Richelle Ahlvers

Principal Storage Management Architect, Broadcom Limited

Biography

Richelle Ahlvers is Principal Storage Management Software Architect at Broadcom Limited, where she defines storage management integrations, solutions, and standards strategies for the Data Center Storage Group.

Before joining Broadcom (formerly Avago), Richelle spent over 20 years in Enterprise Storage R&D teams at HP. While at HP she worked 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.

She has led internal and external standards development and worked as a systems architect for large scale storage system projects, with expertise in high availability, scalability and performance system architecture. She has experience leading and managing multiple advanced development and offshore development teams, as well as leading joint university research projects.

Richelle has been engaged with industry standards initiatives with SNIA and DMTF for many years. She served as the SNIA Technical Council Chair and on the SNIA Board of Directors and has been engaged across a breadth of technologies ranging from storage management, to solid state storage, to cloud storage, to green storage and more.

Stephen Bates

Global Engineering Head, Sr. Technical Director, Microsemi

Biography

Stephen Bates is a Senior Technical Director within the Performance Solutions Business Unit at Microsemi. He works extensively on storage architectures and non-volatile memory. He has been involved in the architecture and development of both RAID-based systems and flash controllers. He has intimate knowledge of the most common networking and storage protocols, including NVM Express, SAS, SATA, PCIe, Ethernet and RDMA.

Stephen is an Adjunct Professor at The University of Alberta, Canada, is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Professional Engineer of Canada. He received his PhD and BSc in Engineering from The University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Jeff Bonwick

Co-founder and CTO, DSSD

Biography

Jeff Bonwick is co-founder and CTO of DSSD, now part of Dell EMC. Jeff co-invented DSSD's system hardware architecture and Flood software stack. He developed DSSD's whole-system simulator, which enabled the team to rapidly explore hundreds of possible hardware topologies and software algorithms, resulting in DSSD's unique architecture and unprecedented performance. Previously Jeff invented and led the development of ZFS, which powers Oracle’s ZFS storage products as well as numerous startups including Nexenta, Delphix, Joyent, and Datto. Jeff is also the inventor of the slab allocator, which is used in every major operating system and has become part of the computer science curriculum at universities worldwide. His previous roles include Sun Fellow, Sun storage CTO, and Oracle VP. Jeff earned a BS in Mathematics from the University of Delaware and an MS in Statistics from Stanford. Jeff holds 64 issued patents in storage and operating system technology.

Peter Goglia

President, VeriTekk Solutions

Biography

Dr. Peter Goglia is President of VeriTekk Solutions. He has 34 years of experience in the disk drive industry. Peter was CEO of Nano-Etch Systems and has held key R&D rolls as VP and CTO for Xyratex Storage Infrastucture Division where he is responsible for technology development and growth strategies for HDD capital equipment. He also held senior positions at WD, Seagate, Control Data and Hewlett Packard. At WD he was VP of R&D in the Magnetic Head Operation including device development, slider, HGA design and process development. At Seagate, he contributed to the recording head development in both design and process. At the Disk Memory Division of Hewlett-Packard he was a senior member of the technical staff. He holds 6 patents and has been an invited speaker at industry technical and trade events. Peter has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, from the University of Illinois.

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Gary Grider

HPC Div Director, LANL

Biography

Bio coming soon.

Edward Grochowski

Consultant, Memory/Storage

Biography

Ed Grochowski is a well known speaker on memory/storage technology. He began his career with IBM’s microelectronic silicon activity in New York and later joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California where his interests included hard disk drives and solid state device evolutionary trends with associated material technologies. Dr. Grochowski holds twelve patents and has participated in numerous memory and storage events to serve the industry. He has a Ph.D. from New York University in Chemical/Materials Engineering with a thesis addressing phase change materials. He was a long time coordinator of the HDD 4K byte sector standards committee. Ed is also a member of the IEEE.

Dan Maslowski

Global Engineering Head, Citi Storage/Engineered Systems, Citigroup

Biography

Dan Maslowski is the Global Engineering Head (GEH) of Storage and Engineered Systems for CATE’s Citi Storage organization. The Storage organization is responsible for developing the storage footprint for the next generation Data Center at Citi. The Engineered systems organization is responsible for delivery of best of breed technologies across storage, networking and compute coupled with application integration for purpose built large configurations.

In his current role, Dan is responsible for leading the integration of networking, storage and compute technologies. The key focus area in engineered systems is the Software Defined Data Center. Key building blocks include Software Defined Networking (SDN) Cloud technologies and next generation storage.

Prior to Citi, Dan was the Vice President for Software Engineering at DDN, leading the engineering team responsible for DDN’s object storage, big data analytics, virtual storage and HPC software strategy. Prior to DDN, Dan spent twelve years at Sun Microsystems and Oracle leading engineering for ZFS, SAM-QFS, Solaris Security, Key Management, multipathing and high availability software as well as archive, object storage and backup technologies.

Niels Reimers

Strategic Planner, NVM Solutions Group, Intel Corporation

Biography

Niels Reimers is a Strategic Planner with the NVM Solutions Group at Intel. In this role, he sets requirements for Intel’s next generation non-volatile storage products working with technology leaders within Intel and the greater storage market. Niels works with various solid state media types and numerous storage protocols including NVMe, PCIe, RDMA and Ethernet, designing solutions for enterprise storage and cloud storage vendors.

Carol Wilder

Strategic Planning / Memory & Storage Data Center Group, Intel

Biography

Carol Wilder is the Director of Strategic Planning at Intel in the Data Center Group specializing in Memory and Storage. In her current role, she leads a team that defines and drives key business and technological innovations for the storage and memory. Deep understanding of Intel’s customer needs and goals from Intel products drives her Intel’s team’s product strategy for memory and storage. Carol worked in product management for Amazon Web Services in storage services and Amazon’s Lab126 on the Echo/Alexa products, as well, as, positions in strategy from communications to mobile to personal assistance within Intel.

Michael Adam, Architect and Manager, Red Hat

Michael is one of the main developers of Samba (www.samba.org), specializing on file serving and clustering. He is an architect and the manager of Red Hat Storage Server's SMB team.

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Irfan Ahmad, CTO, CloudPhysics

Irfan Ahmad is the Chief Technology Officer of CloudPhysics which he cofounded in 2011. Prior to CloudPhysics, Irfan was at VMware, where he was R&D tech lead for the DRS team and co-inventor for flagship products, including Storage DRS and Storage I/O Control. Irfan worked extensively on interdisciplinary endeavors in memory, storage, CPU, and distributed resource management, and developed a special interest in research at the intersection of systems. Irfan also spent several years in performance analysis and optimization, both in systems software and OS kernels. Before VMware, Irfan worked on a software microprocessor at Transmeta.

Irfan’s peer-reviewed research has been featured at ACM SOCC (best paper), USENIX ATC, USENIX FAST, and IEEE IISWC. Irfan was honored to have chaired HotStorage and VMware’s R&D Innovation Conference (RADIO). Irfan is an inventor on seven issued patents and another 20 pending across memory management, page replacement, quality of service management, I/O scheduling and caching. Irfan earned his pink tie from the University of Waterloo.

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Muhammad Ahmad, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Seagate Technology

Muhammad’s more than a decade long experience in the storage industry involves working at different levels of the storage stack. His expertise are in designing customer focused, portable, secure, non-disruptive cross-platform software solutions that can be deployed in diverse hardware & operating system environments. Muhammad holds a Masters in Electrical & Computer Engineering from University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Alex Aizman, Chief Advisor and Founder, Nexenta Systems

Alex is founder and CTO, Nexenta Systems, Inc. Alex created NexentaOS and NexentaStor – the company’s flagship software-only platform, currently at its 5th generation. He co-created iSCSI stack for Linux kernel and its major distributions and co-invented Large Receive Offload (LRO), the broadly adopted method to improve TCP and UDP performance, supported currently in all major operating systems, with and without (LRO) assistance in the hardware. He designed and productized ZFS extensions for heterogeneous data volumes and has multiple patwnts in the fields including multi-tiered heterogeneous-media local storage, distributed virtualized NAS, distributed objects and distributed storage-optimized communication protocols, iSCSI offload.

