2020 Storage Developer Conference Speakers

Marc Acosta

Research Fellow, Western Digital Corporation

Biography

Marc started his career at Western Digital in 1983 and went on to develop controllers for Western Digital's Enterprise and Client HDDs until 2000. Marc then joined Aristos Logic, a RAID Storage Processor startup, as VP of technical marketing. In 2007 Marc took a 2 1/2 year sabbatical, with a year spent at sea. In 2010 Marc rejoined the workforce at STEC, the pioneers of the Enterprise SSD, and was CTO when STEC was acquired by Western Digital in 2013. Marc has remained at Western Digital and works as a Research Fellow with a focus on data placement and computational storage technologies.

Richelle Ahlvers

Board of Directors, SNIA

Biography

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

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

Jeffrey Altman

CEO/CTO, AuriStor, Inc.

Biography

Jeffrey has developed data communications, distributed file system and network security solutions for more than thirty years. His experience with secure data communications extends from two-pair circuits to interplanetary transmissions.

Jeffrey founded AuriStor, Inc. in 2007 to extend the AFS concepts of WAN file system namespaces, security first network protocols, and access control to all 21st centry applications and end users. Today, AuriStor is setting a new standard for secure high performance globally accessible general purpose file systems.

Rajalaxmi Angadi

Senior Software Developer, Intel Corporation

Biography

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

Alexander Antonov

Senior Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Biography

Alexander is a senior software engineer in Intel® VTune™ Profiler team specializing in driver development and hardware performance analysis.

Naohiro Aota

Staff engineer, Western Digital

Biography

Naohiro is a staff engineer in Western Digital Research System Software Group. Naohiro interests are file systems, especially btrfs, and zoned block devices support and applications. Naohiro is the author of several candidate patch series adding SMR disk support to btrfs posted on linux-btrfs mailing list. This on-going btrfs work was presented by Naohiro at LSFMM 2019 and Open Source Summit Europe 2019.

Duckho Bae

Principal Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Duckho Bae is principal engineer at Samsung Memory Business and currently is working on Samsung reference storage system called Poseidon Project. His expertise is in developing advanced SSD features for large-scale data management such as in-storage compute. He holds a PhD in Electronics and Computer Engineering from Hanyang University, Korea.

Curtis Ballard

Distinguished Technologist, HPE

Biography

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

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

Stephen Bates

Chief Technology Officer, Eideticom

Biography

Stephen is an expert in performance storage, persistent and non-volatile memory, computer networking, signal processing and error correction coding and has worked on some of the most complicated communication and storage solutions in the industry.

Matias Bjørling

Director, Emerging System Architectures, Western Digital

Biography

Matias Bjørling, Ph.D., is a Director of Emerging System Architectures at Western Digital. He and his team are responsible for building next-generation storage architectures for deployment in large-scale public and private clouds. He has the pleasure of being the chair of the NVMe Zoned Namespaces Task Group, which standardizes the Zoned Namespace Command Set. Previously, Matias founded the Open-Channel SSD software eco-system, authored the Open-Channel 1.2 and 2.0 specifications, and developed the Linux kernel Open-Channel SSD subsystem, which today he continues to be the kernel maintainer. Matias holds a Ph.D. from the IT University of Copenhagen, where his thesis planted the seed for Open-Channel SSDs architecture having significant adoption in the industry.

Robert Blankenship

Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation

Biography

Rob is a Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation in the I/O Technology and Standards Group. His expertise is in cache coherence protocols and memory interfaces for server products. As a participant in the CXL Consortium he has lead training for CXLv1.1 and is currently working on next generation specification development.

Rory Bolt

Principal Architect, Senior Fellow, KIOXIA America

Biography

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

Richard Brunner

Principal Engineer and CTO of Server Platform Technologies, VMware

Biography

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

Olga Buchonina

CEO, ActionSpot

Biography

Olga Buchonina is an experienced executive leader, engineer, and manager in the technology industry. She founded ActionSpot with the vision to build an environment for entrepreneurs focused on Data Science, Data Security, and Data Engineering for blockchain technology. She has presented on blockchain at several conferences including BlockChain Developer Conference and Block World. She has over 20 years of professional experience and holds several patents. She earned an MS in computer engineering from the University of Houston and has worked for Viavi Solutions, Teledyne LeCroy, AMCC, and IBM.

Scott Bunker

Server Storage Technologist, HPE

Biography

Scott Bunker is a storage technologist within HPE Server Advanced Development. He has designed and architected server storage solutions for 23 years and observed the evolution of server storage grow from proprietary implementations to open standards.

Keith Busch

Technologist, Western Digital Corporation

Biography

Keith Busch has over 16 years of storage experience, and has been developing and promoting NVM Express since its beginning. He maintains various software projects supporting these, including the Linux kernel, QEMU virtualization, and user space tools and libraries for managing these devices, and has given many talks throughout the years promoting open source storage technologies.

Yibo Cai

Principal Software Engineer, ARM

Biography

Yibo is principal software engineer from Arm. He has been working in IT industry for 20 years, and he has rich experience in storage, cloud and database open source software development.

Mark Carlson

Principle Architect, Kioxia

Biography

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

Anjaneya Chagam

Cloud Architect, Intel Corporation

Biography

Anjaneya “Reddy” Chagam is a Senior Principal Engineer and Lead Cloud Storage Architect in Intel’s Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Group. He is responsible for developing software-defined storage strategy, architecture, and technology initiatives. He is a board member in Ceph and SODA Linux Foundation projects. He was instrumental in initiating and gaining consensus among storage vendors to launch SODA (former name OpenSDS) Linux Foundation project. He leads flash manageability architecture, development efforts in SODA Linux Foundation project. He is a Chief Architect responsible for delivering software optimizations in Ceph via Intel upstream contributions. He is a regular speaker at major industry conferences, including Storage Developer Conference, OpenStack, CloudNativeCon and Red Hat Summit, has published several white papers on flash-optimized storage solutions. He earned an MS in computer science from Arizona State University.

Albert Chen

Founder, KALISTA IO

Biography

Albert Chen is founder and CEO of KALISTA IO where he defines and leads company vision and product architecture. Albert started Kalista to help companies better store and organize their data - by creating intelligent storage systems that are easy to use and device friendly.

Before founding Kalista, Albert was senior director at RStor, a multi-cloud platform provider. Prior, Albert served as engineering program director at Western Digital where he developed and cultivated SMR and hybrid drive ecosystem and technologies. Previous to WD, Albert was Windows program manager and storage standards representative at Microsoft. He also held engineering and technical leadership positions at various startups ranging from storage networking, data security, to network management. Albert authored 10 patents and holds a BSCS degree from Cornell University and an MSCS degree from Stanford University.

Vijay Chidambaram

Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin. I joined in Fall 2016, after completing a post-doc at the VMware Research Group in Palo Alto, California. I did my PhD with Prof. Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My work has resulted in patent applications with Microsoft, Samsung, and VMware. My papers have been awarded Best Paper Awards in ATC 2018, FAST 2018, and FAST 2017. I was awarded the NSF CAREER Award in 2018, SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award in 2016, the Microsoft Research Fellowship in 2014, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Alumni Scholarship in 2009. I have published in top OS conferences such as SOSP, OSDI, FAST, and NSDI.

He Chu

Engineer, GENG YUN TECHNOLOGY PTE. LTD.

Biography

I am a software engineer interested on Flash file system, SSD firmware and storage system. I am trying to introduce concepts and practices of continuous integration, Agile development, and software-defined storage to SSD firmware developing and testing. The pynvme, an open-source project based on SPDK NVMe driver, is one of his efforts to improve SSD developing efficiency and quality.

Thomas Coughlin

President, Coughlin Associates

Biography

Thomas Coughlin, PhD, the founder of Coughlin Associates has over 35 years of digital storage engineering and engineering management experience. Coughlin Associates provides digital storage and market consulting, reports and conferences on digital storage and applications.

Najmudheen CT

Architect Huawei, Maintainer SODA Foundation, Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd

Biography

Najmudheen is a Software Architect for Huawei Technologies India . He has 13 years of industry experience in Storage, SRM, VMware products, Containers (Docker/Kubernetes) etc. He is a maintainer of SODA foundation, A Linux foundation project for data autonomy. In the past 1.5 years in Huawei, he has contributed to multiple open source projects and he is the main architect of delfin project for Infrastructure management.

