Dhruva Chakrabarti

Senior Scientist, HP Labs

Biography

Dhruva is a senior scientist in the programming languages group within Intelligent Infrastructure Laboratory, HP Labs. Most recently, one of his focus areas has been system software suitable for non-volatile memory. He has also been working on improving the programmability and performance of multithreaded programs. His work on software transactional memory yielded new abstractions for effective performance analysis leading to a more optimized implementation. 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 around 20 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 is a participant in the newly formed SNIA TWG on NVM programming. He holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northwestern University where he developed an automatic parallelizer for irregular applications.

Dennis Chapman

Senior Technical Director, NetApp

Biography

Senior Technical Director at NetApp responsible for Windows File Services within Data ONTAP as well as the NetApp Windows hosted products. I’ve been at NetApp for 14 years and have held a number of roles from development work in Data ONTAP and SnapManager for Exchange to TD roles with large service providers and the Windows ecosystem. Joined the Amdahl UTS team in 1988 stayed until 1997 followed by a short stint at Tandem/Compaq. Before that 10+ years of startup work ranging from S-100 based systems using CP/M to UNIX SVR3 and SVR4 development on x86.

Garth Gibson

Professor, Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Panasas Inc.
 

Garth Gibson holds a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, USA. His research on Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) has been awarded the 1998 SIGMOD Test of Time Award, the 1999 Allan Newell Award for Research Excellence, the 1999 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award for outstanding contributions in the field of information storage, 2011 entrance into the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame and the 2012 IFIP WG10.4 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing.

Gibson founded Carnegie Mellon University's Parallel Data Laboratory (www.pdl.cmu.edu) and was a founding member of the Technical Council of the Storage Networking Industry Association and the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technology Steering Committee. 

At Panasas (www.panasas.com) Gibson led the development of high-performance, scalable, parallel, file-system appliances in use in High-Performance Computing in national labs, academic clouds, energy research, engineered manufacturing and life sciences. Gibson instigated standardizing key features of parallel file systems in NFSv4.1 (parallel NFS), now adopted and deployed in Linux. His 1995 Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD) led to the ANSI T10 (SCSI) Object Storage Device (OSD) command set now adopted and deployed in Linux. His students have gone on to co-author influential systems such as the Google File System and BigTable, and to lead the technology development of influential products such as EMC's Data Domain. His collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) led to the Parallel Log-structured File System (PLFS), an open source project speeding up highly concurrent file writing by up to two orders of magnitude and in production use at LANL..

Chris Mason

Director Kernel Engineering, Fusion i-o

Biography

Chris Mason is a Director of Kernel Engineering at Fusion-io, and the lead developer of the Btrfs filesystem.  He has been focused on Linux kernel development since 1999, and has managed teams at SUSE and Oracle.  Chris holds BS and MS degrees from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Sanjay Radia

Co-Founder, Hortonworks

Biography

Sanjay is 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! focusing mostly on HDFS, scheduling, and compatibility. 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.

Jayshree Ullal

President and Chief Executive Officer, Arista Networks

Biography

Jayshree Ullal is a networking executive veteran with 25+ years of experience and was named one of the "50 Most Powerful People" in 2005 Network World and one of the "Top Ten Executives" at VMWorld 2011. As President and CEO of Arista Networks, she is responsible for building the company's business in cloud networking.

Formerly, Jayshree was Senior Vice President at Cisco and responsible for $10B in annual revenue from Data Center, Switching and Services, including Cisco's flagship Nexus 7000 and Catalyst 4500 and 6500 product lines. During her tenure at Cisco, Jayshree forged key alliances with EMC, VMware and Microsoft in virtualization and application acceleration. Prior to joining Cisco, Ullal was the Vice President of Marketing at Crescendo Communications, which was Cisco's first acquisition in 1993.

Jayshree holds a B.S. in Engineering (Electrical) from San Francisco State University and an M.S. degree in engineering management from Santa Clara University.

Surendra Verma

Development Manager, Storage and File Systems, Microsoft

Biography

Surendra Verma leads the Windows Storage and File Systems development team at Microsoft that is responsible for the core storage stack from physical storage interfaces, through the file systems to the storage management APIs. He has worked in Microsoft for 14 years, and at IBM and 64K before that. At IBM he worked on the DB2 database for UNIX on the storage engine and parallel query processing, and at 64K on building a new structured search engine. At Microsoft he led the development of Transaction support in Windows (and on NTFS). In Windows 8 he has led the team that has developed features on configurations ranging from tablets to datacenters, including ReFS, Storage Spaces, File History, SOC Storage, Offloaded data transfers, new NTFS chkdsk model, etc.

Benjamin Woo

Founder and Managing Director, Neuralytix

Biography

Mr. Woo is the founder and Managing Director of Neuralytix, Inc. He is a recognized, celebrated, provocative market visionary and thought leader. Mr. Woo frequently speaks at industry and customer events worldwide and is often quoted by leading business and technology press.

Mr. Woo has dedicated his entire career to the data and information industry. He uses this diverse set of skills, knowledge and experience to provide in-depth market insight and advice on key aspects of the IT marketplace to both vendors and buyers of technology.  Mr. Woo also advises Wall Street clients and other interested stakeholders

A self-confessed "closet geek", Mr. Woo is uniquely able to articulate business values from complex technologies and conversely, communicate technically, the shifting challenges faced by organizations today. Additionally, Mr. Woo has served on a number of advisory councils of leading storage manufacturers advising them on strategies and direction relating to the industry.

Prior to founding Neuralytix, Mr. Woo was the Program Vice President of IDC's Worldwide Storage Systems Research, where he led a team of analysts responsible for advising clients on the evolution and trends related to data storage system. While at IDC, Mr. Woo also initiated the research on Big Data.

Prior to joining IDC, Mr. Woo served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing at a national provider of technology solutions and services, where he was responsible for the dramatic growth and expansion of the company. Mr. Woo has served in several key sales and management roles at Network Appliance, Inc. and MTI Technology Corporation. He started his career in Sydney, Australia where he delivered one of the very first keynote speeches on the then nascent data storage technology we now know as RAID.

Michael Adam, Software Engineer, Samba Team

Michael is a Mathematicial working as software engineer for SerNet GmbH in Germany and manages the company's Samba department. As a member of the Samba Team, Michael focusses on clustered Samba.

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Nitan Agrawal, Researcher Storage Systems, NEC Labs.

