Donnie Berkholz

Research Director, 451 Research

Biography

Now serving as Research Director for the Development, DevOps, and IT Ops team at 451 Research. Growing 451's footprint and recognition across the entire software lifecycle. Overall responsibility for diverse areas encompassing private cloud, API management, IT monitoring, DevOps, PaaS, and more. Personal coverage includes development, testing, and release engineering — including languages and language tooling, version control, CI/CD, ALM and build/deployment pipelines, and more.

Previously at RedMonk, the only developer-focused analyst firm, with significant involvement in publication, consults, multimedia products, data-driven research, and speaking engagements. Expert in analysis, visualization, and communication of large, complex problems and datasets as a Ph.D.-trained scientist with >10 published papers. Leader in the open-source community with deep expertise in Gentoo Linux (where I led ~250 developers) and software packaging as well as high-level programming skills (shell scripting, Python). Insightful technical writer and strong communicator with publications on LWN.net, a syndicated blog that topped 38,000 readers, and numerous prizes and recognition for scientific/technical writing and presentations.

Gleb Budman

CEO, Backblaze

Biography

Gleb Budman is CEO and co-founder of Backblaze, a leading cloud storage company that stores over 150 petabytes of data and has recovered over 10 billion files for customers. Gleb bootstrapped Backblaze to millions in revenue and profitability. The company won the SIIA CODiE for Best Cloud Storage and secured a spot on Deloitte’s Fast 500 fastest growing technology companies as a result of its 917% five-year revenue growth.

Previously, Gleb led the product teams from pre-funding through acquisition at Kendara and MailFrontier, and founded three prior companies. He received his MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School, has been a speaker at events including GigaOm Structure, Massive Storage Systems and Technology, and SNIA; profiled by Inc. and Forbes; and holds 5 patents on security. @GlebBudman

Bev Crair

Vice President and General Manager, Storage Group, Intel

Biography

Bev Crair is vice president in the Data Center Group and general manager of the Storage Group at Intel Corporation. She leads the team responsible for delivering business strategies and products that address the existing and emerging storage needs of Intel customers across a breadth of environments, including the cloud, the enterprise, high-performance computing and communications.

Crair joined Intel in 2010 as director of graphics software engineering in the company's Embedded Communications Group. She was named director of software engineering for the group in 2011, with responsibility for the development of software and strategies. Before assuming her current role in 2013, she was general manager of the Intelligent Solutions Division within Intel's Intelligent Solutions Group.

Before joining Intel, Crair was vice president of DXi Engineering at Quantum Corporation. Earlier in her career, she held a variety of senior management and engineering positions at Burroughs (later, Unisys), Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Educomp and Sun Microsystems. Her tenure at Sun included being honored with the Sun Microsystems Leadership Award in 2005.

Crair holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz; and an MBA degree from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University. She is a standing member of the Dean's Advisory Council at the UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering and represents Intel in the Workforce Alliance with the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

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.

Richard McDougall

Big Data and Storage Chief Scientist, VMware

Biography

Richard McDougall is the Big Data and Storage Chief Scientist at VMware. He is working on advanced development and analytics for core vSphere storage and application storage services, including Big Data, Hadoop.

Prior, as the Chief Performance architect Richard drove the performance strategy and initiatives to enable virtualization of high-end mission critical applications on VMware products.

Prior to joining VMware, Richard was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years at Sun, he was responsible for driving high performance and scalability initiatives for Solaris and key applications on the Sun platform. He served on the central software platform architecture review committee, and also drove the early resource management initiatives for Solaris. Recognized as an operating system and performance expert, he developed several technologies for the Solaris operating system and co-authored several books—including “Solaris Resource Management”, “Solaris Internals” and “Solaris Performance and Tools”.

Richard holds several patents in the area of performance instrumentation, algorithms and distributed file system technologies.

Jim Pinkerton

Partner Architect Lead, Microsoft

Biography

Jim Pinkerton is currently an architect in the Windows Server division of Microsoft. His primary role is architecting private cloud solutions, including networking, storage, fabric, and management at scale. In that role, he was the lead architect for Microsoft’s “Cloud Server System” (CPS). Previously Jim worked as a storage architect on advanced scale-out file servers, including working as the lead architect on a next generation file access protocol, SMB3. SMB3 supports transparent server and network failover, high performance fabrics such as RDMA and 40 gigabit Ethernet, peer-to-peer distributed access, and highly optimized WAN/branch office access. He has also helped deliver the Windows NFSv4.1 server, iSCSI target, and other storage innovations. Prior to that he was a network architect in the Windows core networking team, working on Scalable Networking technologies and advanced network device interfaces such as RDMA, IPSec, RSS, and the Chimney architecture.