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Tanveer Alam, Sr. Platform Applications Engineer, Intel

Tanveer Alam is a Sr. Platform Applications Engineer in Intel’s Datacenter Storage Group. He currently enables customers with Intel Xeon Processor based storage designs. Tanveer has 16+ years of broad industry experience including storage, medical devices and telecoms. He holds an MSEE from Columbia University, BSEE from Drexel University.

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Jeremy Allison, Engineer, Samba Team/Google

Jeremy Allison is the co-creator of the Samba project and a lead developer on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing a Free Software Windows compatible authentication, file and print server product for Linux and UNIX systems. Samba is used by all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations worldwide. He works for Google, Inc. who fund him to work full-time on improving Samba and solving the problems of Windows and Linux interoperability.

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Vijay Balakrishnan, Director – Datacenter Performance and Ecosystems, Samsung

Vijay is one of the leaders of the Samsung Memory Solutions Lab building efficient and high-performance solutions for the datacenter. He works on solutions that leverage Samsung’s industry leading flash, SSD and DRAM technologies. Prior to Samsung he worked at Sun Microsystems and Microsoft designing and building high-performance systems.

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Ariday Balderas Alba, Software Engineer, IBM

Ariday Balderas has 4+ years of experience in QA for midrange and enterprise storage solutions at IBM. She has been working on developing test automation and workloads for openstack swift and SwiftonFile on IBM software defined storage products.

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Jignesh Bhadaliya, CTO for EDA, EMC

Jignesh Bhadaliya, Jig, is the CTO for EDA at EMC Emerging Technologies Division (ETD). Jig has worked at Broadcom, University of California at Irvine, Rockwell Semiconductor, and EMC on both the IT and R&D Engineering side of the house. Jig is passionate about the EMC Isilon solution and how it maps into EDA storage requirements, defining the next-gen EDA storage roadmap. Jig is based out of Orange County, California, where he has spent majority of his life. When not working, Jig enjoys spending time with his wife and his two young kids.

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Saurabh Bhatia, Storage Test Specialist, IBM

Saurabh has deep expertise in storage and virtualization background. Being a Certified scrum Master he has been an integral part of EMC's VPLEX product and IBM's SVC product's journey of transition from waterfall model to strictly scrum model.

With more than six years of experience in Mphasis HP, EMC and IBM storage and virtualization products he has gained ISTQB Testing certifications, Certified Scrum Master, EMC and Vmware's certifications. He is currently working as Storage Test Specialist in IBM's SVC Team.

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Michaela Blott, Principal Engineer, Xilinx/Research

Michaela Blott graduated from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. She worked in both research institutions (ETH and Bell Labs) as well as development organizations and was deeply involved in large scale international collaborations such as NetFPGA-10G. Today, she works as a principal engineer at the Xilinx labs in Dublin heading a team of international researchers. She is leading Xilinx’s strategy in regards to bringing FPGAs into new markets and investigating system architectures with emerging memory technologies for different application domains. Her expertise spreads data centers, high-speed networking, emerging memory technologies and distributed computing systems, with an emphasis on building complete implementations. She is on the industry advisor council to the Irish Center for High-End Computing (ICHEC), serves on the technical program committee of a number of conferences (DATE, FPL, GLOBALSIP, Hipeac, PPoPP), organizer of SC’2015/6 workshop and industry review panel of numerous research projects.

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Logan Blyth, Software Developer, Aquari

Logan is a software developer currently focusing on performance testing a Ceph-based Aquari Scale-Out Storage solution. Before joining the Aquari team, he worked at Ciena on their OpenFlow products, including a 15TB carrier-class switch. Before working at Ciena, Logan worked on the Linux software RAID driver for the HP B320i and B120i software RAID solution.

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Bharat Boddu, Principal SW Engineer, Cloudian

Bharat has over 15 years of programming experience in infrastructure software and networking products. He did his masters in software engineering with specialization in Networking Software from San Jose State University. His areas of interests include distributed systems and machine learning.

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Thomas Bowen, Storage Security Architect, Intel Corporation; Intel TCG Storage Workgroup Standards Representative

Thomas Bowen is a Storage Security Architect for Intel Corporation and the Intel representative for the TCG Storage Workgroup. Thomas has six years of storage security experience and four granted patents related to storage security. Thomas has made significant contributions to the TCG SWG including Opal interactions with NVMe, a Challenge-Response Authentication Mechanism for Opal, and the Opal Test Cases specification.

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Patrick Boyd, Principal Systems Management Engineer, Dell

Patrick Boyd is a Principal Systems Management Engineer at Dell, where he works to define integrated systems and storage management solutions and standards for the Sever Platform Group. Patrick has been at Dell for more than 10 years in various storage and systems management roles. In the past, he has lead design and development of storage management software, systems management software, and system firmware. Patrick has been engaged with industry standards initiatives with SNIA, DMTF, and UEFI for several years. He is actively engaged in the development of the Redfish standard, including acting as Co-Chair of the SPMF Storage Task Force. He has been engaged across a breadth of technologies ranging from storage management, to systems management, to firmware update, and more.

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Cameron Brett, Director SSD Product Marketing, Toshiba America Electronic Components’ SSD Business Unit

Cameron T Brett is Director SSD Product Marketing at Toshiba America Electronic Components’ SSD Business Unit.  He is responsible for defining and marketing Toshiba’s SSDs, including SATA, SAS, and PCIe product lines.  He has focused on bringing new generations of storage technology to market and working with OEM, datacenter and channel customers.  A 20-year veteran of the storage industry, he has previous product marketing/management experience with PMC-Sierra, Adaptec, QLogic, and Broadcom.  He serves on the Board of Directors for the SCSI Trade Association (STA) and holds a BS in Computer Science from Monmouth University and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

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Shawn Brume, Business Line Executive, Data Retention Infrastructure, IBM

Shawn Brume Sc.D. is a Business Line Manager for the Data Protection and Retention portfolio at IBM Storage Development Labs in Tucson, USA. Shawn is a Computer Science graduate from Southern California University, and holds a Doctorate of Science in Engineering and Technology. Shawn joined IBM in 2000 and has worked in Tape technology Development, starting in test and in recently moved to the Business Line Management team with responsibility for the Data Protection and Retention portfolio. Shawn is a member of the marketing team for the LTO Program.

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Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze

As the CEO and a co-founder of Backblaze, Gleb Budman has led the company from a start-up to a profitable online backup company. Prior to Backblaze, as Senior Director of Product Management at SonicWALL, Mr. Budman led the worldwide rollout of their Email Security products and services. As Vice President of Products at MailFrontier, he led the organization’s product strategy. Previously, he led product teams for Excite@Home and directed product management for collaboration startup Kendara. He started his career at General Electric, and holds a B.S. in engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Adam Burch, Software Engineer II, Microsoft

Adam Burch is a 4 year veteran of Hyper-V storage and in his tenure at Microsoft has worked on all aspects of how Hyper-V VMs get their storage. Among Adam's expertise is the MS-RSVD protocol, having an integral role in the design and implementation of MS-RSVD v2. Adam also has intimate knowledge of Hyper-V snapshots and virtual machine management.

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Idan Burstein, Architect, Mellanox

Bio pending

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Julian Cachua Fruchier, Storage Test Engineer, IBM

Julian is a Software Engineer at IBM's storage organization. With over 5 years experience on enterprise storage products, he has dedicated the last part of his career to simulate customer workloads on QA phases. He currently works on test automation and continuous integration for software defined storage products.

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Dr. Jorge Campello, Director of System and Software Technologies, Western Digital Corporation; TCG Storage Work Group Chair

Jorge Campello is the Sr Director of Systems and Software Technologies at Western Digital. He has been an active member of TCG for the past 11 years. He has been contributing to the Storage Work Group activities since its inception, initially as a contributor and over the last 7 years serving as the Work Group’s Chair. Jorge holds a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He started his career at IBM’s Almaden Research Center then moved to HGST and finally to Western Digital.