Nitin Agrawal works as a Researcher in the Storage Systems group at NEC Labs Princeton after graduating with a PhD from Wisconsin. Currently he is working on storage architectures for mobile and cloud platforms, and leading the mobile I/O effort at NEC Labs. He has received Best Paper Awards at FAST 2009, FAST 2011, FAST 2012, and a top paper selection at FAST 2007. More details available at http://www.nec-labs.com/~nitin/

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Gabriel Alatorre, IBM 

Gabriel Alatorre is a software engineer in the Services Innovation Lab at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Gabriel is the lead developer on IBM's Intelligent ILM tool, which successfully right-tiered over 1.1 PB of storage and reduced IBM CIO office's per-GB storage cost by 50%. The analytics-driven tool automates the process of load balancing data across the different storage tiers in an environment resulting in higher use of lower cost storage, which greatly reduces overall storage costs. His research interests include big data, analytics, and large-scale systems. In his free time, he enjoys running and salsa dancing.

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Jeremy Allison, Engineer, Google Samba Team

Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an Open Source Windows compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed manner similar to the Linux system, Samba is used by all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations and  products worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba  development efforts and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using the Samba code  commercially.    Jeremy is a member of the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.    He works for Google, Inc. who fund him to work on improving Samba and solving the problems of Windows and Linux interoperability.

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Christian Ambach, IBM Research and Development, Samba Team
 Samba Team

Christian Ambach received a diploma in applied computer sciences and is working for IBM Research & Development in Germany as developer for Scale-Out NAS systems.  Since 2006, he has accompanied and supported the development of creating a clustered CIFS server with CTDB. In 2010, he was invited to the Samba Team and currently focuses on the implementation of SMB2.x in Samba.

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Andrew Baptist, Lead Architect, Cleversafe, Inc

Andrew Baptist is a lead architect at Cleversafe and leads the core     development team.  In this role he has overseen the design, implementation and architecture for many of the product's key features, including the namespace, network stack,protocol and the dispersed metadata and indexing systems.
 

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Jose Baretto, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Jose Barreto is a Principal Program Manager with the Server and Cloud Division at Microsoft, currently focused on the File Services role in Windows Server 2012 and the SMB 3.0 protocol. He graduated in Computer Science at the Universidade Federal do Ceara in Brazil in 1989 and joined Microsoft in 2002. He holds several industry certifications, including CISSP, ITIL, MCM, MCITS, MCT and many other Microsoft certifications. He keeps an active blog at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/

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Andrew Bartlett, Authentication Developer, Samba Team

Andrew Bartlett has been a member of the Samba Team for over 12 years, and has been a key developer on the Samba4 AD project for much of that.  He is a passionate advocate for and development of transparent, flexible alternatives to Microsoft's authentication suite and believes the world is a better place when all our technology solutions can work together on an equal footing.

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Roopesh Battepati, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft

Roopesh Battepati is a developer in the File Server Foundation team at Microsoft where he works on NFS and remote file system components. He has worked at Microsoft for the past decade in various development roles. Prior to Microsoft, he has held development positions at Oracle Corporation and Qualcomm Inc.

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Ashish Batwara, Principal Storage Architect, Fusion-io

Ashish Batwara is a Principal Storage Architect working in Fusion-io’s advanced technology group. He has more than 14 years of industry experience in storage and networking domain. He is currently involved in innovating and designing features for non-volatile memory technologies and applications. He has co-authored several T10 proposals standardizing command sets for flash and other storage devices. Prior to Fusion-io he worked as solutions/firmware architect for LSI’s Engenio  storage group (now NetApp), focused on external storage arrays. Ashish obtained his MS in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. He has several patents in the areas of storage, systems, and I/O architectures.

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Jim Benton, Principal Software Design Engineer, Microsoft

Jim Benton is a Principal Software Design Engineer at Microsoft in the Windows File Server team where his current focus is on design and implementation of storage related services such as data deduplication and file server management infrastructure and tools.  His prior work at Microsoft has included Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), File Server Resource Manager, WMI and Server Appliance Kit.  Before joining Microsoft in 2000, Jim worked as a Senior Engineer at Boeing where he specialized in full airplane aeroelastic analysis, research and code development.  He received a B.S. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from North Carolina State University.

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Dr. Anupam Bhide, CEO and Co-Founder, Calsoft, Inc.

Dr. Anupam Bhide is a seasoned entrepreneur with more than 21 years of experience in IT Industry. His visionary leadership has been the quintessential guiding factor for Calsoft to become a leading Outsourced Software Product Development company. His strength lies in identifying and unlocking optimal value for high-technology companies.

Previously, Anupam led business units at companies like HP, IBM, and Oracle. He has published over 20 papers in various international conferences and won the best paper award at VLDB database conference.  He has a PhD in Computer Science from Univ. of California-Berkeley, an MS from University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B. Tech from IIT-Mumbai.

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Brian Campanotti, CTO, Front Porch Digital

As CTO at Front Porch Digital, Brian Campanotti is leading industry advancement in global content storage management (CSM), media asset management (MAM), migration, and preservation solutions. He has made innovations in the area of cloud-based solutions for handling “big data” targeted at content owners and media companies, and was one of the primary inventors of the Archive eXchange Format (AXF). As such, he continues his work as a founding member of the SMPTE AXF committee.    Mr. Campanotti and his team have won Emmy® Awards for their work in videotape collection preservation technologies and for innovation in serial digital video technology.    Mr. Campanotti started his career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and is an electrical engineering graduate from the University of Toronto.

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Bikash Roy Choudhury, Solutions Architect, NetApp

Bikash is a Solutions Architect at NetApp designing and architecting solutions around NFSv3/v4/4.1/pNFS, Virtualization and database. He performs competitive analysis on performance evaluation and protocol analysis with different storage vendors over NFS. Prior to this role he was a NFS Technical Marketing Engineer partnering with Redhat to provide Linux Alliance support for Pre/Post Sales empowerment and also providing alliance and partner support. He has provided documentation and collateral on best practices, performance tuning for customer and Sales. He also has experience as a Escalation Engineer before this, where he managed and provided technical support for top enterprise accounts like Oracle, Broadcom, Chevron and Motorola.    Bikash has almost 20 years of hi-tech industry experience behind him. Before joining NetApp he was working a Professional service provider for some of the key accounts. He also was a System Administrator for UNIX setups at University working on various communication projects funded by the government.    Bikash received a MSCIS from University of Phoenix, San Jose and B.Sc. in Computer Science Engineering from Regional Engineering College, India.    He is also a speaker at partner/vendor industry conferences like CISCO Live, Redhat Summit, PLM World and user forums like Linux Symposium, SNIA, SCALE and at internal NetApp user communities like SE/PS conferences and Tech ONTAP Live.