Jim has helped create standards within SNIA, IETF, ANSI T11, InfiniBand Trade Association, and the RDMA Consortium, including co-chairing some of the technical working groups and authoring some of the specifications. He has helped create industry interop events through both SNIA and the UNH IOL Consortium.

Andy Rudoff

Software Architect, Intel

Biography

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

Laz Vekiarides

CTO and Co-founder, ClearSky Data

Biography

For more than 20 years, Laz Vekiarides has served in key technical and leadership roles delivering breakthrough technologies to market. Most recently, he served as the executive director of software engineering for Dell’s EqualLogic Storage Engineering group, where he led the development of numerous storage innovations and established the EqualLogic product line as a leader in host OS and hypervisor integration.

Laz joined Dell from EqualLogic, which was acquired in early 2008, where he was a member of the core leadership team – playing a key role in the company’s early success as a senior engineering manager and architect for the PS Series SAN arrays and host tools. Prior to EqualLogic, Laz held senior engineering and management positions at several companies, including 3COM and Banyan Systems.

Laz frequently speaks at industry conferences, particularly in the areas of virtualization and data storage. He holds several storage technology patents, as well as a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Northeastern University and a master’s degree in computer science from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Michael Adam, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Michael works at Red Hat as a principal software engineer in the storage engineering team. Before, he was working as a software engineer and lead of the Samba team at SerNet. As a member of the international Samba Team Michael specializes on clustered Samba and the development of SMB2 and SMB3.

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Ankit Agrawal, Solution Developer, TCS

Ankit has 6+ year of industry experience in soft development, QA in storage Product Engineering. currently he is the part of SPE-storage team of Hi-tech Industry Unit. He has been working as a solution developer. He is also focusing on investigation and PoC for some emerging cloud computing technology such as OpenStack. He has 6 year experiance on Java/J2ee, RESTful web services and Storage technologies.

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Irfan Ahmad, CTO, CloudPhysics

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

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

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Alex Aizman, CTO and Founder, Nexenta Systems

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

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Teague Algie, Software Developer, Cleversafe

Teague Algie is Software Developer at Cleversafe, where he works on the Tools team developing internal tools.

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Jeremy Allison, Engineer, Google Samba Team

Jeremy Allison is the co-creator of the Samba project and a lead developer on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing a Free Software Windows compatible authentication, file and print server product for Linux and UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed manner similar to the Linux kernel, Samba is used by all GNU/Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba development efforts and acts as a corporate liason to companies using the Samba code commercially.

He works for Google, Inc. who fund him to work full-time on improving Samba and solving the problems of Windows and Linux interoperability.

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Jeff Autor, Distinguished Technologist, HP

Jeff Autor is a Distinguished Technologist in the HP Servers Business Unit of the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP). Over his 24-year career at HP he has designed and developed systems management technology for HP server products. Jeff co-authored the first SNMP server management MIBs, and has been involved in the architecture of numerous HP BladeSystem, HP ProLiant and HP iLO management technologies. He has architected and developed manageability interfaces both internal and external to the server ecosystem including support for SNMP, IPMI and JSON-based RESTful protocols. Jeff earned a BS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds 17 patents in the areas of computer system management, hardware abstraction and failover clustering.

Jeff is currently co-Chair of the DMTF's Scalable Platforms Management Forum, leading the effort to create the Redfish open industry standard for systems management using modern RESTful-style protocols and customer-friendly data models.

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Eric Barton, General Manager, Intel

Eric received his BSc in computer science at Edinburgh University in 1979 and then studied at the California Institute of Technology, focusing on CAD and parallel processing. He joined Inmos in 1980 to build the CAD system that was used to develop the Transputer, a revolutionary new microprocessor featuring integrated communications.

In 1985 he co-founded Meiko Ltd to build massively parallel computers based first on the Transputer and latterly on Sparc using Elan/Elite, a low latency RDMA fabric developed in-house. He left Meiko in 1996 to work as an independent consultant and was engaged by Cluster File Systems in 2002 to work on the Lustre parallel file system, becoming Lead Engineer of the Lustre Group when Sun Microsystems acquired the company in 2007. In 2010 after Oracle acquired Sun, he co-founded Whamcloud Inc. to assure the continued development and support of Lustre as an Open Source GPL filesystem. Intel acquired Whamcloud in 2012, where Eric is now is Lead Architect of the High Performance Data Division, working on storage architectures for Exascale.