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Mark Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba

Mark A. Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry 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 and Object Drive technical working groups, and serves as chair of the SNIA Technical Council.

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Mallikarjun Chadalapaka, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Mallikarjun has been working on building data center storage technologies and products for more than two decades. He is the PM owner for Azure-consistent Storage, which is the collection of foundational storage cloud services in Microsoft Azure Stack. He regularly presents in internal and external conferences to discuss these technologies and more. Mallikarjun is also active in standards and industry forums. Mallikarjun is the author/editor of seven IETF RFCs, and holder of a dozen US patents.

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Anjaneya Chagam, Principal Engineer, Intel

Anjaneya "Reddy" Chagam is a Principal Engineer in Intel Data Center Storage 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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Dhruva Chakrabarti, Research Engineer, Hewlett Packard Labs

Dhruva is a senior scientist in the Software and Analytics Lab at Hewlett Packard Labs where he leads a group on programming for persistent memory. His other recent interests include programmability and performance of multithreaded programs as well as software transactional memory. In the past, he was a member of the HPUX compiler and tools lab, leading and contributing to a number of optimizer projects. Dhruva has published numerous papers in conferences and journals, holds a number of patents, and has served on the OpenMP ARB and on the program committees of PPoPP, CGO, LCTES, ICPADS, and Cluster Computing. He holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northwestern University.

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Bernard Chan, Member Technical Staff, NetApp

Bernard is a Member of Technical Staff at NetApp responsible for the quality of the E-Series storage array products. Bernard has been in the storage industry for 24 years and his experience includes component interoperability, storage applications, test architecture, test strategy definition, server virtualization, disk drives & storage array features. He has taught several protocol classes and holds 2 US patents.

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Changho Choi, Principal Engineer, Samsung

Dr. Choi has been leading Samsung Storage Intelligence initiatives including Multi-stream system development, customer enablement and engagements, and ecosystem build for more than three years. He participates in standards group technical discussions with emphasis on Storage Intelligence technology. He led the T10 SCSI Storage Intelligence standard which was published as a standard specification in May, 2015. He also enabled NetApp® to exploit multi-stream features within their products. In addition, he has delivered Storage Intelligence presentations and demos at leading storage conferences such as Flash Memory Summit, Storage Developer Conference, Data Storage Innovation conference, etc. He also leads SSD enablement and ecosystem build with datacenter applications tuning and optimization for SSD in Samsung Memory Solutions Lab. He has solid knowledge of SSD internals, storage system stacks, and datacenter solutions. Prior to Samsung, he worked at Cisco® Systems for nearly six years. His work included datacenter solutions and cloud computing as well as mobile and computer networking protocol and architecture.

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Ira Cooper, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Ira Cooper is the technical lead of Red Hat's Storage Samba Team, working on SMB3, filesystem integration, and general support. In the past he has been the lead for other successful software and storage teams. Ira is also a Samba Team member. He was a MIT Fellow working in the area of Distributed Systems and Systems Engineering. In addition to his time at MIT, Ira has a bachelors degree in Computer Science - Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a widely respected storage analyst and consultant. He has over 35 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 as well as Data Storage Technical 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.

Tom is active with SMPTE, SNIA, the IEEE (he is Director for IEEE Region 6 and active in the Consumer Electronics Society) and other professional organizations. Tom is the founder and organizer of the Annual Storage Visions Conference (www.storagevisions.com), a partner to the International Consumer Electronics Show, as well as the Creative Storage Conference (www.creativestorage.org). He is the general chairman of the annual Flash Memory Summit. He is a Senior member of the IEEE, Leader in the Gerson Lehrman Group Councils of Advisors and a member of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley (CNSV). For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications. go to www.tomcoughlin.com.

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Qihua Dai, Engineering Manager, Intel

Qihua Dai is Engineering Manager in Data Center Group at Intel. She has worked at Intel for 10+ years, focusing on storage software optimization for 3+ years. Her team works on storage software development for Intel Intelligent acceleration Library (ISA-L) and Intel Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK).

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Rob Davis, VP Storage Technology, Mellanox

Rob Davis is the Vice President of Storage Technology at Mellanox Technologies and was formerly Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic. As a key evaluator and decision-maker, Davis takes responsibility for keeping Mellanox at the forefront of emerging storage technologies, products, and relevant markets. Prior to Mellanox, Mr. Davis spent over 25 years as a technology leader and visionary at Ancor Corporation and then at QLogic, which acquired Ancor in 2000. At Ancor Mr. Davis served as Vice President of Advanced Technology, Director of Technical Marketing, and Director of Engineering. At QLogic, Mr. Davis was responsible for keeping the company at the forefront of emerging technologies, products, and relevant markets. Davis’ in-depth expertise spans Virtualization, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand, iSER, RoCE, SAS, PCI, SATA, NVMe and Flash Storage.

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Juan Deaton, Research Engineer and Scientist, AHA

Dr. Juan Deaton is currently a research engineer at AHA Products Group of Comtech EF Data. At AHA, Juan is researching how GZIP acceleration can increase the efficiency computing in many different applications. Before his most recent employment, he has had the opportunity to deliver a wide variety of tutorials on wireless communications topics for the Association of Old Crows, BankInfo Security, Marcus Evans Electronic Warfare, and the Homeland Security S&T Stakeholders. Before working at AHA, he worked for the Idaho National Lab, where he researched spectrum optimization, spectrum modeling, and emergency communications.

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Michael Dexter, Senior Analyst, iXsystems, Inc.

Michael Dexter has used BSD Unix systems since January, 1991 and appreciates the pre-PC Unix era while looking forward to the coming post-PC one. Michael has helped make the bhyve and Xen hypervisor projects a reality on FreeBSD and is the Senior Analyst at iXsystems, Inc. Michael lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two children and coordinates the Portland Linux/Unix Group.

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David Disseldorp, Engineer, SUSE Linux

David Disseldorp is an engineer in the Enterprise Storage team at SUSE Linux, responsible for Ceph RBD and iSCSI target development. David is also a member of the Samba Team, where he previously implemented Samba support for Btrfs features such as compression, copy-on-write clones and snapshots.

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Chet Douglas, Principal SW Engineer, Intel

Chet Douglas is a Principle SW Engineer in the Data Center Group, at Intel, focused on Cloud SW architecture, OS and OEM Enabling of non-volatile memory technologies. He has over 14 Years of experience at Intel working on various enterprise and client programs and 28 years of total Storage experience. He has worked in all aspects of storage including storage controller HW design, SCSI Disk/Tape/CDWriter FW Architecture, storage management SW Architecture, Windows and Linux kernel mode drivers, Enterprise HW RAID, and Client/Workstation SW Raid. He has 7 Storage related HW and SW patents and dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from Clarkson University and has completed significant course work towards a Master of Science in Computer Science.

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Swaroop Dutta, Director, Product Management, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware

Swaroop Dutta is Director, Product Management in the Storage and Availability Business Unit at VMware and manages the Virtual SAN Product Management team leading both their software and hardware areas. He has been with VMware for the past four years leading several initiatives within the storage and availability BU including Virtual Volumes, Core Storage and Data Protection.

Previously, he was with EMC and HP in various Product Management, engineering leadership and software development roles. You can follow Swaroop on twitter @SwaroopVDutta

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Sunu Engineer, CTO, Ryussi Technologies

Sunu Engineer is the Founder and CTO of Ryussi Technologies Pvt. Ltd with a background in Astrophysics. He has been working in the data storage area for over eighteen years and has been the principal archtiect of the high performance SMB server product, MoSMB, from Ryussi Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

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Vinod Eswaraprasad, Chief Architect, Wipro Technologies

Vinod Eswarprasad is Chief Architect at Wipro Technologies working in system software development for server and storage solutions. He has been involved in developing system software modules for fault tolerant systems in open and proprietary architectures for past 15 years. He holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer science from National Institute of Technology, Calicut, India. In his current role in Product Engineering Services division of Wipro, he is focused on Storage Domain in building file systems, storage appliances for various leading storage vendors.