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Phillip Clark, Principal, ECC Data Corporation

During the last 15 years, Phillip Clark has worked as a software designer and developer in the fields of telecommunications and data storage. He is a co-author of 10 US patents, with an additional patent currently in process. Phillip holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from NC State University and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. Currently, Phillip directs software activities at ECC Data Corporation in Denver, Colorado.

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Hank Cohen, Director of Product Management Altior

Hank Cohen, CISSP, is Director of Product Management for Altior, and is responsible for all stages of product lifecycle and planning. He has over 25 years of experience in the technology sector in various positions, including application development encompassing software tools, real time data acquisition, and signal processing and control.      Experience  Mr. Cohen has held product management and systems engineering positions with industry-leading companies such as Hifn, Wind River Systems and Amdahl. He is a member of the IEEE, ISSA and has CISSP credentials. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

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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.

Tom is active with SMPTE, SNIA, IDEMA, the IEEE Magnetics Society, IEEE CE 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 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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Marty Czekalski, President – SCSI Trade Association; Interface and Emerging Architecture Program Manager, Seagate, 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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Joe Dai,  Principal Software Design Engineer, Microsoft

Joe Dai has been working in the storage area for more than a decade within Microsoft.  He has contributed to various components including the base storage stack in every Windows release since Windows NT 4.0.  For the last few years, he has been involved with Hyper-V specifically focusing on the virtualized storage stack improvements.

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Steven Danneman, Senior Software Engineer, EMC Isilon

Steven Danneman is a Software Development Engineer in the Isilon Storage Division of EMC in Seattle, WA makers of scale-out NAS clusters.  He is also a member of the Samba team developing open source Windows interoperability software for the *nix world.  Steven has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

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Jeff Darcy,Principal Software Engineer, Gluster.org

Bio Pending

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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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Prafulla Deuskar, Storage Networking Architect, Intel

Prafulla Deuskar is an architect in Lan Access Division at Intel Corporation. His main areas of interest lie in Storage Networking, Virtualization and IO Performance.

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Greg Dhuse, Senior Software Architect, Cleversafe, Inc.

As senior architect, Greg Dhuse has influenced the design and architecture of many features   central to Cleversafe's products, including intelligent client behavior, the global namespace,   and transactional semantics.  Currently, Greg is leading the design, research and implementation of Hadoop integration and enhancement.

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John Dickinson, Director of Technology at SwiftStack and Project Technical Lead for OpenStack Swift

John Dickinson is Director of Technology at SwiftStack, the storage system for web, mobile and as-a-service applications based on OpenStack Swift. He serves as the Project Technical Lead for OpenStack Swift, and has been involved in the development of Swift for the past 3 years at Rackspace and SwiftStack.

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Kevin Dudak, Senior Product Manager, Spectra Logic

Kevin Dudak, a United States Air Force veteran, originally joined Spectra Logic in 2007 as a Product Manager, and brings more than 15 years of storage industry experience to his role.  As product manager of BlueScale Software for T-Series Tape Libraries and nTier Disk Systems, Dudak is key in helping to define Spectra Logic’s role in big data and archive storage.  Dudak possesses a diverse technology background drawn from years in the hardware and software storage market, where he has architected and overseen storage implementation and support.  He earned both a bachelor of arts in economics and university studies from the University of New Mexico.  During his spare time he enjoys aviation photography, working on classic cars, camping in Colorado and bike riding, and participates in the Registers Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) each year

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Erin Filliater, Enterprise Market Development Manager, Mellanox Technologies

Erin Filliater is the Enterprise Market Development Manager specializing in storage technologies at Mellanox Technologies.  Prior to Mellanox, Ms. Filliater served on the strategic customer engagement team at Oracle, and was a key member of the hardware product definition team at Sun Microsystems.  She has also served on several market development teams in the consumer and technical industries.  Ms. Filliater holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences from the University of Michigan. 

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Paul Forgey, EMC, Isilon Storage Division, EMC, Isilon Storage Division

Paul Forgey works at the Isilon Storage Division of EMC heading the iSCSI implementation of OneFS.

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Steven French, Senior Engineer, IBM

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 kernel client.   For IBM's Linux Technology Center, he is the File System architect.

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Matthew George, Principal Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

Mathew George is a Principal Software Developer in the File Server Team at Microsoft. He has been with Microsoft since 2001 and has contributed to the design and development of the SMB/SMB2/SMB3 family of protocols - with specific focus on the client implementation and the framework for continuous availability. Before joining Microsoft, he worked for Novell in the area of Network Management & traffic analysis.

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Bob Griswold, Director of Industry Software Architecture, Western Digital Corp.

Bob Griswold of Western Digital has been working in the storage industry since he graduated from college more than 22 years ago, and hasn’t been able to get out of it. Some might say that he is stale, but not to his face. He worked at Adaptec during the heyday’s of the ISA SCSI Controllers, helped establish confusing commands for Windows when he worked for Microsoft, and spoke at many events like this over the years. It’s only natural that he would have gathered some intrinsic knowledge about storage, just by paying attention one-half of the time. He’s been published, but that was years ago so reading through his attempts to explain Plug-and-Play might just lead you into the medical field. He currently runs the Redmond Storage Center for Western Digital in Redmond, WA, where he employs the brightest engineers, for his own entertainment.

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Keith Hamilton, Software Architect, Microsoft

Keith is a software architect at Microsoft in the Bing organization. In addition to driving real-time monitoring of web traffic for Bing/MSN, he has spent the last two years working with Bing Maps on storage requirements. He has worked with the Windows 8 storage architects to ensure Windows 8 storage can effectively scale to handle multi-PB's of data at much lower costs than previously. He has been a leader in Microsoft to deploy and educate on the new storage features of Windows 8.

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James Handy, Chief Analyst, 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

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Ulrich Hansen, Director Marketing Development, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

As the HGST director of Market Development, Ulrich Hansen is focused on defining HGST’s next generation products across all market segments, and on ensuring that new products and technologies are successfully introduced into the market. In that role, Ulrich Hansen and his team are assessing emerging technologies, defining requirements for new products, and aligning customers and industry partners with HGST’s product and technology strategy.
 
Mr. Hansen has more than 15 years experience in a number of high-technology sectors, including servers, storage, networking and communication systems. Prior to joining HGST, Mr. Hansen was the senior director of marketing for a specialty memory products start-up company. 
 