Sanil Kumar D

Chief Architect, TOC, Head SODA India, SODA Foundation / Huawei, Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd

Biography

TSC Member, Architecture Lead, SODA Foundation, Maintainer KubeEdge(CNCF)
Chief Architect, Head India SODA Team, Huawei Technologies
Sanil has over 20 years of Industry experience in Linux, Open Source, ARM Ecosystem, Cloud and Emerging Technologies(like Edge Computing, Blockchain, Distributed Computing). He holds multiple patents, published papers & presented sessions and keynotes in international conferences, was Linux Foundation Yocto Project Advisory Board member, collaborates with IEEE(Roof Computing), CCICI, blockchain groups, Organizer of CNCF and SODA Foundation meetup groups. Currently focusing on Ecosystem, Technology Roadmap for SODA Foundation on Data Management Domain. He does blog/creative writing at skdwriting.wordpress.com. Keen to work with developers and enable their careers through open source.

Sudheer Dantuluri

Software Engineer, Microsoft

Biography

Sudheer is a software developer working in the Microsoft SMB team since 2018. He is responsible for development efforts in supporting SMB over QUIC. He earned a Masters in Computer Science from Texas A&M University, College Station in 2017.

Suman Debnath

Principal Developer Advocate Amazon Web Services

Biography

Suman Debnath is a Principal Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services. He tries to simplify the intricacies of AWS cloud services to developers, aids them to unravel its optimum possibilities and obtain its utmost usage into their application. His key focus areas are: Machine learning, Data Analytics and Storage. He is presently pursuing his Master’s in Artificial Intelligence from IIT, Jodhpur.

He has been working on storage performance measurement, tool development and quality engineering and has authored more than 50 white papers on performance benchmarking and monitoring of storage systems. In 2015, he was honoured as the SME for Storage from SNIA and CompTIA. He is a frequent speaker at numerous national and international conferences like OpenSource India, C#Corner, DataHack Summit, GHCI, SNIA SDC and PyCon. He loves to host tech talks/live-code on various areas, like Python, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, and Cloud Computing.

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suman-d/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_sumand
AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/evangelists/suman-debnath/

Rob Davis

VP of storage technology, Nvidia

Biography

Rob Davis is a VP of storage technology at Nvidia networking (formerly Mellanox). He has extensive experience in all aspects of storage technology.

Don Deel

SMI GB Chair, SNIA; Senior Standards Technologist, NetApp, SNIA; NetApp

Biography

Don Deel is a Senior Standards Technologist at NetApp and has been actively involved with the Storage Networking Industry Association in several different volunteer roles since the year 2000. He participated in the development of the original Bluefin specification which later became SMI-S when it was contributed to the SNIA, and he continues to play an active role in the ongoing development of SMI-S today. He is also currently involved in the development of the SNIA Swordfish specification, which handles the management of storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments. His standards development experience stretches back into the mid-1980s, and includes work on the Fibre Channel and HIPPI standards.

Within the SNIA, Don has been active in a number of leadership positions since the early days of the association, and he has been recognized for his contributions several times. He is currently serving as the Storage Management Initiative Governing Board chair, the SMI Technical Work Group chair, and the Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group co-chair.

Douglas Dumitru

CTO, EasyCo LLC

Biography

CTO at EasyCo LLC. Developer of Block Translation Software for All Flash Arrays including five patent grants.

Brian Eccles

Principal Analyst, IBM

Biography

Brian is an IBM Quantum Ambassador and analyst. His experience includes market research, technology prognostication, key account management, business development and sales, teaching continuing education courses, new product development, building manufacturing facilities, and controlling a low earth orbit satellite. He enjoys building and leading global teams.

Lars Eggert

Technical Director, NetApp

Biography

Lars Eggert is Technical Director for Networking in NetApp’s Office of the CTO based near Helsinki, Finland.

Lars is an experienced technologist with deep expertise in network architectures, systems and protocol design, ranging from the Internet to datacenter to IoT/edge environments. He drives NetApp’s networking agenda by bridging the gap between academic research and products through various collaborative research, engineering and open source collaborations, which lead to product improvements, key IPR, open source, directions for strategic investments and numerous academic papers and standards contributions.

Lars has been leading networking standardization as part of the IETF steering group and architecture board for two decades and has chaired its research arm, the IRTF. He currently chairs the QUIC working group that is delivering a major new Internet protocol, and he serves on the program and organization committees of academic conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM, as well as numerous other boards.

Lars received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2003. Before joining NetApp in 2011, he was a Principal Scientist at Nokia and served on the corporation’s CTO and CEO Technology Councils of senior technology experts. In parallel, from 2009-2014, Lars was an Adjunct Professor at Aalto University, Finland’s top technical university. From 2003-2006, he was a senior researcher at NEC Labs.

Vinod Eswaraprasad

Chief Architect, Global Head of Cloud&Platform Practice, Wipro

Biography

Vinod Eswaraprasad is a Chief Architect, and Global Head of Cloud and Platform Practice at Industrial and Engineering Services, Wipro. He has been working in the area of building fault-tolerant, scalable, and distributed platform architecture, and design for the last 23 years. In the current role, Vinod is engaged in building integrated Cloud and Storage solutions targeted towards multiple industry segments, especially focusing on cloud-native computing and hybrid/multi-cloud architectures. His main area of interest are distributed computing, cloud/hyper-scale computing, and storage technologies.

Charles Fan

CEO and co-founder, MemVerge

Biography

Charles Fan is the co-founder and CEO of MemVerge, the inventor of software that delivers the memory-centric infrastructure (MCI) of the future, today. Prior to MemVerge, Charles was CTO of Cheetah Mobile, leading its technology teams in AI, big data and cloud. Before Cheetah, Charles was an SVP/GM at VMware, responsible for VMware’s storage and availability business unit. He led the team that built the HCI market leader Virtual SAN. Charles also worked at EMC and was the founder of EMC China R&D Center, having joined EMC via the acquisition of Rainfinity. He was a co-founder and CTO of Rainfinity and was responsible for its file virtualization and high availability products. Charles received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from The Cooper Union.

Ron Feist

Subject Matter Expert Elite for Hybrid Cloud, NetApp

Biography

Former Professional Services Consultant and Cloud Architect, I added the DevOps and Cloud expertise to my Swiss knife since I joined NetApp University, leading the enablement for our Professional Services and our Channel Partners on the new concepts surrounding the infrastructure world in the modern data center of today and tomorrow. I love presenting and teaching everything I learn!

Dmitry Fomichev

R&D Technologist, Western Digital Corporation

Biography

Dmitry Fomichev works as R&D technologist at Western Digital Research since 2017. His current areas of interest include zoned block devices, storage protocol standards, QEMU development, Linux kernel development, storage emulation and benchmarking. Before joining WDC, Dmitry worked at a number of storage companies, including Syncsort, Whiptail, Cisco and Oracle. He has around 20 years of storage and Linux development experience. He is a graduate of MPEI in Moscow.

Steven French

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Biography

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

Yamin Friedman

Architecture engineer, Nvidia

Biography

I am a hardware architect at Nvidia networking (formerly Mellanox). My main focus is on storage solutions, mostly dis-aggregated across the network. The work on storage has led me to work on optimizations in the software stack of the Linux kernel as well deep dive explorations into hardware details in order to better understand the system as a whole. I have experience with standard servers as well as system-on-chip devices.

Uma Maheswara Rao Gangumalla

Principal Software Engineer, Cloudera

Biography

Uma Maheswara Rao is an Apache Software Foundation Member[1]. An Apache Hadoop, BookKeeper, Incubator committer and a member of the Project Management Committee[2], and a long-term active contributor to the Apache Hadoop project. He is also mentoring several incubator projects at Apache. Uma holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering. He has more than 13 years of experience in large scale Distributed Software Platforms design and development. Currently, Uma is working as a Principal Software Engineer at Cloudera, Inc, California, and primarily focuses on open source big data technologies. Prior to this, Uma worked as a Software Architect at Intel Corporation, California.
[1] https://www.apache.org/foundation/members.html
[2] http://people.apache.org/phonebook.html?uid=umamahesh

Rémy Gauguey

Sr Software Architect - Data Center Business Unit, Kalray

Biography

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

Jerome Gaysse

Senior Technology and Market Analyst, silinnov consulting

Biography

Jerome Gaysse is senior technology and market analyst at Silinnov Consulting, a consultancy based on emerging data storage technologies. He also drives the Cloud services offering at SPIE ICS, a leading IT French company.

He has strong technical expertise in IP, NVM, FPGAs, and ASICs for the data center market. He successfully worked with major corporate companies, startups, and research institutes in both Europe and the USA. He is a regular presenter at international conferences such as those sponsored by IEEE and SNIA, as well as past Flash Memory Summits. Jerome earned an MSEE from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon (France) with a semiconductor specialty.