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Douglas Fallstrom, Senior Director of Product Management, Primary Data

As Senior Director of Product Management at Primary Data, Douglas Fallstrom oversees the development of the company’s DataSphere data virtualization platform. He has more than two decades of experience providing leadership in product management, including prior positions at Coho Data, Symantec, VERITAS and Sun Microsystems.

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Rahul Fiske, Engineer, IBM

Rahul Fiske, currently working with IBM has storage expertise specifically related to FC/FCOE initiator and target. His other fields of interest are RDMA, and Storage virtualization.

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Steven French, Principal Systems Engineer: Protocols, Samba Team/Primary Data

Steve French is a Principal System Engineer at Primary Data. He is a member of the Samba team and the author and maintainer of one of the larger Linux file systems, cifs.ko, which provides CIFS and SMB3 protocol support for access to Network Attached Storage and Windows. Since graduating with a Masters degree from Rice University, he has been designing and developing file systems and networking software for more than 20 years. He is a frequent speaker at CIFS/SMB3, Samba and storage events, and is co-author of the CIFS Technical Reference.

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Balaji Ganesan, Director Of Engineering, Cloudian

Balaji Ganesan is one of the early engineers of Cloudian, has been responsible for co-architecting Cloudian's HyperStore object storage platform. He has 18 years of experience in building highly scalable distributed systems.

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Tushar Gohad, Senior Staff Engineer, Intel Corporation

Tushar is part of Intel's Data Center Group where his primary area of focus is Software Defined/Scale-out Storage Architecture. Tushar has been working in the open-source networking and storage-related technologies for over a decade now – his recent contributions include Erasure Code data path in OpenStack Swift, Intel’s Storage Performance Dev Kit (SPDK), networking in the Linux kernel and Ceph performance. Prior to joining Intel, Tushar was a lead open-source/Linux kernel developer at Cavium Networks/MontaVista Software where his focus was data-plane packet processing acceleration in all-Linux environments involving UIO, IPv6 enabling in the Linux ecosystem, Linux namespaces/containers and Linux IPsec scalability improvements. Tushar holds a Masters degree in Computer Science.

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Gurmeet Goindi, Technical Product Strategist, Oracle Corp

Gurmeet Goindi is a Technical Product Strategist in Oracle Database’s Systems Technology org. Gurmeet is currently responsible for Exadata Database Machine’s future hardware and software roadmap and also Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance’s hardware roadmap. Until recently Gurmeet managed the Exadata product management team. Gurmeet is also an evangelist for innovations Oracle is bringing in application aware storage and flash arena and has presented Oracle’s vision at various industry forums – Storage Network World (SNW), Flash Memory Summit, Open Sever Summit, Data Storage Innovation Conference, Storage Developer Conference, Oracle Expert Summits, IOUG Collaborate, Oracle Open World and many other regional Oracle User Groups.

Gurmeet has been working in Silicon Valley for last 16 years in various engineering, management and product management roles. Gurmeet comes to Oracle from NetApp, where he was in the Engineering organization for 7+ years. Most recently he was the architect for NetApp’s flagship storage platform, FAS6200. Prior to NetApp, he worked for Bay Networks and Motorola Computing Group designing Internet routers, firewalls, and high performance computers.

Gurmeet has a Bachelors of Engineering in Electronics and an MBA from University of Chicago - Booth School of Business.

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Dror Goldenberg, VP of Software Architecture, Mellanox Technologies

Dror Goldenberg has served as Mellanox’s vice president of software architecture since October 2013. Previously, Mr. Goldenberg served as vice president of architecture from March 2010 to October 2013, where he was responsible for software, firmware and system architecture. Mr. Goldenberg joined Mellanox in 2000 as an architect, serving in numerous architecture and design positions. Prior to Mellanox, Mr. Goldenberg held various software development positions on an elite R&D team in the Israeli Defense Force. Prior to that, Mr. Goldenberg was a member of the Pentium MMX and Pentium 4 architecture validation teams at Intel. He contributed to the PCI and InfiniBand specifications and holds several patents in the field of high speed networking. Mr. Goldenberg graduated Cum Laude with a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and holds an MBA from the Technion Institute of Technology Israel.

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Shlomo Greenberg, PhD, Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beer-Sheva, Israel

Shlomo Greenberg received his BSc, MSc (with honors), and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel, in 1976, 1984, and 1997, respectively. He is currently a staff member at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Beer-Sheva, Israel. His primary research interests are computer architecture, wireless communication, image and digital signal processing, computer vision and VLSI low power design.

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Sagi Grimberg, Co-founder, Principle Architect, LightBits Labs

Sagi Grimberg is a co-founder and principal architect at LightBits Labs as well as the maintainer of the Linux iSER initiator and target drivers and an active contributor to the Linux kernel I/O stack. Prior to LightBits Labs, Sagi was a storage team leader at Mellanox Technologies working on storage technologies focusing on RDMA protocols and advanced features such as data-integrity and erasure coding offload engines.

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Gaurav Gupta, Senior Consultant, Tata Consultancy Services

Gaurav Gupta is heading delivery team for a TCS HiTech customer who is a leading Data Storage company. He has more than 18 years of experience in Product development, Quality Assurance and Sustenance engineering in Storage domain. His key areas of focus include Cloud Storage, Data Protection, Open Source Storage, Big Data, Virtualization, and Product Integration. He was part of incubation team started Storage Engineering group in TCS. Since then he has created many high competent teams for HiTech customers by establishing Innovation Program, Competency Development Program, and Quality initiatives and replicating these best practices to bring repeat success to TCS's customers.

Gaurav has presented / published multiple papers at various customer conferences related to data storage, data protection and storage manageability. He is also an active member with Computer Society of India.

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Jim Handy, Gen'l 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 posts blogs at www.TheMemoryGuy.com, and www.TheSSDguy.com.

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Bob Hansen, V.P. Systems Architecture, Apeiron Data Systems

With over 30 years of storage industry experience in both technical and managerial rolls, Bob Hansen now serves as VP of Systems Architecture for Apeiron Data Systems where he is responsible for SW, HW and scale out applications interface architecture. Bob is also the Managing Director of Kitaro Consulting specializing in storage systems architecture and performance. Before founding Kitaro, Bob served as Technical Director at NetApp where he was responsible for storage HW/FW/SW architecture and strategic planning. He has previously held technical and managerial positions at Xyratex, Agilent Technologies and HP.

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Christoph Hellwig

Christoph Hellwig has been working on Linux file systems and storage components for more than 15 years and is one of the key Linux kernel contributors in these areas.

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Cheng Huang, Principle Researcher, Microsoft

Cheng Huang is a principle research scientist and architect at Microsoft Research. Lately, he has been leading the design, architecture and implementation of the Azure Storage vNext system ( to scale the capacity of Azure Storage by more than 100x ). Along the way, he has been introducing formal methods ( such as TLA+ and IronFleet ) and model checking ( such as P# ) to the Azure teams.

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Walt Hubis, Principal, Hubis Technical Associates

Walt is a storage architect and the owner of 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 is a sought-after speaker at industry conferences. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering.

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Tim Hudson, CTO, Cryptsoft

Tim Hudson has been involved in the field of network and system security for more than 20 years. Tim Hudson is CTO and Technical Director at Cryptsoft based in Brisbane, Australia. He provides advice and guidance on security technology design and architecture. Cryptsoft is a foundational sponsor of the OASIS standards body and a core contributor to the Key Management Interoperability Protocol and PKCS11 Technical Committees and a voting member of the SNIA and the SSIF. Tim is also Co-Chair, SNIA Security Technical Work Group.