Mr. Hansen’s background includes senior positions in product development, marketing, and corporate strategy with both management consultancies and technology companies, including Dell and A.T. Kearney. He holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Austin, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering (‘Diplom-Ingenieur’) from the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany.
 

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Jai Haridas, Principal Development Manager, Microsoft

Jai Haridas is currently working as a Principal Development Manager on the Windows Azure Storage team. Over the past 6 years Jai has helped develop both Windows Live Storage and the Azure Storage systems. Jai has worked in the software development for over 15 years with experience in SQL and NO-SQL storage systems and has published papers on topics such as Query Optimization and Highly Available Cloud Storage Services

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John Hayes, Founder and Chief Architect, Pure Storage

John Hayes joined John Colgrove to co-found Pure Storage in 2009 after serving in Yahoo!'s Office of the Chief Technologist, where he investigated web architectures for collaborative development of highly-reliable systems. He joined Yahoo! via the acquisition of Bix, where he was a founding engineer. His work prior to Yahoo! focused on developing distributed platforms for real-time interpersonal interaction in a variety of areas including entertainment, medicine, psychology, and defense.  During this time, he became interested in the underlying architecture of reliable distributed systems, particularly those built from unreliable components. His diverse experiences have led him to develop new approaches to make today's increasingly complex distributed systems more reliable. John holds a degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Guelph University in Ontario, Canada.

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Christoph Hellwig, Principal Storeage Engineer, Nebula

Christoph Hellwig works as principal storage engineer at Nebula, working on bringing scalable and solid storage to private cloud infrastructure.    Previous he ran a consulting, training and contract engineering business, specializing on Linux filesystems and storage but also dipping into virtualization and network infrastructure.  Well known clients include Dell, SGI, IBM, Red Hat or LeftHand Networks.    He is one of the most frequent and well known contributors to the VFS, filesystems and all levels of the storage stack in Linux.

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Christopher R. Hertel, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Christopher R. Hertel is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he gets to play with cluster file systems and Samba and SMB2...the kind of stuff that only storage geeks call "fun".  Chris is also a long-haul member of the Samba Team, a founding member of the jCIFS project, and the lead author of all of the truly useful SMB/CIFS documentation available today (the SMB2 docs are someone else's fault).  Chris has also been adjunct facutly, 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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Cheng Huang, Researcher, Microsoft Research

Cheng Huang is a researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He has worked extensively on erasure coding technologies. His work on erasure coding are now being used in a number of Microsoft products, including Lync for smooth video conferencing, Xbox for low latency messaging between consoles and Xbox Live data centers, and Windows Azure for significant cost savings in cloud storage.  
 

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John Hufferd, Owner/Consultant, Hufferd Enterprises

John Hufferd, Consultant, Hufferd Enterprises  John Hufferd is currently a Consultant for his own company – Hufferd Enterprises. Prior to this he was the  Senior Executive Director of Technology at Brocade Communications, John Hufferd was responsible for defining Brocade’s technology direction and strategy of storage networks including iSCSI based, FC based, FCoE based, and NAS (CIFS, CIFS) networks. John has over 40 years in the storage and networking industries and prior to joining Brocade; John was retired from the IBM Corporation, where he was focused on Storage Networking Strategies.  John was a member of the IETF the IBTA (InfiniBand Trade Association) and the T11 Fibre Channel Standards Group -- BB5/6 which is focused on FCoE.  John also has held positions on the board of advisors for 7 different companies, and has authored the definitive book on iSCSI called "iSCSI -- The Universal Storage Connection", published by Addison-Wesley.

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Jeff Hughes, Senior Engineering Manager, Isilon Storage Division, EMC

Jeff Hughes is an Sr Engineering Manager in the Isilon Storage Division of EMC.  For the last 6 years he has worked on Isilon's distributed filesystem, OneFS, spanning from high-level applications to on-disk layout.  Jeff has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

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Dr. M. K. Jibbe, Director of Test Architect and Quality for APG Products, NetApp

Dr. M. K. Jibbe is a Director at NetApp (APG). At the technical level, he leads the test architect and Quality Team in US and in India as a test technologist and a quality Czar. As an architect Director, Dr. Jibbe and his group define and design the test requirements and test processes for all the NetApp SAN Storage products. Dr. Jibbe has been awarded 24 US / Canada patents, 48 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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Claus Joergensen, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Claus Joergensen is a Principal Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows File Server Team. Claus current responsibilities includes the SMB file server, specifically SMB Transparent Failover, SMB Scale-Out, VSS for SMB File Shares. Prior to this role, Claus held a number of positions, including Program Manager for Windows Storage Server and Principal Consultant in Microsoft Services.

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Mike Johnson, Senior Software Design Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

Mike Johnson is a Senior Software Design Engineer at Microsoft in the File Server Foundation team currently working on NFS and other remote file sharing technologies. Earlier work at Microsoft included Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), Partition Manager, Mountpoint Manager and Remote Storage Services (tape based HSM). Before joining Microsoft in 1999, Mike was at DEC as part of the VMS team (before it got the “Open” prefix) working on DEC's transaction manager (DECdtm), cluster inter-process messaging and then a number of file systems (ODS-2 and Spiralog). Earlier still there was a short spell at IBM and Marconi Secure Radio Systems, working on assorted voice and data encryption equipment.

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Madhu Jujare, Senior Software Design Engineer, Microsoft

Madhu Jujare, Senior Software Design Engineer, Microsoft  Madhu Jujare is a Senior Software Design Engineer with Microsoft Corporation, Redmond where he is currently working on System Center Virtual Machine Manager project. He is been working at Microsoft on server virtualization and storage technologies for past 8 years. Prior to Microsoft, he worked in IBM Beaverton on SAN file system and NUMA Server technologies. He holds a Masters in Computer Science from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

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Uttam Kaushik , Engineer, EMC

Uttam works as the Manager, Engineering, EMC DiskXtender product suite. DiskXtender is a Hierarchical or Tier'ed storage software product that aims to move data seamlessly from more expensive storage to cheaper and cost effective storage medium using a complex set of user configured and defined rules. He has been associated with Storage archiving design and development for the past 17 years. Uttam has a Masters' degree in Computer Science from University of South Florida, Tampa.

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Greg Kramer, Sr. Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

Greg Kramer, Ph.D., Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

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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Michael Krause, Fellow Engineer, Hewlett-Packard

HP Fellow Engineer focused on platform architecture and creating local I/O technology, virtualization technology, and the creation of high-speed IPC / network / storage technology to meet customer solution requirements across multiple market segments

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David Kruse, Principal Software Development Lead, 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 8.  He has also worked on related storage technologies at Microsoft, including the Offline Files abilities in Windows and the WebDAV redirector.  During a presentation in previous years around SMB 2, he stated that there likely would be no need for an SMB 3 during his career.  Evidently, he was wrong.