Bill Gervasi

Principal Systems Architect, Nantero

Biography

Mr. Gervasi has over 40 years of experience in high speed memory subsystem definition, design, and product development. Career highlights include 19 years at Intel where he was systems hardware designer, software designer, and strategic accounts manager. Mr. Gervasi subsequently was with S3 where he was a graphics architecture specialist and at Transmeta as memory technology analyst. Most recently he held several key positions with companies such as Netlist, SimpleTech, and US Modular driving unique memory module configurations. He is now Principal Systems Architect for Nantero, developing non-volatile RAM-class memories.

Mr. Gervasi been involved in the definition of Double Data Rate SDRAM since its earliest inception. He has served on the JEDEC Board of Directors and chaired committees for DRAM parametrics and small form factor memory modules during the development of DDR1 through DDR5. He is currently the chairman of the JEDEC Non-Volatile Memory committee.

Jody Glider

Principal Storage Architect, Cloud Architecture and Engineering, SAP

Biography

Jody is a 40+ year veteran of enterprise storage system research and development. Early in his career he worked on mainframe storage systems, was a leader in startup SF2 Corporation which brought to market one of the first fault-tolerant RAID controllers, was responsible for firmware for IBM's first mainframe-attached RAID controller, and then worked in IBM Almaden Research in storage systems research in a large range of projects related to log-structured storage, distributed and scale-out storage, compression and deduplication, and preserving ability to leverage data reduction capabilities in the face of at-source encryption. Most recently Jody has worked in SAP's Global Cloud Services business leading its storage architecture group.

Akhil Gokhale

Managing Consultant, Wipro Technologies

Biography

Akhil has around 18 years of experience in product and software development. He is currently part of the Cloud and Software Products Practice.

Ben Golub

CEO, Storj Labs

Biography

Ben Golub is the executive chairman and interim CEO at Storj Labs, an open source, decentralized cloud storage provider. Storj is disrupting the centralized cloud storage industry and under Ben’s guidance, the team has rolled out initiatives that empower open source projects by enabling them to passively earn revenue every time their users store data in the cloud.

Ben also serves as an advisor at Mayfield, a global venture capital firm with over $2.7 billion under management. He was previously co-founder and CEO at Docker, the leader of the container and microservices movement and one of the fastest growing open source companies in history. Prior to Docker, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Gluster, an open source cloud storage platform that was acquired by Red Hat in 2011. Ben has a BA from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard.

Javier Gonzalez

Principal Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Javier is a Principal Software Engineer at Samsung Electronics, where he founded and manages SSDR (Samsung Semiconductor Denmark Research) - Samsung Memory first R&D center in Europe and fifth worldwide. He leads a distributed team of top engineers where he applies his expertise in open-source and ecosystem enablement for emerging storage technologies. He co-authored the Open-Channel SSD specification and currently contributes to the Zoned Namespace standardization and extended features in NVMe. He is a contributor to a range of open-source projects, including the Linux kernel, and a regular speaker at top storage industry conferences. He holds a Ph.D in Operating Systems by the IT University of Copenhagen.

Krishnakumar Gowravaram

Senior Technical Leader and Architect, Cisco

Biography

Experienced Technical leader, Software Engineer with a demonstrated history of building Storage & Networking systems.

Sagi Grimberg

CTO, lightbits

Biography

Sagi Grimberg is a co-founder and CTO in Lightbits, a storage company developing next-gen hyperscale storage solutions. He has more than 10 years of experience in storage, networking and RDMA technologies and distributed systems. Sagi is a co-maintainer of the Linux NVMe subsystem and the lead author of the NVMe/TCP standard. He has written technical papers, made conference and meetup presentations.

Logan Gunthorpe

Principle Engineer, Eideticom

Biography

Logan Gunthorpe graduated with a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alberta in 2007 and has his P.Eng with Apega in Alberta. Mr. Gunthorpe is currently employed as a Principle Engineer at Eideticom Communications Inc. He has extensive experience writing software in a variety of programming languages for Linux and Embedded systems. He has made contributions to the upstream Linux kernel including the switchtec driver, plx_dma driver and helping to add support for P2PDMA to the PCI subsystem.

Rajesh Gupta

Senior Engineer, Thales, Inc

Biography

My name is Rajesh Gupta and I am Senior Development Manager at Thales. I have more than 25 years of experience in delivering enterprise level security, Encryption, Key Management and file system/Storage products.

Jonmichael Hands

Senior Strategic Planner and NVM Express Marketing Work Group Chair, Intel

Biography

Jonmichael Hands is a Senior Strategic Planner for Intel’s Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG). He is currently the product line manager for data center SSDs, handling product marketing, marketing management, and strategic planning. He is also Co-chair of the Marketing Workgroup for NVM Express, Inc., the standards organization for NVMe. He has been very active in NVMe standards work, and has presented on NVMe at webinars and conferences, including Flash Memory Summit. He has 10 years experience in the technology industry, has written four articles, and has received a patent. He earned a BSEE from the Colorado School of Mines.

Jim Handy

General Director, Objective Analysis

Biography

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.

Feilong He

Machine Learning Engineer, Intel Corporation

Biography

Feilong is a machine learning engineer at Intel Corporation currently. He has contributed a lot of code to Apache Hadoop project. And he is the major code developer for HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) persistent memory cache feature. Before joining Intel, Feilong earned a Master degree in Computer Science from Sun Yat-sen University, China.

Jeff Hilland

President, DMTF; Distinguished Technologist at HPE, DMTF; HPE

Biography

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

Jeremy Hitt

Principal Software Engineer, Dell EMC

Biography

TBD

Brandon Hoff

Director, Product Management, Fibre Channel Industry Association, Broadcom Inc.

Biography

Brandon Hoff is a Principal Architect at Broadcom Inc.. Prior to Broadcom, Brandon was previously a part of Emulex’s Office of the CTO, VP of Marketing at San Juan Tech, CMO and CSO at CipherOptics, and Business Line Manager at McDATA. Brandon has 30 years of Engineering and Marketing experience in ASIC development, Software, Fiber Channel, Ethernet, Security, Encryption, Telco, and Flash. Brandon is responsible for keeping Broadcom Limited ECD in a leadership position in technologies, products, and markets. In addition, Brandon has two patents and has held leadership positions in trade groups such as IBTA and SNIA.

Hans Holmberg

Technologist, Western Digital Corporation

Biography

Hans is a Technologist at Western Digital, working on emerging storage solutions and driving the zoned block device ecosystem forward. He has a long history of working with flash and has architected and implemented solutions for everything from raw NAND to Open-Channel and NVMe. Hans regularly contributes to conferences and is an active kernel developer in the block subsystem. He holds an MS in Computer Technology from The Institute of Technology at Linköping University.

David Howells

Biography

David Howells has contributed to the Linux kernel for around 25 years, 19 of them at Red Hat. Currently, his primary focus is on common filesystem components within the kernel, such as key management and local file caching. He also wrote the in-kernel AFS filesystem (kAFS) and its socket support (AF_RXRPC).

Naresh Kumar Inna

Co-founder and CEO, Memhive

Biography

Naresh Kumar Inna is co-founder and CEO at Memhive, where he co-develops apps that run faster with Persistent Memory. He has more than 20 years of experience in architecture and development of enterprise storage software. Prior to Memhive, he was with Tegile Systems/Western Digital as the director of SAN, leading a team that developed the protocol stack (SCSI/FC/iSCSI) and services such as live storage migration, synchronous replication and scale out storage. He is the author of Chelsio's FCoE Linux open source driver. He also has prior experience with low level x86, IA-64 and PARISC architectures during his stint at HP.

Masanori Itoh

Principal Researcher, Toyota Motors / TSC Member SODA foundation, Toyota

Biography

He has been in the IT industry roughly 20 years and has been working in mainly infrastructure level things, operating systems, cloud orchestrators etc. At TOYOTA, he is in charge of overall architecture of their near future systems supporting connected cars and autonomous vehicles. He is also involved in various open source software communities for more than 10 years.

Shyamkumar Iyer

Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Dell Office of CTO, Dell

Biography

Distinguished Member of Technical staff in Dell's Office of CTO for Servers with many years of experience Researching, Designing, Developing, Debugging, Validating, Leading and Driving System and Software solutions that have an industry wide impact. Experienced at leading research concepts that turn into industry first products or influence roadmaps significantly. With 20 granted patents and 30+ pending, Shyam has wide experience in architecture, protocol & system software stacks & hardware definitions. Shyam is also the Chair for SDXI(Smart Data Acceleration Interface), a newly formed SNIA TWG which aims to develop, extend and drive an extensible, virtualizable, forward-compatible, memory to memory data movement and acceleration interface standard.