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Louis Imershein, VP Product, Permabit Technology Corporation

Louis Imershein, VP Product at Permabit Technology Corporation, is responsible for product management and strategic planning. He has 25 years of technical leadership experience in product management, software engineering, and technical support.

Prior to Permabit, Imershein was a Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Sun Microsystems Data Management Group. Prior to Sun, he was a member of the technical staff at The Santa Cruz Operation where he made significant engineering contributions to the early development of UNIX on Intel x86-based systems.

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Jeff Inman, Software Developer, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Mr. Inman has been developing software in support of scientific computing for several decades.

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Dr. M. K. Jibbe, Technical Director, NetApp

Dr. M. K. Jibbe is a Technical Director (TD) at NetApp (HSG). At the technical level, he is responsible for the Quality of the E-series products in US as a quality Czar. As a TD, Dr. Jibbe develops the quality metrics and specifies Quality requirements / Goals for development and test organizations for all the NetApp HSG Storage products. Dr. Jibbe has been awarded 34 US / Canada patents, 12 others in Patent Pending State, and published over 57 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), DriveTechnology, Computer Architecture, Programming Languages and Standards, and other Basic Electrical and Computer engineering classes.

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Rob Johnson, Research Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University

Rob Johnson is a Research Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University and conducts research on Security, Big Data Algorithms, and Cryptography. He is director of the Security, Programming Languages, And Theory (SPLAT) lab at Stony Brook, the Cryptography Lab at the New York Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT), and the Smart Grid Cyber-Security Testing Lab of the New York Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (AERTC).

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Kazuhiko Kawamura, Senior Manager - System Engineering, Sony Corporation

Kazuhiko received the master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University and joined Sony as a software engineer in 1989. Since then, he is mainly working for various data storage products, such as Data recorders, Data tape drives, Tape libraries and HSM softwares for the data storage industry. For the recent 3 years, he has been working for Sony's professional optical storage products as a senior researcher.

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RAFI KC, Software Engineer, Red Hat India

Rafi K C from India. I am a C developer presently working on Gluster FS, a distributed file system project at Red Hat. Remote Direct Memory Access(RDMA), snapshot creation, data tiering are some of the areas of Gluster I have actively worked on. Improving the performance of the distributed file system is always a challenge and one that I enjoy doing very much. I follow the latest updates in the opensource world. Being at Red Hat means I have the freedom to try out new solutions and practices. I have presented few talks in international conferences. My last presentation was in NOSCONF2016 (http://nosconf.github.io/) about RAFT algorithm.

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Sangeeth Keeriyadath, Senior Staff Software Engineer, IBM

Sangeeth Keeriyadath works for IBM and is proficient in various storage virtualization technologies. He has provided significant contributions to IBM's PowerVM offering; including device drivers for virtual adapters (vSCSI / NPIV), Shared Storage Pools and Live Partition mobility.

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Eden Kim, CEO, Calypso Testers

Eden is CEO of Calypso Systems, Inc., a leader in SSD test and measurement equipment and services. Eden is also Chair of the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Working Group.

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Chandra Kumar Konamki, Sr Software Engineer, Microsoft

Chandra is a Senior Software Engineer working in the Storage and File Systems group at Microsoft. He has been with Microsoft for 8+ years. He started his career in the Windows sustained engineering team, where he was finding and fixing bugs in the Windows file system and storage stacks. Later he moved to the NTFS product development team and played a key role in adding storage class memory support to the NTFS file system. He is currently working with Intel on porting the NVML Libraries to Windows. He graduated from Madras Institute of Technology in India.

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Oleg Kravtsov, Lead Developer, Tuxera

Oleg Kravtsov is Lead Developer at Tuxera – the leading provider of network storage software. Oleg has a Master’s degree in Mathematics and over 15 years of experience working with file systems, embedded and network management software design, driver development, troubleshooting, porting software components, and telecommunications. Oleg specializes in design and implementation of test suits and network-oriented software & protocols. At Tuxera, Oleg is leading a team of developers building new technologies, currently focusing on Tuxera SMB.

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Matt Kurjanowicz, Senior Software Engineer Lead, Microsoft

Matt Kurjanowicz is a Senior Software Engineering Lead at Microsoft, working on Hyper-V storage. Matt previously worked on Hyper-V Shared VHDX and the MS-RSVD protocol, Failover Clustering, File and Storage Servers, and in other roles in the computing industry.

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Ilya Kuznetsov, Product Manager, YADRO

Ilya Kuznetsov is a Product Manager at YADRO. He has more than 8 years of experience of enterprise UNIX servers and storage systems deep technical pre-sale & post-sale, including IBM in the past. At YADRO Ilya leads OpenPOWER servers engineering and also participates in storage products developments.

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Veronica Lagrange, Staff Engineer, Samsung

Veronica is a Staff Engineer with the Memory Solutions Lab at Samsung, where she works on SSD enablement for the datacenter, such as tuning and optimizing database applications for fast storage. Previously, Veronica was a Senior Performance Engineer with Splice Machine, and before that, held Senior Performance Engineering and Modeling positions with HPE and Compaq. Veronica received her PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Veronica is also a reviewer with ACM Reviews, with more than 20 reviews published.

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Dan Lambright, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Dan Lambright is a principal software engineer at Red Hat Storage. He helped design GlusterFS's automated tiering feature. Prior to Red Hat he worked at DELL and EMC. He also teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell as an adjunct professor.

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Damien Le Moal, Sr. Manager, Western Digital

Damien Le Moal manages the System Software group within Western Digital research, Systems and Software Technologies department. Damien is a co-author of the libzbc project and has contributed to the development of ZBC & ZAC Linux kernel support.

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Andrew Leonard, Senior Software Engineer, EMC Isilon

Andrew Leonard is a Senior Software Engineer at EMC Isilon. Andrew's previous employers have included WhitePages, RootMetrics and Seattle Biomedical Research Institute. Andrew holds a BA in Physics from Cornell University.

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Volker Lendecke, Developer, Samba Team / SerNet

Volker Lendecke is a long-time member of the Samba Team and co-founder of SerNet GmbH in Göttingen, Germany. Volker is one of the initial architects of ctdb and actively developing clustered Samba.

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Richard Levy, CEO and President, Peer Fusion

Richard Levy is the founder of Peer Fusion Inc. Prior to Peer Fusion Richard was a founder of SunUp Digital systems (acquired by Motorola), a maker of software for large TV NOCs. Richard's work focuses on large scale data ingestion, processing and storage. Richard is a graduate of UCSD. Richard was granted patents related to cluster storage and multi-tiered storage.

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Weigang Li, Software Engineer, Intel

Weigang Li is a Senior Software Engineer in the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation. He has over 10 years experience in networking, data security, data compression, file system and accelerator technologies. His recent work focuses on optimization of the compression and encryption workload in Storage system with accelerator technologies.

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Xiaodong Liu, Storage Software Engineer, Intel Asia R&D

Xiaodong Liu is a Storage Software Engineer in Data Center Group at Intel. He focus on the areas of algorithms acceleration related to storage, as a developer of multi-buffer hash and hash function stitching. And do a lot work to optimize storage algorithm workflow based on IA platform and its new feature.

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Shannon Loomis, Data Scientist, Nimble Storage

Shannon Loomis is a Data Scientist at Nimble Storage, where she uses big data to monitor performance, predict needs, diagnose issues, and gain insight into how storage arrays are used in the field. Shannon holds a PhD from Brown University and a BS from the University of Chicago and was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin prior to joining Nimble.

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Paul Luse, Principal Engineer, Intel

Paul is a Principal Engineer working in the Storage Group at Intel. He has been working in storage-related technologies for most of his 20+ year career at Intel. Recently, Paul played a key role in the OpenStack Swift project as one of the Core Developers but since early 2016 has shifted his focus to next generation byte addressable non-volatile memory technologies. Prior to joining Intel, Paul worked for GE Government Services supporting the Strategic Defense Initiative in the South Pacific. Paul completed his undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Economics at Arizona State University and holds a Master's of Science Degree in Software Engineering also from ASU.