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Parag Kulkarni, VP Engineering, Calsoft, Inc.

Parag Kulkarni – VP Engineering  Parag Kulkarni is a veteran of storage industry with more than 20 years experience architecting and developing products. His key strength lies in quickly understanding product requirements and translating them into architectural and engineering specs for implementation. Parag leads the engineering team at Calsoft. Previously, Parag led the development of Database Editions product at Veritas (Symantec). Before this, Parag was a key contributing member at leading storage companies like Informix (IBM).   Parag has a Masters of Technology in Computer Science from IIT Roorkee and degree in Industrial Management from University of Indore, India.

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Jeff Layton, Sr. Software Engineer, Red Hat.

Jeff Layton is an engineer for Red Hat with a primary focus on NFS and CIFS. He's also a member of the worldwide Samba team, focusing primarily on the Linux CIFS client and is maintainer of the cifs-utils project for Linux.

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Wesley Leggette, Software Architect, Cleversafe, Inc.

Wesley Leggette has been a Software Architect for Cleversafe for more than 6 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 petabyte-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 works on Samba for more than 15 years now.
His main focus is the file server and the clustering parts of Samba. Volker Lendecke is co-founder of SerNet GmbH in Göttingen, Germany. SerNet is the leading system integrator with core Samba Team members.

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Paul Long, Sr. Program Manager, Protocol Enginering Framework, Microsoft Corporation

Paul Long, Senior Program Manager, Protocol Engineering Framework  Paul Long is a program manager focusing primarily on the UI.  Paul publishes information about our current tools via our blog, http://blogs.technet.com/netmon, as well as providing support on our forums, http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/netmon.  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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Dan Lovinger, Principal Software Architect

Dan Lovinger is a Principal Architect in the Windows File Server team with a current focus on system performance and architecture. Since joining what was then the Windows NT Base team in 1995, he has worked across the local and remote/distributed file systems and kernel support for memory cache management. From 1996 to 2001 he led Microsoft's participation in the Optical Storage Technology Association's standardization of the UDF filesystem. Dan is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon and holds a Bachelor's in Mathematics/Computer Science.

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Paul Luse,  Software Architect and Development Lead, Intel

Paul is a Software Architect and Development Lead for the Intel Corporation, working in the Server Software Engineering group primarily focused on Enterprise Storage. He has been working in storage-related technologies for most of his 18+ year career at Intel. Recently, Paul played a key role in the development of the industry’s first NVM Express Windows device driver as part of a group of select engineers from IDT, LSI, and Intel. 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 is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Software Engineering also from ASU.

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Padmavathy Madhusudhanan, Technical Manageer, Wipro Technologies

Padmavathy K.M is a Technical Manager with Wipro Technologies having an overall experience of 14 years in s/w development.  Her expertise includes Client-Server based applications, Component development using COM, SMI-S & storage applications. She is a post graduate from University of Madras with a Master's degree in Computer Applications.  In her current role, she works in the Product Engineering Services division focused on Technology evaluation & selection, solution architecture definition, engagement model definition and demonstrations to address customer specific requirements in NAS/SAN/cloud platform. Earlier she had worked on Data migration, storage virtualization & tape virtualization products for various leading storage vendors.  Her interest includes SMI-S, storage virtualization, Cloud storage, Big data and is a member of SNIA SMI-S core and cloud storage groups.

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Aniket Malatpure, Sr. Test Lead, Microsoft

Aniket Malatpure is a Senior Lead Software Development Engineer in Test, in the Windows Sustained Engineering team at Microsoft. His team owns servicing enterprise customers and shipping security updates for Windows File Server. Prior to joining the Windows Sustained Engineering team, he worked as Software Development Engineer in Test in the Windows File Server team focusing on remote file systems. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from University of Mumbai and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Clemson University.

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Gus Malek-Madani, CEO and Founder, Green Platform Corporation

Gus holds an MSME, PE and has twenty five years experience applying carbon fiber technology to solving vibration problems.  He also holds several US and international patents related to Carbon Fiber and vibration mitigation.   He has founded three companies  (1) Venture backed Composite Rotor: Centrifuges and Rotors for Biotech industry,  (2) Composite Products: High-End Audio/Video, and (3) Green Platform Corp: Anti-Vibration Solutions for s disk storage for higher performance and reliability.  Gus spoke at last year’s SDC 2011 in a well received presentation on the effects of vibration on HDD performance.

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Alex McDonald, Office of the CTO, NetApp

Alex joined NetApp in 2005, after more than 30 years in a variety of roles with some of the best known names in the software industry (Legent, Oracle, BMC). With a background of software development, support, sales and consulting, Alex is part of NetApp’s CTO group that supports industry activities and promotes technology & standards based solutions. He is co-chair of the SNIA NFS Special Interest Group.

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Greg McSorley, Technical Business Development Manager, Amphenol Corp.

Currently serving as Technical Business Development Manager at Amphenol Corp., Greg is a 32 year computer/storage business veteran.  The bulk of his high-tech career was spent at Data General and EMC designing and testing packages for EMI integrity, and high speed interconnects.  For the past 12 years, Greg has focused his expertise on designing high speed interconnects, including SCSI, FC, IB and 10GbE.  Greg has remained active throughout his career in various standards committees, including INCITS T10 and T11, SFF, where he took part in chairing various working groups.  Today, Greg plays an active role in the Ethernet Alliance (EA) and serves on the board of directors of the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) as Treasurer and the SCSI Trade Association (STA) as Vice President. While in his current position at Amphenol, Greg leads the company’s standard committee activities and continues to be involved the T10, T11, OIF and SFF committees as well as the IEEE organization.

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Karan is part of the Windows Storage and File Systems development team at Microsoft where his current focus is on the design and implementation of Storage Spaces. Prior to that, he worked on numerous block storage technologies such as VDS (Virtual Disk Service), VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service), RSM (Removable Storage Manager) and various block storage drivers such as LDM (Logical Disk Manager), DISK, CD-ROM – since joining Microsoft in 2000. Karan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

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Garrett Mueller, Senior Engineer, NetApp

Garrett Mueller is a senior engineer at NetApp, responsible for the development of Data ONTAP's support for the Windows ecosystem, and CIFS in particular. He has been a member of the CIFS development team for almost 9 years. Most recently he led the development team delivering non-disruptive operations capability to CIFS clients in Data ONTAP

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Peter Murray, Senior Product Specialist, SwiftTest, Inc.