Rakesh Jain 

Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Research, IBM

Biography

Rakesh Jain is an Architect and Researcher with IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose CA. He is an expert in Cloud automation, Storage Management, High Availability & Disaster Recovery technologies and in Internet of Things. He is also involved in the development of storage management and monitoring products, as well as storage management for Cloud, and has built several solutions using cloud-native technology.

Klaus Jensen

Staff Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Klaus Jensen is a Software Engineer with a background in academia. He has worked in the area of High Performance Computing, avoided users as an old school UNIX sysop, taken a stint in an IT consultancy, written a Ph.D. on tape and been involved in the OpenChannel SSD community. He now works on NVMe emulation and the NVMe software stack at Samsung Electronics.

Huiren Jiang

Software Engineer, Microsoft

Biography

Huiren Jiang is a software engineer from Microsoft, who is working on Windows protocol test suites for File Sharing, SMBD, RDP protocols and is passionate for test suite open source and cross-platform work.

Mahmoud Jibbe

Technical Director, NetApp

Biography

Technical director at NetApp since 2011. Dr. Jibbe has 32 Patents awarded and 58 papers published in different engineering areas. Dr. Jibbe is an adjunt faculty at the Wichita Sate University in the EECE department since 1983.

Kanchan Joshi

Staff Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Kanchan is a Staff Engineer at Samsung, where he currently works on developing ZNS and other emerging storage interfaces in Linux I/O stack. He has worked on various ideas involving host-device co-design and published technical papers.

Arun Kandasamy

Lead Programmer, MSys Technologies

Biography

Arun holds over a decade of distinguished experience in Embedded and storage domain with strong exposure to Docker and Kubernetes. At Msys, he is responsible for containerizing complex application, which holds external/persistent storage as well as monitoring metrics using Prometheus.

Shin'ichiro Kawasaki

Principal Engineer, Western Digital Corporation

Biography

Shin'ichiro Kawasaki is a Principal Engineer in Western Digital Research System Software Group. Shin'ichiro has a long experience with embedded Java systems performance optimization as well as storage device firmware development. Zoned block device support and testing in Linux ecosystem are now Shin'ichiro's main interest.

Terence Kelly

Biography

Terence Kelly studied Computer Science at Princeton and the University of Michigan, earning his Ph.D. at the latter in 2002. He then spent 14 years at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. During his final five years at HPL, he developed software support for non-volatile memory. Kelly now teaches and evangelizes the persistent memory style of programming. His patents and publications are listed at http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/~~tpkelly/papers/

Eden Kim

CEO, Calypso Systems, Inc.

Biography

CEO of Calypso and chair of SNIA SSS TWG. Primary author of SNIA SSS PTS, SNIA Real World Storage Workload PTS for Datacenter Storage, PM White Paper and various white papers on SSD, PCIe and Datacenter storage. Mr. Kim speaks at international trade shows in US, Japan and China.

Calypso is a leading developer of workload capture, analysis and test services and products and provides SNIA Reference Test Platforms and test services. Calypso also hosts the free real world workload website www.testmyworkload.com where users can download IO capture tools and upload workload captures for analysis.

John Kim

Director of Storage Marketing, Networking Business Unit, NVIDIA

Biography

John Kim is Director of Storage Marketing at NVIDIA in the Networking Business Unit, where he helps customers and vendors benefit from high performance network connections, SmartNIC offloads, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), especially in the areas of storage, big data, and artificial intelligence. A frequent blogger, conference speaker, and webcast presenter, John is also chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association Networking Storage Forum (SNIA NSF). After starting his high tech career at an IT helpdesk and as a network administrator, John worked in solution marketing, product management, and alliances, first for enterprise software companies and then in enterprise storage at NetApp and EMC before joining Mellanox in 2013 and then NVIDIA in 2020. Follow him on Twitter: @Tier1Storage

Jungsoo Kim

Staff Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Biography

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

Ramya Krishnamurthy

QA Architect [Test Expert], HPE

Biography

Ramya Krishnamurthy- Have 17+ years’ of strong hands-on experience in the storage domain across companies like HPE, NetApp, EMC (Wipro/Mindtree)

Working as QA architect in HPE currently for HPE storage solution with 3PAR /Primera

Hold the below Certifications:

• SNIA Certified Professional (SCP)
• CCNA certified
• Dell Certified in Networking

Was Backup speaker in last year SDC 2019

Chaitanya Kulkarni

Principal Engineer, Western Digital Corporation

Biography

Core member of the Kernel team at Western digital. I've worked on implementing one of the payload-less Linux Kernel Operation (Write-Zeroes) for offloading Zeroout LBA range. With several contributions to NVMe Subsystem including NVMe PCIe driver, NVMeOF Target driver, user space tool (nvme-cli/nvmetcli, blktests) and test-cases, now I work as an Upstream Linux Kernel NVMe Subsystem maintainer and co-author of the nvme-cli project which is a de-facto standard for all nvme management on Linux. I've added and worked on several features to upstream kernel such as Linux Kernel NVMe SGL Support, NVMeOF Passthru Driver, NVMeOF File backend support, etc for NVMe Subsystems. Since I started kernel development, I'm also a regular invitee for invitation-only Linux Kernel Storage/File-System/Memory Management (LSFMM) conference.

Parag Kulkarni

Chief Operating Officer, Calsoft

Biography

Parag Kulkarni is chief operating officer at Calsoft. Parag is an industry veteran, bringing more than 20 years of experience in designing and developing complex technology products. Parag drives the technology roadmap at Calsoft to improve the overall quality of delivery processes. Before joining Calsoft, Parag held key positions at Veritas (formerly Symantec) where he conceived the Database Edition Product for Windows and led its delivery through two product lines – Database Edition for Microsoft (R) Exchange Server and Database Edition for Microsoft (R) SQL Server. Prior to his role at Veritas, he was a key contributor to Informix Corporation’s line of database products, now acquired by IBM. Parag holds a master’s degree in computer science from IIT, Roorkee and a bachelor’s degree in industrial management from University of Indore, India.

Ajay Kumar

Senior Test Specialist, HPE

Biography

Ajay Kumar has almost 13 year of industry experience in server and storage domain currently at HPE. He is part of Ecossystem team to qualify latest Windows Server OS. Prior to that Ajay has worked with NetApp on Data Protection solution like Backup/Snapmirror/Snaplock/Snapvault.

Ashit Kumar

Architect, SODA Foundation/Huawei

Biography

Ashit Kumar is working as an architect with Huawei Technologies and is responsible for technically leading the projects in SODA Foundation (a project under Linux Foundation). He has nearly 14 years of experience in developing Storage and Server Management, DRaaS, Orchestration, and multi-cloud solutions. Currently, he is one maintainer of SODA Foundation project. He holds a Masters degree from the University of Pune, Computer Science Department.

Sushantha Kumar

System Engineer, Huawei Technologies India Private Limited

Biography

Sushantha Kumar is a System Engineer at Huawei Technologies India, contributing towards various SODA foundation projects which focuses on storage integration challenges with heterogeneous storage platforms. He has worked on several projects at PaaS layer. He has good exposure towards kubernetes, CNI, Helm and few other CNCF projects. He is the Maintainer of an opensource project "CNI-Genie". Prior to working on PaaS technologies, he has worked on several user access protocols such as snmp, ssh, telnet etc.

Ilia Kurakin

Senior Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Biography

Ilia is a lead of I/O performance analysis in Intel® VTune™ Profiler team. Specialized in platform-level performance analysis methodologies and hardware performance counters.

Mark Lantz

Principal Research Staff Member, IBM Research

Biography

Dr. Mark Lantz is a principal research staff member in the IBM Research – Zurich laboratory, an IEEE Fellow and is the manager of the Cloud FPGA and Tape Technology Research Group. Dr. Lantz has over 19 years of experience in storage technology research. He has been an IBM Master Inventor since 2011, he is co-inventor on over 170 patents and co-author of over 125 research publications.

Jeff LeFevre

Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, UC Santa Cruz, University of California, Santa Cruz

Biography

Jeff LeFevre is an Assistant Adjunct Professor for Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, where he leads the Skyhook Data Management project to store and manage tabular data within Ceph. The SkyhookDM project is part of the Center for Research in Open Source Systems at UC Santa Cruz, where Jeff is currently an incubator fellow. His research interests are in cloud databases, database physical design, and storage systems. He completed an MS thesis on storage systems from UC San Diego in 2009, and Ph.D. thesis on database physical design from UC Santa Cruz in 2014. After graduation, Jeff worked at HP on integrating the Vertica database with external computation engines such as Distributed R and Apache Spark. Dr. LeFevre joined the CSE faculty in 2018.