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Ioannis Manousakis, PhD Candidate in Rutgers University, Department of Computer Science

Manousakis Ioannis is a PhD candidate in Rutgers University, Department of Computer Science currently working towards his thesis. Ioannis’ research interests include distributed, energy efficient systems and datacenter architecture. During his PhD, Ioannis has worked in datacenter reliability, cooling provisioning, datacenter planning and placement optimization in Microsoft cloud infrastructure and operations team (MCIO) which designs, deploys and operates Microsoft’s hyperscale datacenters.

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Bill Martin, Principal Engineer Storage Standards, Samsung

Bill Martin has been involved in the storage industry for over 30 years, starting in 1983 with the development of a proprietary optical storage interface for HP, architecting the HP Tachyon interface chip for Fibre Channel, serving on industry consortiums and standards bodies for storage including SNIA, INCITS T11, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, SATA-IO, and NVMe. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from the University of California, Davis. Bill is Vice Chair of the SNIA Technical Council, Vice Chair of the INCITS T10, SCSI Storage Interfaces Technical Committee, Secretary of the INCITS T13, AT Attachment Technical Committee, and editor of SCSI Block Commands – 4 (SBC-4). Previous positions within the storage community include Chair of the SNIA Data Integrity TWG , Vice Chair of INCITS T11.3, Fibre Channel Interconnection Schemes, Secretary INCITS T11, Fibre Channel Interfaces Technical Committee. Additionally, Bill led Fibre Channel interoperability events for over 17 years, and participated in the SNIA interoperability lab in the early 2000’s.

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Sean McGinnis, Sr. Principal Software Engineer, Dell

Sean McGinnis is a software architect and project lead with the Dell Storage group. He focuses on enabling integration of Dell Storage capabilities with external systems to streamline the ease of use and availability of the various Dell storage offerings to meet application needs. Sean is the current Project Team Lead for the OpenStack Cinder project. Sean has been a speaker at several OpenStack Summits and the Container Data Storage conference following DockerCon EU 2015

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Anurag Mehrotra, Assistant Consultant TCS

Anurag Mehrotra is leading a project team for a TCS HiTech customer in the Data Storage space. He has more than 9 years of experience in storage domain. His area of interest includes Data Protection, Virtualization, and Storage Performance. He has gain expertise on multi-vendor storage and data protection products and solutions by development, quality assurance and storage administration.

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Stefan Metzmacher, Developer, SerNet / Samba Team

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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Vernon Miller, Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Vernon Miller is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM working on parallel file system performance. Vernon has worked in the area of storage performance for 12 years, focusing on block, file, and NAS environments. Vernon also helped develop the SPEC SFS2014 benchmark suite. Vernon has a M.S. in Physics from the University of Arizona.

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Dr. Masood Mortazavi, Distinguished Engineer, Huawei, US R&D Center

Dr. Masood Mortazavi is a distinguished engineer at Huawei, US R&D Center. He leads research teams working on distributed databases, file and operating systems, cloud infrastructure services, AI and cognitive computing. Prior to working at Huawei, he was the senior principle architect for cloud infrastructure services at Yahoo. At Sun Microsystems, he led teams of engineers working on open-source and Java technologies. Prior to Sun, he worked at Teknowledge on DARPA-funded research projects focused on intelligent and distributed systems. Masood studied scientific computing at UC Davis followed by several years of post-graduate studies in Logic and Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley with focus on philosophy of cognition and AI. He has 40+ patents either awarded or being reviewed. He has more than a dozen published papers, including a 2016 book chapter on "Big Data and Privacy". He represents Huawei on the BigData@CSAIL/MIT advisory board.

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Manish Motwani, Backend Storage Software Architect, Cleversafe, an IBM Company

Manish has over 10 years of experience in developing highly scalable object storage systems, with a focus on the back-end storage server technologies. He currently oversees development of the server team at Cleversafe and holds over 30 issued patents.

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Sumaithri Mukkamalla, Software Engineer, EMC/Isilon

Sumaithri Mukkamalla is a Software Engineer in the Isilon Storage Division of EMC. Her area of development work covers SMB server and has implemented multi-protocol file extension filtering on OneFS. Prior to this, she worked with Samsung Research India. Sumaithri holds a Master’s degree in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Peter Murray, Principal System Engineer, Virtual Instruments

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 Virtual Instruments (Load DynamiX and Virtual Instruments recently merged), Peter worked for 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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Srinivasan Narayanamurthy, Member Technical Staff, NetApp

Srini works as a storage systems researcher at NetApp. His areas of interest include distributed systems and storage security. He spent about three years exclusively investigating the space of erasure codes. He was part of the team that constructed one of the notable practical constructions for a locally regenerating erasure code for HDFS. He has deep technical expertise in the space of erasure codes and brings in a decade worth of experience in the industry after a PhD in computer science.

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Philippe Nicolas, Advisor Rozo Systems

Philippe Nicolas is a recognized storage industry expert with more than 20 years of experience He’s currently advisor for several companies such Rozo Systems, OpenIO, Infinit, Guardtime, NEC and Solix Technologies. Previously, he drove the Industry Strategy at Scality after leading the Product Strategy since 2011. Before, he initiated a P2P dispersed storage software project named KerStor. Previously, he was at Brocade for 2 years as technology evangelist and strategist and spent nearly 10 years at Veritas Software and Symantec in different technology and product roles. Prior 1997, he served various technical positions at SGI and Compaq. He holds an engineering degree in computer sciences from ESI.

In parallel, Philippe started the SNIA Europe France regional committee in 2001, and he served as Chairman for France until February 2010. He was also 2 times board director of the SNIA Europe in 2001-2002 and between 2007 and 2009. He created also 4 SNIA Tutorials around Data Sharing, File Storage, Massive Scalability and Cloud Storage since 2002. He received in 2005 the "Outstanding Service Award", from the SNIA Europe, for his industry and association contribution and he's a founding member of SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative.

He owns 2 famous French Storage blogs (filestorage.blogspot.com and continuousdataprotection.blogspot.com), #1 independent storage blog in France, with 2000+ blogposts and 10+ years of existence. His twitter account is @CDP_FST. Philippe Nicolas is an Advisor for Rozo Systems

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Mark Pastor, Director of Archive and Technical Workflow Solutions, Quantum

Mark Pastor is director of archive and technical workflow solutions at Quantum. Mark represents Quantum within the Active Archive Alliance and the LTO Consortium. He regularly blogs on topics relating to data management, protection and archive, and has been widely published in industry publications including WIRED, CIO, Information Management and Wikibon.

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Martin Petersen, Architect, Oracle

Martin K. Petersen has contributed to the Linux Kernel since the early nineties. As Linux Storage Architect at Oracle he focuses on future I/O and storage technologies. Martin also participates in various industry standardization efforts and co-maintains the Linux SCSI stack.

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Nick Principe, Principal Software Engineer, EMC Corporation

Nick Principe is a Principal Software Engineer at EMC working on customer-focused performance engineering. Nick has worked in the performance engineering field for over 10 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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Shaz Qadeer, Principal Researcher, Microsoft

Shaz Qadeer is a Principal Researcher in MSR. He works on techniques for programming and verifying concurrent and distributed systems. Along with colleagues in MSR and academia, he has developed the P and P# language frameworks for asynchronous event-driven programming. P and P# are being used inside Microsoft Windows and Azure to develop critical drivers and services. P and P# are available at https://github.com/p-org.

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Murali Rajagopal, Storage Architect, VMware

Storage Architect in VMWare Storage and Availability Business Unit OCTO, promoting and enabling new technologies such as NVMe especially for VSAN use cases.

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Raj Ramanujan, Sr. Principal Engineer, Intel

Bio pending

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Da Qi Ren, Staff Research Engineer, Huawei Technologies

Dr. Ren, a principal research engineer of Futurewei Technologies in Santa Clara, CA, USA, has more than 12 years of experience in high performance computing and architectures. His research focus has been in the areas of formal methods, parallel and distributed processing, big data analytics, software design and optimization, HPC, and computational electromagnetics. He has 11 patents, and has published 60 journal and conference papers. Dr. Ren received his Ph.D. from McGill University. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Tokyo. He is a member of IEEE and ICS.