Peter is a testing expert with over 25 years of experience implementing, trouble-shooting, and maintaining secure, fast, and highly available networks and applications.  In his role as Product Specialist, Peter works with customers and prospects daily to ensure SwiftTest’s products meet market requirements and are used to maximum benefit. 

Prior to SwiftTest, Peter served on technical teams at network equipment manufacturing companies including F5 Networks and Spirent Communications.  While at Spirent, Peter was extensively involved with stateful device and network testing and has amassed over 20 years’ of technical experience within the network equipment manufacturing industry alone. 

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Alex Naparu, Software Design Engineer, Microsoft

Alex Naparu, Software Design Engineer, Microsoft  Alex Naparu is a Software Design Engineer with Microsoft Corporation, Redmond where he is currently working on System Center Virtual Machine Manager. He has been working at Microsoft on server virtualization, storage management and large-scale databases for past 7 years

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Philippe Nicolas is Director of Product Strategy at Scality where he drives Product Management and Product Marketing effort. He's a recognized storage industry expert with 20 years of experience. He co-owns The IT Press Tour he launched in June 2010 and occupied various positions at Condor Consulting Group, KerStor, Brocade, Symantec, Veritas, SGI and Compaq. He received his computer sciences engineering level diploma in the early 90s.    In parallel, Philippe Nicolas 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 November 2007 and March 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 (http://filestorage.blogspot.com/ and http://continuousdataprotection.blogspot.com/), #1 independent storage blog in France, with 1000+ blogposts and 6+ years of existence. His twitter account is @CDP_FST.

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Chuck Paridon, Storage Performance Architect, Hewlett Packard

Chuck is a 24 year veteran in computer system and storage subsystem performance analysis. He is currently responsible for the development and delivery of Storage Performance collateral in the form of field performance troubleshooting and pre-sales consulting. He is a member of the SNIA Solid State and Green Storage Technical workgroups, and the Storage Performance Council. Chuck earned a BS Mechanical Engineering (Univ. of Akron, OH) and an MS Computer Science (Cal State Univ., Chico).

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Michael Penick, Senior Software Developer, GoDaddy.com

Michael Penick, Senior Software Developer, GoDaddy.com  Michael works on Go Daddy's Cloud Storage team providing customers with scalable, low cost storage systems. He joined Go Daddy in 2007, helping to develop Go Daddy's internal cloud storage solution. Mike has more than 7 years of experience with different areas of distributed computing including storage, visualization and scalable web services. He holds a M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Nevada, Reno.
 

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Dan Pollack, Senior Operations Architect, AOL

Bio Pending

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Evgeny Popovich, Principal Software Engineer, EMC Isilon Storage Division 

Evgeny Popovich is a Principal Software Engineer at Isilon Systems – a division of EMC Corporation.  Evgeny’s recent work includes NFS and SMB implementation, protocols interoperability, as well as improving file server performance.  Past experience includes NAS development at Exanet and military simulators development at IDF BattleLab.  Evgeny holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Sciences from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

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Anjanibhargavi Ragothaman, System Engineer, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd

Bio Coming Soon.

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Robert Randall, Windows Driver Architect, Micron Technology, Inc.

Robert has contributed at levels across the spectrum in technology companies from VP of Engineering to coder for hire.  Robert was a key contributor to the   creation of Microsoft's [MS-CIFS] and [MS-SMB] specifications.  He has a soup of protocols in his head which includes CIFS, SMB, iSCSI, SCSI, FCP, PCI, and many others.  Robert has been participated in amazing R&D discoveries and plenty of misguided flops.  Robert has delivered commercial products through companies   such as Cisco Systems, NetPerceptions, Inc., Lucent Technologies and many more.  Most of his time has been spent on systems software including embedded systems, device drivers, and firmware.

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Giorgio Regni, CTO, Scality

A veteran of open source and commercial development projects, Giorgio’s expertise ranges from leading the development of an open-source content management system to designing and implementing a POS system for restaurants used in over 5,000 restaurants in Europe. He’s specialized in high performance network and infrastructure software.  Giorgio, who joined Bizanga shortly after its inception, started as a lead developer for core IMP application and firmware before overseeing the company’s development activities as VP Engineering. He holds an engineering degree in computer science from INSA (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées) in Toulouse.

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Jason Resch, Senior Software Engineer, Cleversafe, Inc.

Jason Resch is an innovative force at Cleversafe.  In his six years with the company, he has become the most prolific inventor having hundreds of patent applications.  As a Senior Software Engineer Jason has specialized in information security, helping to make dispersed storage become one of the most secure ways of storing data.  An inventor and entrepreneur, Jason founded and operated a social network company while in high school.

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Jose Rivera, Software Engineer, Red Hat

José Rivera graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. As part of the team responsible for creating and overhauling the official CIFS specifications ([MS-CIFS] and [MS-SMB], published by Microsoft), José went from zero to CIFS expert in less than a year. Since then he's brought his knowledge to Red Hat, where he works on interoperability between Windows and Linux.

When not fighting for world peace, José has taught video game design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, had his work on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and played percussion in several orchestral ensembles.

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Andy Rudoff, Enterprise Storage Architect, Intel

Andy Rudoff is an Enterprise Storage Architect at Intel.  He has over 20 years experience in storage, operating systems internals, file systems, and networking.

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Ankur Saran, Systems Engineer, Tata Consultancy Services, Ltd.

Ankur Saran has been working in storage technology domain with TCS since 2010. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from Institute of Engineering and Rural Technology, Allahabad, India. His area of expertise is file systems, de-duplication, and compression.

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Stacy Schwarz-Gardner, Strategic Technical Architect, Spectra Logic

Stacy Schwarz-Gardner, Strategic Technical Architect, Spectra Logic Stacy Schwarz-Gardner has more than 25 years of storage industry experience and currently serves as Strategic Technical Architect for Spectra Logic. In this role, Stacy is the technical consultant for Spectra’s active archive and strategic focus accounts, and provides technical insight for the company’s product development, marketing and professional services divisions. Prior to joining Spectra Logic, Stacy served as CTO for Integrated Archive Systems and before that, CIO for Accountants, Inc.-Vedior. She holds multiple technical certifications in storage, data protection, virtualization and infrastructure, and is an Active Archive Alliance Certification Instructor. Stacy holds a bachelor’s of science degree from the University of California, Davis.