Damien Le Moal

Director, Western Digital Corporation

Biography

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

Volker Lendecke

Developer, SerNet GmbH

Biography

Volker Lendecke is a long-time member of the Samba Team and co-founder of SerNet GmbH in Göttingen, Germany.

Yadong Li

Lead software architect, Intel

Biography

Yadong Li is a Principal Engineer and the Lead Software Architect for high performance SmartNIC programs in the Networking Division at Intel.  Yadong’s ongoing focus is to develop and expand the Cloud Storage and SmartNIC software strategy, architecture and technologies.

Yadong joined Intel in 2001 as a software engineer in the LAN Access Division (LAD), leading network device driver design, performance optimization and SW/HW interface design contributions for several generations of Ethernet Controllers.  From 2012 through 2017, Yadong worked as a platform software architect for mobile SoCs with the MCG System Architecture Team, and later worked on Optane SSD architecture in Storage Technologies Group.  Yadong holds 9 patents granted on Ethernet Controller design and 8 pending.

Yadong earned two master’s degrees, one in Computer Science from Wright State University and one in Information and Signal Processing from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

Chris Lionetti

Board of Directors, SNIA; Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, HPE

Biography

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

Nishant Lodha

Director of Technologies, Marvell

Biography

Nishant Lodha is a Director of Technologies focused on emerging I/O for Marvell’s 10/25/50/100GbE Ethernet NICs and 16/32G Fibre Channel HBAs. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Nishant is responsible for Enterprise and Cloud Storage markets, trend analysis and analytics, technology integrations and use cases for flash accelerated applications. As an author of various papers and speaker at technology events – including a recently published NVMe-oF and 25GbE paper, speaker at several Flash Memory Summits, DPDK Summit, SDC and a various BrightTalk webinars. Over the last decade, Nishant has evangelized Ethernet and Fibre Channel based fabrics, AI/ML and Storage use cases and Telco/Cloud technologies. Prior of joining Marvell in 2010, Nishant has worked at various storage and networking industry majors including Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems and Intel. Nishant served on the Board of Directors for the Ethernet Alliance in 2016 and is on the board of the IBTA Steering committee.

Mengyan (Helen) Lu

Senior Software Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Biography

Helen Lu leads the Microsoft Interoperability Test team responsible for developing Protocol Test Suites, essential tools for validating interoperability solutions against the Windows Open Specifications.

Simon Lund

Staff Engineer, Samsung

Biography

Simon Lund is a Staff Engineer at Samsung. His current work revolves around reducing the cognitive load for developers adopting emerging storage interfaces. Before Samsung, he worked at CNEX Labs designing and implementing liblightnvm: the Open-Channel SSD User Space Library. Simon received his Ph.D. on High Performance Backends for Array-Oriented Programming on Next-Generation Processing Units at the University of Copenhagen.

He has given several talks on programming language, interpreter, and compiler design for HPC during his Ph.D. Most recently, in the storage industry at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference 2019 and Linux Vault 2020. Regardless of the topic, Simon's focus is the same, to bridge the gap between high-level abstractions and low-level control and measuring the cost and benefit of doing so.

Kim Malone

Storage Software Architect, Intel

Biography

Kim is a storage software architect in Intel's Data Platforms Group (DPG), focused on pathfinding around computational storage and heterogeneous computation. She has over 20 years of experience architecting and developing distributed high-availability clustered systems in the storage, networking, cable, and telecommunications industries. Prior to Intel, Kim held principal engineer roles at both NetApp and SwiftStack.

Kim co-authored the first technical proposal for adding computational storage to NVMe, and is co-chair of the NVMe Computational Storage Task Group.

Carlos Maltzahn

Adjunct Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz

Biography

Dr. Carlos Maltzahn is the founder and director of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS). Dr. Maltzahn also co-founded the Systems Research Lab, known for its cutting-edge work on programmable storage systems, big data storage & processing, scalable data management, distributed system performance management, and practical reproducible evaluation of computer systems. Carlos joined UC Santa Cruz in 2004, after five years at Netapp working on network-intermediaries and storage systems. In 2005 he co-founded and became a key mentor on Sage Weil’s Ceph project. In 2008 Carlos became a member of the computer science faculty at UC Santa Cruz and has graduated nine Ph.D. students since. Carlos graduated with a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Colorado at Boulder.

Chris Mao

Principal Engineer, Pure Storage

Biography

Chris Mao is currently a Principal Engineer at Pure Storage. He has been driving hardware architecture, flash controller design and domain-specific hardware acceleration for Pure's scale-out FlashBlade Systems since its very early concept in 2014.

Prior to Pure, he co-architected and designed the very first networking ASIC for Google’s hyper-scale datacenter in 2012. At Nuova systems/Cisco, he co-architected and designed the industry’s first Converged Network Interface ASIC for server & network virtualization that launched Cisco’s UCS Systems in 2006. He received his PhD degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and holds 18 US & International patents.

Jean-Francois Marie

Chief Solution Architect, Kalray

Biography

Jean-François has more than 30 years of experience in the high tech industry. He started his career dealing with real time systems, before joining Sun Microsystems as a data center architect, then EMC² and finally NetApp in 2006, where he had various roles in a 13-year career. He held various roles, from Chief Technologist and Product Marketing Director for EMEA, to French Expert team manager to handle new technology introduction. He also managed global and regional accounts, alliances and partners.

Jean-François was also an active SNIA member for 10 years and French SNIA President for 2 years. He has a Masters degree in Electronics, specialized in microprocessor design and embedded systems.

On a personal note, he has been a Basket Ball player, a coach and head coach for 25 years.

William Martin

SSD I/O Standards, Samsung

Biography

Bill Martin has over 30 years of experience in the storage industry. He is currently responsible for driving Solid State Storage forward within the industry for Samsung in a variety of standards arenas, e.g,. as Co-Chair of the SNIA Technical Council, Chair of the SCSI T10 Committee, NVMe board member, Author of the NVMe-KV Command Standard, Secretary of ATA T13 Committee, and editor of the SCSI T10 Block Commands document. He has also had extensive experience in the Fibre Channel arena including with the T11 Standards committee and leading FC interoperability events. His employers have included HP, Gadzoox, Brocade, Sierra Logic, Emulex and now Samsung. His industry work has been recognized with numerous awards from INCITS, the FCIA and the SNIA.

Ryan McKenzie

Senior Platform and Performance Engineer, iXsystems

Biography

Ryan earned his Masters in Computer Science from the Univ. of KY with a focus in numerical methods and data driven simulations. After spending several academic years as a full time lecturer teaching programming, Ryan took a research position at UNC Chapel Hill working to capture and replay network traffic using application layer aware tools. Ryan applied this work to internships and VMware testing virtual NIC drivers and at EMC deploying testbeds for storage performance benchmarking. Ryan worked 5 years on the performance team at EMC and has now spent 2 years on the performance team at iXsystems.

Pankaj Mehra

VP of Storage Pathfinding, Samsung Electronics

Biography

Pankaj Mehra is VP of Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. He was previously VP and Senior Fellow at both SanDisk and WD, WW CTO at Fusion-io, and a Distinguished Technologist at HP. Besides his 3 books on Machine Learning and Systems, Pankaj has over 50 papers and patents resulting from his work building Storage Systems, Persistent Memory, Data Center Fabrics, and Near-Data Processing. Dr. Mehra has held Faculty and Research positions at IIT Delhi, UC Santa Cruz, IBM Research, and NASA Ames.

Takashi Menjo

Researcher, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation

Biography

Takashi Menjo is a Researcher at NTT Software Innovation Center located in Tokyo, Japan. He works in the area of PMEM-aware applications, especially redesigning traditional disk-based softwares such as PostgreSQL.

Dr. Jai Menon

Chief Scientist, Fungible

Biography

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

Dr. J Metz

Chairman, SNIA

Biography

J Metz serves as Interim Chair of the SNIA Board of Directors. J is Field CTO for Rockport Networks where he drives cutting-edge technology strategy and decisions. Recognized as a leading storage networking expert, J is an evangelist for all storage-related technology and has a unique ability to dissect and explain complex concepts and strategies. He is passionate about the innerworkings and application of emerging technologies.

J was previously an R&D Engineer for advanced storage and storage networking at Cisco. He has been a leader in several key industry standards groups, sitting on the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). A popular blogger and active on Twitter, his areas of expertise include NVMe, SANs, Fibre Channel, and storage security.