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Jason Resch, Senior Software Architect, IBM

Jason Resch is an innovative force at Cleversafe, now an IBM company. In his ten years with the company, he has become the most prolific inventor with over two hundred issued patents. As a Senior Software Architect Jason has specialized in developing new algorithms to support security, reliability, and scalability.

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Jose Rivera, Software Engineer, Red Hat / Samba Team

José Rivera is a Samba Team member that spends his time at Red Hat working on improving clustered Samba, distributed filesystems, and clustered resource managers. 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. He is also a member of the Samba Team. He likes animals and making percussive noises.

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Craig Robertson, Principal Software Architect Radian Memory Systems, Inc.

Craig started his career at Teradyne developing system software for VLSI and memory test equipment. At Teradyne, he worked on high-performance embedded compilers in C, C++ and Lisp; on micro-timing optimization techniques; on high-performance distributed databus design. He ultimately managed several geographically dispersed teams responsible for the architectural overhaul of the company's test system software. At DataDirect Networks (DDN), he was a co-architect for their WoS self-replicating, self-healing distributed object store for scale-out deployments. He worked on distribution and erasure coding algorithms for the ultra low-latency object retrieval system. Prior to Radian, Craig was an architect at Ixia Labs, designing virtualization enabling technology, high-performance kernel modules, and messaging systems for the industry's most advanced 40Gb/100Gb and up ethernet test equipment.

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Subhojit Roy, Storage Software Engineer, IBM India

Subhojit Roy is STSM and lead architect for ISTL Storwize development team. He drove end-end architecture and development for iSCSI/iSER and FCoE protocol stack for Storwize product line. Subhojit is an AOT member and an IBM Master Inventor. He holds 20 patents and many more filed with USPTO.

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Andy Rudoff, Architect Datacenter Software, Intel Corporation

Andy Rudoff is an Architect in the Datacenter Software Division at Intel Corporation. He has over 25 years experience in operating systems internals, file systems, and networking. Andy is co-author of the popular Unix Network Programming book. His recent work focuses on Non-Volatile Memory Programming models and algorithms for using Persistent Memory.

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Endric Schubert, PhD, CTO & Founder, MLE

Dr. Endric Schubert is CTO of Missing Link Electronics which he co-founded in 2010. As a technologist and entrepreneur in the field of electronic and semiconductor design his background includes software engineering, FPGA technology, Reconfigurable Computing and Embedded Systems design. He worked in the Advanced Technology Group at Exemplar Logic, at Axis Systems, at Aristo Technology Inc. and later co-founded Bridges2Silicon, Inc. and ESIC-Solutions. He has authored various technical publications, is inventor of several patents and holds lectures on electronic system design.

Endric holds an Electrical Engineering degree (Dipl.-Ing.) from University of Karlsruhe, Germany and a PhD degree from University of Tuebingen, Germany. He is a guest lecturer on system level design at the University of Ulm, Germany.

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Sudipta Sengupta, Principal Research Scientist, Microsoft Research

Dr. Sudipta Sengupta is Principal Research Scientist at Microsoft Research, where his work over the last nine years has spanned systems, networking, storage, and data management for server and cloud. His work on flash memory based key-value stores ships in SQL Server Hekaton, Azure DocumentDB, and Bing ObjectStore. His research on data deduplication has been incorporated into the new primary data deduplication feature in Windows Server 2012. He designed the network topology and routing algorithms for VL2, a modern data center network that introduced foundational ideas that have since been adopted across the cloud computing industry. Previously, Dr. Sengupta spent five years at Bell Laboratories, the Research Division of Lucent Technologies.

Dr. Sengupta is IEEE Fellow and ACM Distinguished Scientist. He was awarded the IEEE William R. Bennett Prize and the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize for his work on oblivious routing of network traffic. At Microsoft, he received the Gold Star Award for leadership and contributions for Microsoft's long term success and the Microsoft Research Technology Transfer Award for shipping research ideas into Microsoft's products and services. At Bell Labs, he received the President's Teamwork Achievement Award for technology transfer of research into Lucent products. Dr. Sengupta received a Ph.D. and an M.S. from MIT (Cambridge, USA) and a B.Tech. from IIT-Kanpur (India), all in Computer Science.

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Vinod Shankar, Principal Software Lead, Microsoft

Vinod Shankar is a Principal Software Lead at Microsoft with 20 years of software development experience on Windows. He joined Microsoft in 2007 year and has been working on CSV and software defined storage since then, prior to that he worked at Veritas and Brocade in a software engineer and lead role developing storage solutions for Windows platform.

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Tien Shiah, Product Marketing Manager, Samsung

Tien Shiah is a Product Marketing Manager for solid state drives at Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. He serves as an SSD evangelist, product consultant and market expert, focused on accelerating the migration to SSDs in the client and enterprise marketplace. He brings more than 15 years of product marketing experience from the semiconductor and storage industries. He has an MBA from McGill University and an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of British Columbia.

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Roy Shterman, Software Engineer, Mellanox

Roy Shterman, a software developer in the software storage team in Mellanox, is working on NVMe over Fabrics and iSCSI extensions for RDMA technologies.

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Eric Slack, Sr. Analyst, Evaluator Group

Eric is a technology writer and Sr. Analyst with Evaluator Group with over 25 years experience in high-tech industries. He’s held technical management and marketing positions in the computer storage, instrumentation, digital imaging and test equipment fields. He has spent the past 15 years in the data storage field, with storage hardware manufacturers and as a national storage integrator, designing and implementing open systems storage solutions for companies in the Western United States.  Eric earned degrees in electrical/computer engineering from the University of Colorado and marketing from California State University, Humboldt.  He lives in Colorado with his wife and twenty-something twins.

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David Slik, Technical Director, NetApp

David Slik is the Technical Director for Capacity Storage at NetApp, Inc. He has been involved in object storage for over fifteen years, is the co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group, a member of the LTFS and Object Drive technical working groups, and a principal author of the CDMI standard.

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Jean-Francois Smigielski, Co-founder and R&D Manager, OpenIO

Passionated software engineer, Jean-Francois spents 10 years on backend services involved in Cloud architectures: architecture, development and support in production. He gained a strong technical expertise and a deep experience in software defined storage solutions.

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Scott Sobhani, Co-founder & CEO, Cloud Constellation Corporation – SpaceBeltTM, the Information Ultra-HighwayTM

Scott Sobhani, CEO and cofounder of Cloud Constellation Corporation and the SpaceBelt, Information Ultra-Highway is an experienced telecom executive with over 25 years in executive management positions, most recent as VP for business development and commercial affairs at International Telecom Advisory Group (ITAG). Previous positions include CEO of TalkBox, VP and GM at Lockheed Martin, and VP, GM and senior economist at Hughes Electronics Corporation. Mr. Sobhani was responsible for closing over $2.3 billion in competitive new business orders for satellite spacecraft systems, mobile network equipment and rocket launch vehicles. He co-authored “Sky Cloud Autonomous Electronic Data Storage and Information Delivery Network System”, “Space-Based Electronic Data Storage and Network System” and “Intermediary Satellite Network for Cross-Strapping and Local Network Decongestion” (each of which are patent pending). He has an MBA from the University of Southern California, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Terry Spear, President & CTO, IOLogix

Terry Spear is a 25 year storage industry veteran who has contributed in both management and technical roles during storage product development at Seagate, Quantum, Mountaingate, Honeywell/Metrum, Kanamatsu Electron, Raytheon, ADIC, Iomega, Sun, IBM, HP, Symantec and numerous startups. He was the founder of Breakthrough Systems a supplier of licensed OEM storage software stacks for disk, tape and library devices and systems. Earlier he was a co-founder, along with original members of the Intel 8086 microprocessor design team, of Language Resources a leading microprocessor software development tools vendor. Terry studied Engineering Physics and Psychology for his undergraduate degree and Computer Science during graduate school at the University of Colorado.