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Sujoy Sen, Chief Software Architect, Data Center Solutions, Micron Technology

Sujoy Sen is the Chief Software Architect of the Data Center Solutions group (erstwhile Virtensys) at Micron. He is responsible for product architecture and technology development for DCS. He has over 15 years experience in server design and networking software with 23 patents in Server and I/O technologies.

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Sudipta Sengupta, Senior Research Scientist, Microsoft

Sudipta Sengupta is currently at Microsoft Research, where he is working on non-volatile memory for cloud/server applications, data deduplication, data center systems and networking, and peer-to-peer applications. Previously, he spent five years at Bell Laboratories, the Research Division of Lucent Technologies. Dr. Sengupta received a Ph.D. and an M.S. in EECS from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India. He was awarded the President of India Gold Medal at IIT-Kanpur for graduating at the top of his class. Dr. Sengupta won the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize for 2011 and the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize for 2008 for his work on oblivious routing of Internet traffic. At Bell Labs, he received the President's Teamwork Achievement Award for technology transfer of research into Lucent products. At Microsoft, he received the Gold Star Award which recognizes excellence in leadership and contributions for Microsoft's long term success

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Spencer Shepler, Performance 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 now at 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 the Windows SMB3.0 protocol.

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Udayan Singh, Lead SPE-Storage & Platform and Lead Innovate@HiTech, Tata Consultancy Services

Udayan has 11 years of industry experience in software development, QA & sustenance primarily in Storage Product Engineering and also in Telecom domain. Currently he leads SPE-Storage & Platform and Innovate@HiTech in HTSC part of HiTech Industry Unit. SPE-Storage & Platform team focuses on development of Solution Accelerators addressing the latest trends that are impacting Storage / Platform Product Companies. He also leads the initiative of driving Innovation in HiTech ISU.

Previously he has worked on behalf of TCS with Polaris Wireless and Nokia Networks. He has also been part of Architecture and Technology Consulting Group.

Udayan has presented / published papers at external forums and has filed patents on area of Storage Technologies. He is also a member Computer Society of India.

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David Slik, Technical Director, Object Storage, NetApp

David Slik is the Technical Director for Object Storage at NetApp, and is a co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group. He participated in the creation of the XAM and CDMI standards, and has architected and developed large-scale distributed object storage systems deployed world-wide as a key component of mission- critical enterprise applications.

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Malcolm Smith, Senior Software Design Engineer, Microsoft

Malcolm Smith is a Senior Software Design Engineer in the Resilient File Systems team in the Windows Storage and File Systems Group at Microsoft.  Malcolm joined Microsoft in 2005 working on Transactional NTFS, before moving over to core NTFS development in 2006.  After spearheading NTFS development in Windows 7, he moved over to work on the new ReFS file system in Windows 8.  Prior to joining Microsoft Malcolm contributed to many open source projects including Putty, Mozilla and the Linux kernel.  Malcolm has a BAppSc in Information Technology from RMIT University, and a LLB from University of Melbourne.

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Mark Smith, Enterprise Architect, IBM GTS

Mark R Smith has been a Method Evangelist for as long as he can remember. For the past decade he has taught IBM internal courses promoting IBM's Unified Method. He is currently the Chief Architect for the GTS Global Storage Architecture Control Board (ACB)  In over two decades with IBM, Mark has held IT Architect roles in various capacities including High Performance Computing R&D collaborations with NASA and Cornell Univ. Mark is an Open Group Master Certified IT Architect and holds engineering degrees from Duke Univ and Virginia Tech, and is a Senior Member in the IEEE.

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Esther Spanjer, Director of Technical Marketing, SMART Storage Systems

Esther Spanjer is Director of SSD Technical Marketing at SMART. With more than 15 years of experience in the flash industry, Spanjer has gained valuable knowledge on the requirements for flash-based storage solutions in embedded, industrial and enterprise storage applications. Spanjer has authored more than 20 articles in international publications and conference proceedings, and has been chosen to speak at a number of industry events, including IDEMA, DiskCon, ESC, Server Blade Summit, Storage Networking World, Flash Memory Summit, and previous Storage Developers Conferences. Spanjer formerly worked for msystems and STEC, and holds a B.Sc. degree in Electronic Engineering from the Technical University Amsterdam (Netherlands) and an MBA from Presidio Graduate School.

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Aravind Velamur Srinivasan, Senior Software Engineer, EMC - Isilon Storage Division

Aravind Srinivasan is a Software Development Engineer at EMC's Isilon Storage Division in Seattle, WA makers of scale-out storage systems.  He is part of the SMB team for the past 4 years at Isilon. Aravind has a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

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Rafal Szczesniak, Senior Software Engineer, EMC Isilon Storage Division

Rafal Szczesniak is a Senior Software Engineer at EMC Isilon Storage Division. His work covers local authentication provider and local privileges subsystem as well as their respective RPC interfaces in Likewise Storage Server. Rafal holds M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland.

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Tom Talpey, Software Architect, Microsoft

Tom Talpey is an Architect in the File Server Team at Microsoft. His responsibilities include SMB 3.0, SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), and all the protocols and technologies that support the SMB ecosystem. He is responsible for the industry-leading Open Specifications of these technologies, a set of 29 Microsoft documents which support interoperability and standardization of the protocols.  Toms also works actively in industry standards, as co-chair of the IETF STORM working group, which is tasked with maintaining storage and RDMA standards. Tom has worked in the areas of network filesystems, network transports and RDMA for many years. Before joining Microsoft in 2009, Tom co-authored components of the NFS protocols including NFSv4.1 and NFS over RDMA, contributed to open source implementations of these in Linux, and participated in several RDMA protocol standardization efforts including iWARP.    Greg Kramer is a Senior Software Developer 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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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 APG 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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Herb Tanzer, Storage Hardware Architect, Hewlett-Packard Co.

Herb has 18 years experience in storage hardware design, and previously was involved in electric vehicle and avionics R&D. Current responsibilities include product definition of some next-generation storage subsystems. He is a member of the SNIA Green Storage Technical Workgroup, of The Green Grid Datacenter Efiiciency (Storage) Workgroup, and the IEEE. His degrees are BS Engineering Science (Univ. of Michigan), MS Mechanical Engineering and MBA (Univ. of So. Calif), and MS Electrical Engineering (Cal State Univ., Sacramento), and is a registered PE (Mech).  

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Jim Ting Stec, Inc.

Jim Ting is a high-tech marketing professional who has worked for Intel, Hewlett-Packard, LSI, Sun Microsystems, NetApp, Cisco Systems and several startups before STEC, Inc.