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

Stefan Metzmacher

Developer, SerNet/Samba-Team

Biography

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

Dave Minturn

Principal Engineer, Intel

Biography

Dave Minturn is a Principal Engineer in the Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. Dave was a co-author of the NVMe-oF v1.0 and v1.1 specifications which includes the NVMe/RDMA and NVMe/TCP transports

Rupin Mohan

Director R&D, CTO SAN, HPE

Biography

Rupin Mohan is a Director of Research & Development and CTO of Storage Networking (SAN) at HPE Storage. Rupin leads a global R&D team responsible for development of Storage Networking products. Rupin has filed 30+ patents, at HPE. Rupin has 25+ years’ experience in Storage Networking stack development and has been instrumental in picking significant technology & business trends, technical evaluation, and analysis of new technologies in Storage Networking. He is a Board Member and Marketing Chairman for FCIA. Rupin completed his MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management as a Sloan Fellow. He also holds a MS in Engineering from Tufts University and BE in Computer. Engineering from Delhi Institute of Technology.

Jason Molgaard

Principal Storage Solutions Architect, Arm Inc.

Biography

Jason Molgaard is the Principal Storage Solutions Architect at Arm, where he works closely with the top storage suppliers globally to define leading-edge processor subsystems and overall system storage controller architectures.? He focuses on determining the best tradeoffs among performance, cost, and area.? Jason also helps define Computational Storage through participation in SNIA’s Computational Storage TWG.? An experienced ASIC/SoC design engineer, he has proven architecture, design, verification, and design leadership experience with an emphasis on developing enterprise storage and server ASICs, including microprocessor and microcontroller design and integration. Before joining Arm, Jason architected and designed HDD and SSD storage controllers for Western Digital, SanDisk, Toshiba, and Fujitsu. Jason holds an MSEE and BSEE from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Jagadish Mukku

Technical Director, Robin.io

Biography

Jagadish Mukku is a technical director leading the Data Protection and Cloud Mobility at Robin.io. He played a key role in architecting the ROBIN platform enterprise storage stack that powers data protection, cloud mobility, life cycle management of databases and data intensive applications. Prior to Robin.io he was a Senior Architect at Violin Systems known for delivering the industry's first million iops in a 4U All Flash Array. He has been in the storage industry for 19 years starting his career in Veritas and built products in scale out storage, distributed systems, and file systems throughout his career.

Hani Nemati

Software Engineer, Microsoft

Biography

Hani Nemati is a Software Engineer at Microsoft. He works with Kernel (Windows and Linux) teams as system performance engineer. Prior to this, he was a PhD student in the DORSAL Lab at Polytechnique Montreal where he worked on Linux tracing and Virtualization technology.

Myoungwon Oh

Rethinking Distributed Storage System Architecture for Fast Storage Devices, Samsung Electronics

Biography

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

Michael Oros

Executive Director, SNIA

Biography

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

Jim Pappas

Chairman, CXL Consortium; Director of Technology Initiatives, Intel, CXL Consortium

Biography

Jim Pappas is the Director of Technology Initiatives at Intel Corporation. In this role, Jim is responsible to establish broad industry ecosystems that comply with new technologies in the areas of Enterprise I/O, Energy Efficient Computing, Solid State Storage, and Persistent Memory. Jim has founded or has served on several organizations in these areas including PCI-SIG, Universal Serial Bus (USB), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), Open Fabrics Alliance (OFA), The Green Grid (TGG), Compute Express Link™ (CXL), and many others. Jim has over 30 years of experience in the computer industry. He has been granted eight U.S. patents in the areas of computer graphics and microprocessor technologies. He has spoken at dozens of major industry events and holds a B.S.E.E. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Joey Parnell

Sr. Architect, NetApp

Biography

Joey Parnell is a software architect and development lead at NetApp in the E-Series product group, responsible for reliability and availability features including SCSI and NVMe-oF support, storage virtualization, active-active I/O support, automatic load balancing, and data security features. Recently his focus has been technical leadership on video surveillance solutions. Prior to NetApp, he was a development lead and software developer at LSI Corporation, responsible for serviceability and diagnostics features of RAID disk array subsystems. He graduated from Wichita State University with BS and MS degrees in Computer Science.

Scott Peterson

Senior Software Engineer, Intel

Biography

Scott works in Intel's Data Platforms Group primarily on disaggregated storage solutions and Ceph client caching. Previously Scott was a technical lead on Dell's FluidCache (a distributed fault tolerant host write-back cache for SANs), and worked on a cluster filesystem at PolyServe (HP).

Sergei Platonov

VP of Strategy, RAIDIX

Biography

Data storage expert with more than ten years of experience. Robust experience in scientific and technical research as well as implementing new erasure coding algorithms. Was Head of Research Laboratory for 2 years. During this period, the lab registered several patents and prepared a series of scientific publications. Sergey was engaged in joined projects with prominent universities (St Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University, Saint Petersburg Polytechnic University, Universität zu Lübeck).

He was a shortlisted nominee for Expert of the Year Award by the “Expert” IT magazine. Invited as an industry expert to the SORT international conference. A regular speaker at industry events including MSKF, SC, HPEC, SORT.

More facts about Sergei:

• Author to tens of publications in industry journals
• Organizer of the unique and the largest data storage ‘geek’ conference in Eastern Europe

Daniel Pollack

CTO, Data Storage Science LLC

Biography

Dan Pollack was introduced to UNIX in 1988 and has been a System Administrator of some sort since 1990. He has worked in the financial, government and online service industries. As a systems architect he's designed and built enterprise class web scale infrastructures utilizing cutting edge technologies. He is a multidisciplinary technology expert with a focus on storage systems at scale. In 2001 he authored a book based on the knowledge gathered from his early storage networking implementations called "Practical Storage Area Networking." He currently resides at Data Storage Science LLC in Northern Virginia where he is the CTO.

Keshav Prasad

Co-founder and CTO, Memhive

Biography

Keshav Prasad is a seasoned software architect from Bangalore India. He is CTO and co-founder at Memhive, where he co-develops apps that run faster with Persistent Memory. He was one of the principal engineers in his earlier startup Tegile Systems (acquired by Western Digital), where he led the design and development of various features of Intelliflash storage appliance and Intellicare cloud analytics platform. He loves anything to do with technology, especially in the fields of big data management and analytics.

Denis Pravdin

Senior Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Biography

Denis is a lead of data center workloads performance analysis in Intel® VTune™ Profiler team. He is specialized in improving performance analysis of customer storage applications including cases running in virtualized environments and anomaly detection methodology based on Intel® Processor Trace.

Nick Principe

Platform and Performance Engineering Supervisor, iXsystems

Biography

Nick Principe is Platform and Performance Engineering Supervisor at iXsystems working on customer-focused performance engineering and marketing collateral. Nick has worked in the performance engineering field for over 15 years, focusing on the performance measurement and analysis of NAS systems. Nick has also contributed to the development of two SPEC SFS benchmarks, the SNIA Emerald v3.0 specification, and was one of the first co-chairs of the SNIA Workload TWG. Nick is currently Secretary and Editor of the SPEC Storage subcommittee.

Garrett Ransom

Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Biography

Garrett Ransom is a storage administrator and developer in the HPC Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is responsible for the design, deployment, and management of long-term storage infrastructure to support the Laboratory's extensive scientific HPC capabilities. Garrett received a bachelor's in Computer Science from New Mexico Tech in 2016. Over the last 3 years at the Laboratory, he has contributed to the development of MarFS, Pftool, Marchive, and GUFI. Additionally, Garrett has overseen the deployment of production Campaign Storage systems and provides administrative support for MarFS, GPFS, and HPSS filesystems across the site.

Hannes Reinecke

Kernel Storage Architect, SUSE Software Solutions

Biography

Studied Physics with main focus image processing in Heidelberg from 1990 until 1997, followed by a PhD in Edinburgh 's Heriot-Watt University in 2000. Worked as sysadmin during the studies, mainly in the Mathematical Institute in Heidelberg. After working as a teamlead at SUSE Labs for storage and networking I've switched roles to become the Kernel Storage Architect at SUSE Labs, concentrating on developing new technologies and integrating upstream implementations into SUSE Linux. Principal contact point for storage and network related issues on SLES.

Linux addict since the earliest days (0.95); various patches to get Linux up and running. Main points of interest are storage, (i)SCSI, FC/FCoE, NVMe-OF, and multipathing. And S/390, naturally.

I'm active on the Linux SCSI mailing list, reviewing patches and dusting out murky corners in the SCSI stack. Recently got involved in the NVMe effort, working together with partners like NetApp, Broadcom, and Marvell to get NVMe-oF to production quality.