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Terry Stokes, Principal Software Engineer, EMC/Isilon

Terry Stokes is a Principal Software Engineer in the protocols group at EMC Isilon. Prior to Isilon, Terry was an independent consultant at multiple companies. Before that, he was a co-founder of Extraordinary Networks, a short-lived startup, where he developed the ExtraordinaryFS WORM filesystem. Terry has a Masters degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University.

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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 for many years in the areas of network filesystems, network transports and RDMA, and recently has been working on applying these to remote access of Persistent Memory, working within the SNIA Nonvolatile Memory Programming TWG, and others.

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Shaun Tancheff, Software Engineer, AeonAzure

Shaun Tancheff is a Software Engineer with over 20 years of experience crossing several areas of the computing and storage arena. Frequently involved in system level optimization often focused on various performance related objectives. Currently working with Seagate to deliver the lowest cost highest performing rotational media.

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Osamu Tatebe, Professor, University of Tsukuba

Osamu Tatebe received a Ph.D. in computer science (1997, Univ. of Tokyo). He worked at Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL), and National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) until 2006. He is now a professor in Department of Computer Science at University of Tsukuba. He has been a co-chair of Grid File System Working Group of Open Grid Forum since 2004. His research area is high-performance computing, data-intensive computing, and parallel and distributed system software.

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Pushkar Thorat, Software Engineer, IBM

Pushkaraj is a Senior Software Engineer in ISDL department of IBM India. He has 10 years of industry experience in Software Development and has expertise in Storage, Object and Cloud services.

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Rachel Traylor, Research Scientist, EMC

Rachel Traylor is a research scientist with EMC. She has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Arlington and an MS is Statistics from Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include stochastic processes, risk and reliability theory, queuing theory, and probability.

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Shailendra Tripathi, Architect, Tegile Systems

As architect, Shailendra drives all the filesystem and performance scaling work at Tegile. He has been driving the filesystem engineering to adapt the software on high IO performance all flash systems and various new features enabling its optimal usage.

Shailendra has more than 15 years of experience in the filesystem areas on physical and cluster FS, and, data management functions of snapshot, replication, compression, and, deduplication. He has worked largely in the storage start-ups including, Exablox, Ocarina Networks (acquired by Dell), Agami Networks, HP, and, Kuokoa Networks. Shailendra holds a Master's in Computer Science and Engineering from India Institute of Kanpur, India.

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Ali Turkoglu, Principal Software Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Ali Turkoglu has been leading the development efforts for object based storage on Microsoft Azure Stack and Storage Resource Provider. He has been previously worked in areas like Networking and block and file level storage.

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Kothanda (Kodi) Umamageswaran, Vice President, Exadata Development, Oracle

Kothanda (Kodi) Umamageswaran is a Vice President at Oracle Corporation. He joined Oracle in 1997 and has over 19 years of system software expertise, technology leadership. Kodi began his career developing clustering solutions for IBM SP at Oracle before moving on to infrastructure and systems for the Oracle database. Now his core responsibilities are the development of the mission-critical capabilities for Exadata, including the high availability, performance, manageability, and enabling high speed deployments.

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Marc VanHeyningen, Principal Software Engineer, Isilon/EMC

Marc VanHeyningen is a Principal Software Engineer with EMC Isilon, where he has worked for nine years. His work has involved identity management, Authentication/Authorization/Accounting (AAA), and a variety of protocol areas. Previously he worked with Sonicwall, Aventail, CompuServe and Spry. Marc attended Indiana University (MS CS).

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Doug Voigt, Distinguished Technologist, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Doug Voigt is a Distinguished Technologist in the Chief Technologist’s office of HPE’s Storage Division. He is chair of the SNIA NVM Programming Model TWG and a member of the SNIA Technical Council. Doug has over 37 years of development experience in disk drives, disk arrays, storage management and non-volatile memory. He holds CS and EE degrees from Cornell University and 33 US patents, primarily in virtual arrays.

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Benjamin Walker, Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Ben Walker is the technical lead for the Storage Performance Development Kit (http://spdk.io). He has been working in storage and at Intel for 5 years writing Windows and Linux drivers, disk caches, and optimizing software for SSDs. His other notable projects are Intel Rapid Storage Technology and Intel Smart Response Technology. Ben previously worked for 3 years as a software developer in a financial futures trading firm on high performance server applications. He is a Fulbright Scholar and has a B.S. in physics from Arizona State University.

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Shaun Walsh, Managing Partner, G2M Research

Bio pending

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Ralph Weber, Consultant, ENDL Texas

Ralph Weber has been the editor of the SCSI Primary Commands standard since its inception in 1994, as well as editing two versions of the SCSI Architecture Model (SAM-2 and SAM-3). In March 2015, Ralph assumed the chairmanship of INCITS T10, the Technical Committee that develops SCSI standards. FWIW A more complete bio is available at http://endl.com/row.htm

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Michael Willett, VP Marketing, Drive Trust Alliance

Dr. Michael Willett received a Bachelor of Science degree from the US Air Force Academy (Top Secret clearance) and a Masters and PhD in mathematics from NC State University. After a career as a university professor of mathematics and computer science, Dr. Willett joined IBM as a design architect, moving into IBM's Cryptography Competency Center. Later, Dr. Willett joined Fiderus, a security and privacy consulting practice, subsequently accepting a position with Wave Systems. Recently, Dr. Willett was a Senior Director at Seagate Research, focusing on security functionality on hard drives, including self-encryption, related standardization, product rollout, patent development, and partner liaison. Currently, Dr. Willett serves as a consultant on the marketing of storage-based security. Dr. Willett also chaired the OASIS Privacy Management Reference Model Technical Committee (PMRM TC), which has developed an operational reference model for implementing privacy requirements. Recently, Dr. Willett worked with Samsung as a storage security strategist, helping to define their self-encryption strategy across Samsung’s portfolio of storage products. Currently, Dr. Willett is working with the Bright Plaza executive team to promote the Drive Trust Alliance, whose mission is to promote adoption of SEDs in the marketplace (www.drivetrust.com).

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Gen Xu, Performance Engineer, Intel

Gen Xu is a performance engineer at Intel’s Software and Service Group. Gen has been working in the area of distributed storage cluster modeling and simulation, specifically object storage Swift. He has rich experience in performance optimization of storage systems. Gen holds an M.S. in Computer Science from East China Normal University in China.

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Kevin Xu, Software Architect, EMC

Kevin Xu is currently with the Advanced Development Group of the CTO office of EMC Core Technologies Division. His experience and interest include technologies in OS, realtime systems, file systems, virtualization, cloud architecture, communication networks, machine learning, and data analytics. Prior to EMC, he was a distinguished member of technical staff in Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. Kevin holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering and is a senior member of IEEE.

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Chendi Xue, Software Engineer, Intel APAC R&D

Chendi Xue is a Software Development Engineer in the Software and Service Group for Intel Corporation, working in the Big Data Technology team primarily focused on Cloud Storage Software. She has been working on Ceph performance analyze and optimization for more than three years.

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Mat Young, VP of Marketing, Netlist

Mat Young, 18 years plus storage experience, SNIA certified in early 2000. Founded Fusion-io in EMEA 2009, created and grew the Data Propulsion Labs. Now VP of Marketing at Netlist.

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Frank Zhao, Software Architect, CTO Office, EMC Corp

Frank Zhao is Software Architect and Innovator at EMC Office of CTO, with many years of engineering experience in fs/storage, data protection, flash and distributed storage. Now he is leading EMC CTO relevant Advanced Development projects on micro-service, streaming and Big Data in-memory analytics with intensive interactions with Docker, Storm/Spark, Redis, Kafka etc. Frank is named inventor on 3 granted U.S. patents and additional 25 pending.

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