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J.R. Tipton, Principal Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

J.R. Tipton is one the principal designers and developers of ReFS, a new reliable file system debuting in Windows Server 2012. He’s been doing research and development for Microsoft since 2001. J.R. studied computer science at Oregon State University.

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Anil Vasudeva, President & Chief Analyst, IMEX Research

Anil Vasudeva is President and Chief Analyst at IMEX Research & Consulting, focused on NexGen Data-Center Infrastructures encompassing Servers, Storage, Networks and Data Management, Cloud Computing, Virtualization and Convergence technologies, products, solutions and practices. A 25-year veteran of the computer industry, he has held senior executive and operational positions in technology and marketing with Fujitsu, Amdahl, Memorex/Unisys and startups. Presently as head of IMEX Research, he provides research and consulting advisory services and industry guidance in emerging technology markets to IT-50 companies and new startups. Mr. Vasudeva has an MSEE from University of Arizona, spent 3 years towards doctorate studies at UCLA and received his MBA from University of Santa Clara

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Lazarus Vekiarides, Executive Director of Software Engineering, Enterprise Storage, Dell

For over 20 years Lazarus Vekiarides has served in key technical and leadership roles delivering breakthrough technologies to market. Laz is currently the Executive Director of Software Engineering for Dell’s EqualLogic Storage Engineering group,  responsible for the development of all storage management technologies as well as host OS and hypervisor integration. Laz joined Dell from EqualLogic, which was acquired in early 2008, where he played a key role in the company’s early success as the Sr. Engineering Manager and Architect for the PS Series Virtual SAN arrays and host tools. Prior to EqualLogic, Laz held senior engineering and management positions at several companies including 3COM and Banyan Systems. He holds a BSEE from Northeastern University and a MSCS from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

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Senthilkumar Vijayakumar, Systems Engineer, Tata Consultancy Services, Ltd. 

Senthil is an IT Analyst with Tata Consultancy Services and has 5+ years of work experience in Information Storage Systems (NAS and SAN Products). Couple of years he has been associated with Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics Initiative Project and his area of interest includes Green IT, High Performance Computing, and Cloud Computing Technologies. He recently involved in designing and developing solutions in the area of Computational Biology, Neurosciences using Cloud Computing Technologies and Big Data Analytics.

He has authored, published and presented his work at several conferences, including IEEE Computer Society, Storage Developer Conference organized by SNIA and International Society for Research in Science and Technology, USA. Paper titled “Optimizing Sequence Alignment in Cloud using Hadoop and MPP Database” Author’s of the paper - Senthilkumar Vijayakumar, Anjani Bhargavi, Uma Praseeda and Syed Azar Ahamed accepted and presented in the conference IEEE CLOUD 2012, 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing June 24-29 2012, Hyatt Regency Waikiki Resort and Spa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. He has filed 2 patents (pending) in the area of Green IT and Cloud Computing Technologies. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering and a Masters in Communication Systems from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India.

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Raymond Wang, Senior Software Design Engineer in Test, Microsoft

Raymond is a Senior Software Engineer in the File Server Foundation test team at Microsoft, joining the company in 2007, he has been working on development of test tools, framework and testing Windows NFSv2, v3 and v4.1 implementation. He is the primary developer for design and development of framework comprising of synthetic NFSv4.1 client for testing Windows NFSv4.1 server. Prior to joining Microsoft, Raymond worked as software development engineer for Adexa Inc. Canada and IBM China.   Raymond holds a B.S. degree in computer science from Beihang University in Beijing, China.

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Rich Weber, VP of Product Management and Operations, Panzura

With over 20 years of experience in the enterprise software, networking and storage industries, Rich is a hands-on manager of product management, IT and operations teams. Rich has also previously held Director and VP-level roles in product management and operations. Before joining Panzura, Rich was VP of Operations at Opvista and prior to that ran operations at Wi-Fi infrastructure provider Trapeze Networks, which was acquired by Belden in 2008. Rich is also responsible for managing the development and maintenance of all Cloud Connectors working closely with Panzura’s Cloud Partners

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Sage Weil, Founder and Chief Architect, Inktank

Sage Weil designed Ceph as part of his PhD research in Storage Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since graduating, he has continued to refine the system with the goal of providing a stable next generation distributed file system for Linux. Prior to his graduate work, he cofounded New Dream Network, the company behind DreamHost.com, a Los Angeles-based web hosting company.

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Ric Wheeler, Architect & Manager of the RHEL File System Team & Red Hat Storage, Red Hat

Ric Wheeler works at Red Hat as the manager and architect of the file system team and manages the Red Hat Storage engineering organization. He has extensive experience in storage and file systems after spending ten years at EMC in its 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. In the distant past, Ric worked on the original MOSIX process migration system at Hebrew University’s distributed systems laboratory. For the past ten years, he has been active in the Linux file system and I/O world where he helped organize workshops, inform open source developers about high-end storage, and helped advance the robustness of the Linux I/O and file system stack.

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Mark Wunderlich, Storage Technologist, Intel

Mark Wunderlich is a storage technologist in Lan Access Division at Intel. Mark has been a quintessentialstorage guy at Intel having been involved in development of IOMeter, SRP, iSCSI, FCoE etc.

Mark’s technical interests lie in Windows storage architecture, virtualization and performance.  

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Liang Yang, Senior Performance Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

Liang Yang has been working in virtualization and storage performance area for the last 7 years. He was a performance engineer at Intel storage division and contributed to the firmware optimization of Intel I/O processors. At Microsoft, he worked on Hyper-V storage stack area from v1 to the latest release primarily focused on improving Hyper-V storage performance and scalability

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Gunter Zink, Principal Program Manager

Gunter Zink is a Principal Program Manager involved in performance measurement and enhancement of Microsoft SQL Server, with a focus on the application interactions with storage hardware and software.    Claus Joergensen is a Principal Program Manager on the Windows File Services team, focusing on SMB3 interactions with applications that have storage-heavy workloads, especially SQL Server.

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Tsan Zheng, Sr. Test Lead, Microsoft

Tsan Zheng has been working as a Senior Lead Software Design Engineer in Test in the Windows File Server team at Microsoft for 3 years. Her team owns scenario testing based on File Server technologies and the core reliability and performance testing infrastructures. Prior to joining the File Server test team, she worked as a Program Manager for the Bing division and as a Lead Software Design Engineer in Test in the Windows serviceability team focusing on networking technologies. She has a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Zhejiang University and a M.S. of Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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