Jean-Baptiste Riaux

Senior Field Application Engineer, Kalray

Biography

Jean-Baptiste Riaux is a Sr Field Application Engineer at Kalray for the Data Center Business Unit. He specializes in storage and HPC applications, and has a strong experience in deploying NVMe and NVMe-oF storage solutions. Before joining Kalray, Jean-Baptiste gained an extensive experience of the storage and HPC domains in DDN.

Eric Ries

SVP Memory and Storage Strategy Division, KIOXIA America Inc., KIOXIA America, Inc.

Biography

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

Eric is a graduate of Brigham Young University.

Thomas Rivera

Strategic Success Manager, VMware Carbon Black

Biography

Andy Rudoff

Persistent Memory SW Architect, Intel

Biography

Andy Rudoff is a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, focusing on Non-Volatile Memory programming. He is a contributor to the SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group and the CXL Memory Systems Workgroup which defined the extensions required for the configuration of Persistent Memory on CXL.

Thomas Salemy

Software Engineer, Microsoft

Biography

Thomas is deeply passionate about the intersection of computer science with the physical world, and accordingly the expanding opportunities of compute and storage at the edge. He is a Boston native but now lives in Seattle as a member of the SMB team at Microsoft.

Josh Salomon

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Biography

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

Leah Schoeb

Sr Developer Relations Manager, AMD

Biography

Leah Schoeb is a Sr. Developer Relations Manager at AMD focused on system-level platform architecture for AMD's storage ecosystem. She has over 25 years' experience in helping systems companies with performance engineering and optimization, market positioning, benchmark evidence creation, and guiding industry standards development for system, virtualization, containerized, and data solutions. She has served in leadership roles for performance architecture for a wide variety of major companies, including VMware, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Intel, and Amdahl. An active participant in standards work for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). She earned a BSEE from the University of Maryland and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. She is a member of the Flash Memory Summit’s Conference Advisory Board and the organizer of the Annual Update series of presentations.

Scott Schweitzer

Systems Architect, Xilinx Inc.

Biography

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

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

Peter Scott

Senior Engineer, Thales, Inc

Biography

I have worked in kernel mode development for over 25 years, focusing primarily on the Windows platforms. My main area of expertise is in the file system and storage stacks.

Mike Scriber

Sr. Director, Server Solution Management, Supermicro

Biography

Mike Scriber is the Sr. Director Server Solution Management at Supermicro, where he designs very high density storage systems using NVMe. His recent work includes 1U racks with close to 1 petabyte capacity using U.2 drives and the EDSFF form factor drives. Before joining Supermicro, he was Director of Systems Engineering at Samsung Semiconductor, where he designed and developed the first 2U 40 NVMe SSD storage systems. He has also held senior engineering positions at Dell, Toshiba, IBM, and Intel during his 35-year career in the technology industry. He earned an MS in computer engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology and a BS in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

Scott Shadley

VP Marketing, NGD Systems

Biography

Scott Shadley is a member of the SNIA Board of Directors and VP Marketing at NGD Systems where he leads marketing, product management, and product development for the company’s industry-leading computational storage. He has been a key figure in promoting computational storage, being co-chair of the SNIA Technical Working Group on the subject which he helped found, and speaking on the subject at Open Compute Summit, Flash Memory Summit, multiple SDCs, and many other events, press interviews, blogs, and webinars. Before joining NGD Systems, Scott managed the Product Marketing team at Micron, was the Business Line Manager for the SATA SSD portfolio, and was the Principal Technologist for the SSD and emerging memory portfolio. He launched four successful innovative SSDs for Micron and two for STEC, all of which were multimillion dollar sellers. Scott earned a BSEE in Device Physics from Boise State University and an MBA in marketing from University of Phoenix.

Vipin Shankar

VP of Engineering, Calsoft

Biography

Vipin Shankar is currently working as VP-Engineering at Calsoft and drives engineering groups from business advancement and new technologies R&D perspective. Vipin has more than two decades of experience in delivering products in multiple domains such as Storage, Network Management, Mobile device management, Cloud based EDA, Disaster Recovery to name a few. He has spearheaded engineering teams by being in the leadership position for companies like Veritas, Symantec, Motorola, Saba, SiCAD and Globant.

Debendra Das Sharma

Intel Fellow; Director of I/O Technology and Standards Group, Intel

Biography

Dr. Debendra Das Sharma is an Intel Fellow and Director of I/O Technology and Standards Group. He is an expert in IO subsystem and interface architecture, delivering Intel-wide critical interconnect technologies in Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe), coherency, multichip package interconnect, SoC, and rack scale architecture. He is the Technical Task Force Co-chair of CXL™ Consortium and a board member of PCI-SIG.

Debendra joined Intel in 2001 from HP. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Bachelor of Technology (Hons) degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He holds 99 U.S. patents. Debendra currently lives in Saratoga, Calif. with his wife and two sons. He enjoys reading and participating in various outdoor and volunteering activities with his family.

Suchakrapani Sharma

Staff Scientist, ShiftLeft Inc

Biography

Suchakra is currently a Staff Scientist at ShiftLeft Inc. where he plays around with large graphs and hunts bugs. He completed his PhD in Computer Engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal where he worked on eBPF and hardware-assisted tracing techniques to advance systems performance analysis. On related topics, he has delivered talks & trainings at meetups/conferences such as USENIX LISA, All Systems Go, Papers We Love, Tracing Summit etc. He also developed one of the first hardware-trace based VM analysis techniques.

Mehul Sheth

Principal Performance Engineer, Veritas Technologies LL

Biography

Mehul Sheth was a Senior Performance Engineer in Performance Labs at Druva untill July 2020 where he was responsible for the performance of CloudApps product of Druva InSync and Filesystem / NAS solution of Druva Phoenix. He has a experience of about 14 years in development and performance engineering, where he has ensured production performance of thousands of applications. Mehul loves to tackle unsolved problems and strives to bring a simple solution to the table, rather than trying complex things.

Mohammad Asif Siddiqui

System Engineer, Huawei Technologies

Biography

Mohammad Asif Siddiqui is System Engineer at Huawei Technologies. has over 6+ years of experience in Cloud and MicroServices Domain. He has been working on developing ServiceMesh and Kubernetes Native systems for HPC workloads. His focus area lies on servicemesh, resource management, resource scheduling and microservices for distributed system and hybrid cloud solutions. He is one of the core member of development Team for Mesher(A ServiceMesh Implementation of Huawei). He is a member of an Apache IPMC(Incubator Project Management Committee) and a member Apache ServiceComb PMC. He is the project owner for Service-Center(Huawei Service Registry). He was the core member for ServiceComb and has helped ServiceComb project from Incubation to Graduation as a Top Level Project in ASF. Asif has worked in multiple Huawei Cloud Products like Cloud Application Engine, Cloud Container Engine, Cloud Service Engine, ServiceStage, Cloud Application Services, ROMA

Amarjit Singh

Director, DevOps Solutions, Kioxia America

Biography

Amarjit Singh is the director of solutions engineering within the KumoScale™ Shared and Accelerated Storage Software team at KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.). He is a hands-on private and public cloud enthusiast who leads DevOps and cloud solutions engineering within the team. He is currently working on expanding the capabilities of KumoScale software while also enabling NVMe flash ‘as a service’ in modern cloud infrastructures. Amarjit has managed large and massive infrastructures in both public clouds and data centers, and has spent the past 20 years helping to evolve cloud infrastructures. Mr Singh earned Bachelors’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Thapar University, India.

Radha Krishna Singuru

DMTS - Senior Member, Wipro Technologies

Biography

Radhakrishna has graduated from IIT Kanpur, in CSE and has more than 24 years of industrial experience in product and system software development ranging from Cloud and virtualization technologies, scalable platforms, SDN, L2/L3 switching and stacking software spanning across multiple industry domains. He has filed multiple patents in the area of Network Security, Virtualization, Load Balancers, IOT, Edge Computing, Block Chain, Serverless Computing etc. He has published multiple papers in SDN, Cloud Security, Cloud Analytics, Autonomous Vehicles etc. He is a DMTS - Senior Member and Chief Architect Product POD

David Sloan

Senior Software Engineer, Eideticom

Biography

David Sloan is a Software Engineer at Eideticom, a developer of systems and software for advanced storage applications. At Eideticom, he has worked on the development of an FPGA-based accelerator for NVMe-based systems. His duties include scaring away monster squirrels, pouring authentic Canadian maple syrup on the keyboards of delinquent programmers, and being sure that all Canadians remain unmemorable (as referenced in the Doonesbury comic strip). He received his PhD from the University of Alberta, where he has worked on integrated circuit design and system integration. He earned a BSc in computer engineering from the University of Alberta.

Curtis Stevens

Technologist, Seagate Technology

Biography

Curtis Stevens has been actively working in standardization for 35+ years. Organizations include SMPTE, SFF, USB, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, IEEE, PCI, JEDEC and 1394.

