system software for Fault Tolerant and High availability systems. He has good working experience with SAN, NAS and iSCSI networks.

He also has good working experience with various storage arrays (Dothill, IBM, EMC, Hitachi, Oracle Pillar, etc). He has good working knowledge on Openstack Swift clusters, Openstack Cinder drivers, and has been working on Object storage implementations (Swift, Ceph) and developing software using REST API's. He is presently working for Vedams Software (providing storage engineering services). In the past he has worked for Stratus Technologies, Compaq, Digital Equipment Corp and IBM. His book on OpenStack Swift was published by Packt Publishing in May of 2014.

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Yogesh Vedpathak, Software Developer, Cleversafe

As a software developer at Cleversafe, Yogesh’s main focus is on development of high throughput networks for distributing data in highly scalable storage systems. During his 4 years at Cleversafe he has invented techniques to detect and recover from faulty networks, boosting throughput on high latency networks. He has BS in Computer Engineering and MS in Computer Science. Yogesh a SNIA certified storage professional and is a second time SDC speaker.

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Doug Voigt, Distinguished Technologist, HP

Doug Voigt is a Distinguished Technologist in the Chief Technologist’s office of HP’s Storage Division with 35 years experience in disk drives, disk arrays, storage management and non-volatile memory. Doug holds CS and EE degrees from Cornell University. He has 31 US patents, primarily in virtual arrays with 19 patents pending.

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Haris Volos, Research Engineer, HP

Haris Volos is a research engineer at the Hewlett Packard Laboratories (HP Labs). He is interested in systems in a broad sense, including operating systems, file and storage systems, and the interaction of hardware architecture with systems. More specifically, his current research focuses on the implications of next-generation byte-addressable non-volatile memory to systems software. He received his engineering degree from the National Technical University of Athens, and M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin – Madison under advisor Michael Swift.

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Paul von Behren, Software Architect, Intel Corporation

Paul von Behren is a Software Architect at Intel Corporation. His background includes software for managing Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SAS storage devices, multi path management software, and RAID systems. He has helped lead the creation of the SNIA Storage Management Initiative – Standard (SMI-S) and Multipath Management API standards, and contributed a number of other storage and management software standards.

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Tanmay Waghmare, Principal Test Manager, Microsoft

Tanmay Waghmare is Principal Test Manager with Windows File Server and Clustering Team at Microsoft where he leads a team of storage developers focused on remote file protocols SMB, iSCSI and NFS. He has worked at Microsoft for more than a decade in various storage areas. He is passionate advocate of protocol compliance, interoperability, availability, reliability and scalability of remote file storage. Tanmay obtained his graduate degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India.

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Yaguang Wang, Sr. Software Engineer, Intel

Yaguang Wang is a Sr. software engineer from Intel Corporation. Previously, he worked with ISV to optimization database performance with enterprise benchmarks like TPC-E and TPC-H, and helped local OEMs publish top benchmark results. His current focus is on the optimization and development of cloud storage solutions. He is driving the development of COSBench (an open source cloud storage benchmarking tool), and cooperating with users to apply it at different scenarios. Yaguang holds a BA in Physics from Tsinghua University and a MA of communication & Information from Shanghai University.

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Marcus Watts, Software Engineer, CohortFS, LLC

Marcus Watts is a programmer at CohortFS. He previously worked for a large education institution where he worked with AFS and identity management. Way back when, he wrote a computer conferencing program, PicoSpan, which was the basis for the Well in California.

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Zane Wei, Director, Huawei Technologies

Mr. Zane Wei has been the vice director of the Shannon Lab, the head of the IT Research Lab of Central Research Institution, and the head of strategy and planning of corporate hardware technology in Huawei Technologies. He has great efforts in the research of high throughput computer (HTC) systems, software/hardware design, and computer fault tolerant techniques. He has received the honor of CEO Award of Excellence several times due to his outstanding contributions. He has published many journal and conference papers, and is holding many patents. He has also served as a Technical Committee Member for a number of high quality conferences, including HPCA, ICCCN and etc. He received his MBA degree from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

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Sage Weil, Founder and Chief Architect, Inktank

Sage helped create Ceph as part of his graduate work at UCSC Santa Cruz almost a decade ago. Since then, he has continued to develop the system into a reliable open source distributed storage platform that provides object, block, and file system interfaces. He now serves as CTO at Inktank, a storage company launched two years ago to deliver Ceph to enterprise customers.

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Jim Williams, Product Manager, Oracle

Jim has worked for Oracle for over 14 years and started on the design team for a feature that automates the management of storage for Oracle’s database. Previous to Oracle, worked for Amdahl Corporation on the development team building a family of high-end storage arrays.

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Cheng Wu, Senior Director, ProphetStor

Cheng Wu, Ph.D., Senior Director of Corporate Development, has over 20 years of experience in product development, ecommerce, web property management and inbound marketing strategies. Prior to joining ProphetStor, Dr. Wu was Co-founder and President at eFunda, Inc., the world’s largest online knowledgebase for the mechanical engineering community since 1990 with over 400,000 active members. He held various engineering management positions at Aerogen, Inc., a medical device company specialized in aerosolized drug delivery and contributed 7 key patents that enabled the commercialization of the company’s technologies. Dr. Wu received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from National Taiwan University.

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Felix Xavier, Founder, CloudByte

Recognized as one of the top 250 MSP thought and entrepreneurial leaders globally by MSPmentor, Felix has more than 15 years of development and technology management experience. With the right blend of expertise in both networking and storage technologies, he co-founded CloudByte. Most recently, Felix helped NetApp gain leadership position in storage array-based data protection by driving innovations around its product suite. He has filed numerous patents with the US patent office around core storage technologies. Prior to this, Felix worked at Juniper, Novell and IBM, where he handled networking technologies, including LAN, WAN and security protocols and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS).

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Boris Zuckerman, Distinguish Technologist, HP

Boris Zuckerman is a distinguish technologist working for HPSD STO. Prior to this role he was the Vice President of Engineering, the acting Chief Architect and the Director of the File System Kernel Group at IBRIX. Before IBRIX, Boris held System Architect positions at several companies including Conley Corporation/EMC, NextPoint Networks, FTP Software, and CompuServe Data Technologies. He was instrumental in the design of EMC’s Multipath File System (MPFS/HighRoad/pNFS) and personally implemented the MPFS NT client and CIFS/NTFS MPFS server. While at FTP Software, he developed the InterDriveNT NFS file system client and was a chief architect for the relational database System 1032.

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