Jacob Strauss

Principal Engineer, Amazon

Biography

Jacob Strauss is a Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services currently working on the Amazon Elastic File System. He has been at AWS since 2013 building distributed systems under the guise of storage services and growing Amazon's Boston-area engineering teams. In the distant past as part of PhD work at MIT he worked on smaller-scale systems such as overlay networks and personal storage.

Rafal Szczesniak

Principal Software Engineer, Dell EMC

Biography

Rafal Szczesniak is a Principal Software Engineer at Dell EMC. He works primarily on SMB, DCE/RPC and authentication protocols in Isilon scale out clustered storage. His background and prior experience include developing Likewise Storage Stack as well as Samba.

Boris Tankhilevich

CEO, Magtera, Inc.

Biography

Ph.D in Quantum Magnetism, Academia of Sciences of former USSR
J. D. from Hastings College of the Law, CA
Registered Patent Attorney
U. S. Citizen
Co-Founded with Adam Tachner Magtera, Inc. in 2011 www.magtera.com

Perry Taylor

Senior Performance Monitoring Engineer, Intel Corporation

Biography

Perry Taylor is a senior performance monitoring engineer, developing methodologies for Intel platform observation that are utilized in optimization, characterization and debug of system and software performance.

Niraj Tolia

CEO, Kasten

Biography

Niraj Tolia is the CEO and Co-Founder at Kasten and is interested in all things Kubernetes. He has played multiple roles in the past, including the Senior Director of Engineering for Dell EMC's CloudBoost family of products and the VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Maginatics (acquired by EMC). Niraj received his PhD, MS, and BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Sidney Tsai

Research Staff Member, Manager, IBM

Biography

HsinYu (Sidney) Tsai received her Ph.D. from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 and joined IBM as a research staff member. Sidney currently works in the Alamden Research Center in San Jose, CA, managing the Analog AI group for deep learning acceleration using PCM-based technology. Before joining the neuromorphic computing group, Sidney worked in the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y, where she is developed next generation lithography for circuit applications with directed self-assembly (DSA) and managed the Advanced Lithography group in the Microelectronics Research Laboratory.

Jeremiah Tussey

Board of Directors, STA; Alliances Manager, Microchip

Biography

Jeremiah Tussey is the alliance product marketing manager for Data Center Solutions at Microchip, and the vice president of the SCSI Trade Association. He supports Microchip’s vendor alliances for SAS and PCIe products and associated involvement in industry events related to PCI-SIG, NVMe, and SAS. Prior to joining PMC in 2012 (now Microchip), Jeremiah was a senior hardware application engineer for SAS products at Maxim Integrated and Vitesse Semiconductor (now Microchip). In total, he has over 20 years of experience in the storage industry.

Arie van der Hoeven

Principal Product Manager, Seagate Technology

Biography

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

Himanshu Varshney

Technical Project Leader, Huawei Technologies India Private Limited

Biography

Himanshu Varshney is currently working as Technical Project Leader at Huawei Technologies India, contributing towards OpenSDS, an open source community to address storage integration challenges with heterogeneous storage platforms. He has worked on Multi-Cloud solutions, VMware plugin, Orchestration Manager, Workflow Manager etc. for OpenSDS. He has worked as Software Developer at DELL-EMC Corporation for 2 years in Data Protection and Backup/Restore Products, Management Server for Multi-Cluster Management. He was a Research Associate for 2 years in IIT Delhi and completed M.Tech from IIIT Delhi. He has an IEEE publication as White Space Detection and Spectrum Characterization in Urban and Rural India, 2013 IEEE 14th International Symposium. Apart from his work, he explores and contributes to the cutting edge technologies, emerging standards, tools and best practices.

Anil Vasudevan

Sr. Principal Engineer, Intel

Biography

Anil is a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corp.

Joseph Vazhappilly

Senior System Architect, SODA Foundation/Huawei

Biography

Joseph Vazhappilly contributes to SODA Foundation open source projects in Storage and Cloud domain. He has more than 18 years of industry experience in the areas of Storage, Cloud Computing, Graphics, Linux Drivers, etc. and Graduated in Electronics and Communications Engg from Kerala University.

Divya Vijayakumar

Senior Software Engineer, MSys Technologies

Biography

Divya holds prominent experience in the DevOps domain, engaging in all tools and processes. In her prior experience with Comcast communications, she has worked on crucial framework developments involving complete DevOps workflow along with Python programming.

At Msys, she is responsible for collaborating with the team to get data to the client on time. She has worked on containerizing complex applications with a strong background of Docker and Kubernetes.

Haris Volos

Assistant Professor, University of Cyprus

Biography

Haris Volos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cyprus in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests span broad areas of computer systems, including computer architecture, systems software, and non-volatile memory systems. Before joining the University of Cyprus, he worked as a software engineer at Google, Mountain View, USA (2018-2019) and as a research engineer at Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, USA (2013-2018). He obtained his engineering degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2005) from the National Technical University of Athens (Metsovion). He received his M.Sc. (2007) and Ph.D. (2012) in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Daniel Waddington

Principal Research Staff Member, IBM

Biography

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

Orit Wasserman

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Biography

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

Neil Werdmuller

Director of Storage Solutions, Arm, Ltd.

Biography

Neil Werdmuller is the director of storage solutions, Automotive and IoT Line of Business at Arm. Neil is responsible for driving Arm processor and SoC technologies that power billions of storage controllers worldwide, including SSDs, hard drives, eMMC/UFS embedded memory, and in-memory controllers for HBM and emerging memory technologies. Neil works closely with the industry’s top storage suppliers globally to develop cutting-edge processing solutions that push the frontiers of speed, cost and area for the storage market. Neil led the team that developed the Arm Cortex-R8 processor, which invisibly powers many of today's market-leading storage products.

Before joining Arm, he was responsible for strategic sourcing in TI’s Wireless Connectivity Business Unit bringing critical technologies in-house to support the business. He has over 30 years’ experience in embedded markets and earned a BSc in Computer Science from Portsmouth University (UK).

Wen Xin

Software Engineer, Microsoft

Biography

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

Xu-Lin

Architect Huawei, Maintainer SODA Foundation

Biography

Erik Xu (Xu-Lin) is a senior architect at Huawei, where he is responsible for designing and developing the management of software-defined storage(SDS). He is also active in the SODA community as one of the contributors to SODA projects. He is an enthusiast of data and storage standard and orchestration.

Juncheng Yang

Carnegie Mellon University & Twitter

Biography

Juncheng Yang is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University and researcher at Twitter. His work mostly focuses on storage systems with a focus on caching system. His research has been published at OSDI, SoCC, HotCloud, ICDE, etc.

Ziye Yang

Staff cloud software engineer, Intel

Biography

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

Yao Yue

Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Twitter

Biography

Yao Yue is an engineer and manager working at Twitter Platform. She has been working on distributed cache since 2010, with extensive experience with popular OSS projects such as Memcached and Redis. She designed and implemented a modular open-sourced cache framework called Pelikan (more at pelikan.io). Since 2017, she has started and managed the Infrastructure Performance and Optimization team. Her team work on infrastructure performance and capacity monitoring, optimizing systems configurations and utilization, cross-service tracing an insight at scale, and advancing software design to take advantage of new hardware technologies.

Jian Zhang

Software Engineer Manager, Intel Corporation

Biography

Jian Zhang is a senior software engineering manager at Intel, where he and his team primarily focus on Open Source Storage development and optimizations on Intel platforms, and build reference solutions for customers. He has over 10 years of experience in performance analysis and optimization for many open source projects such as Xen, KVM, Swift, Ceph, Spark, and Hadoop and benchmarking workloads such as those from SPEC or TPC. He earned a master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University. He has mulitple publications and has also presented at the OpenStack Summit, Vault, Strata Data conference, Cephalocon, OFA workshop, Flash Memory Summit, Spark AI Summit etc.

Tong Zhang

Chief Scientist, ScaleFlux

Biography

Tong Zhang is a co-founder and the Chief Scientist of ScaleFlux, a Silicon Valley startup on commercializing computational solid-state storage drives. He is also currently a Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2002. His current research areas include memory and data storage systems, computer architecture, and VLSI signal processing. He has graduated 17 PhD students, and co-authored over 160 papers, with over 5,000 citations and h-index of 40. Among his many research accomplishments, he made pioneering contributions to establishing the research area of flash memory signal processing and enabling practical implementation of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codecs in commercial data storage and communication systems. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Yi Zou

Research scientist, Intel Corp

Biography

Research Scientist at Intel labs