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Stephen Bates, Technical Director, PMC

Stephen Bates is a Technical Director at PMC-Sierra Inc. He works on next-generation storage systems and is an architect for PMC’s family of SSD controllers. Prior to PMC he taught at the University of Alberta, Canada where his research focused on Low-Density Parity Check codes and hardware acceleration of bioinformatics algorithms. Before that he worked as a DSP and ECC architect for a variety of companies include Aquantia and Massana. He gained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1997.

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Luke Behnke, VP of Product, Bitcasa

Luke has been at Bitcasa since 2012. Previous product management positions at various start-ups: Movoto, Currensee. Prior to that an engineer. He has an MBA from MIT, and a BS in Mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin.

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Caitlin Bestler, Senior Director of Arch, Nexenta Systems

Caitlin Bestler is Sr. Director of Architecture at Nexenta Systems and is the architect of the NexentaEdge product line. Her experience includes not only storage systems but networking (especially RDMA) and Cable TV control systems. The Cable TV control system experience is strangely relevant to modern distributed storage networking. Controlling cable decoders is managing a highly distributed authorization database with very unreliable components over networks with very poor performance characteristics. Modern storage networks face the same issues, just at far faster speeds.

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Jeff Braunstein, Developer Evangelist, Spectra Logic

Jeff has been with Spectra Logic for 13 years in the areas of Marketing Operations and business systems management. Jeff's background is in web development and programming. Currently, as Developer Evangelist, Jeff is responsible for ensuring that partners and customers have all necessary tools to develop BlackPearl DS3 applications and testing out development tools to ensure that they meet customer and partner need. Jeff is also responsible for giving feedback to the Engineering Team on product features and roadmap and reaching out to potential partners and customers about how to develop DS3 applications. Jeff holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in Engineering from the University of California, Davis.

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Julian Cachua, Software Engineer, IBM

Julian is a Software Engineer at IBM's storage organization. With over 5 years experience on NAS products, he has dedicated the last couple years to simulate customer workloads on QA phases. He currently works on test automation for software defined storage products.

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James Cain, Principal Software Architect, Quantel Limited

Dr James Westland Cain is Principal Software Architect at Quantel Ltd, a UK based engineering firm selling specialist software and bespoke hardware into high-end Film Post Production houses and News and Sports Broadcasters, globally. The products James has helped create are in daily use at companies such as The BBC, ESPN, Rogers and Fox Sports and have helped make films such as Avatar, Gone Girl, Star Trek Into Darkness and The SpongeBob Movie. James, a coder by trade, has co-authored many peer reviewed academic papers, has numerous patents granted and has been a regular attendee at the SNIA SDC CIFS/SMB Plugfest. He was awarded a Ph.D. in advanced Software Engineering by Reading University in 2003 and is a Visiting Fellow at Brunel University.

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Jorge Campello, Director of Systems - Architecture and Solutions, HGST

Jorge Campello holds a Electrical Engineer Degree and a MSc in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He started his career in the storage industry at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. He moved on to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and finally to HGST, a Western Digital Company where he is the Director of Systems, Architecture and Solutions. His interests and expertise revolve around Information Theory, Digital Communications, Security, Databases, Filesystems, Linux, Open Source, Open Compute, Distributed Storage Solutions, Data Center Optimization, Solid State Drives, Emerging NVMs, Solid-State and Hybrid Arrays, Networking, Computer and CPU Architecture.

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Mark Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba

Mark A. Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards at Toshiba, has more than 35 years of experience with Networking and Storage development and more than 18 years experience with Java technology. Mark was one of the authors of the CDMI Cloud Storage standard. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events. He is the co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage and Object Drive technical working groups, and serves as vice chair on the SNIA Technical Council.

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Anjaneya Chagam, Principal Engineer, Intel

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

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Suman Chakravartula, Maintainer, Rockstor

Suman Chakravartula is an experienced application developer with primary focus on web, cloud infrastructure, storage and open source. He's the creator and maintainer of the open source project called Rockstor and the founder of the company behind it. He has a MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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Jeff Chang, VP Marketing and Business Development, AgigA Tech

At AgigA Tech, Jeff has focused on the promotion and evangelization of NVDIMM technology to the industry at-large. He has been instrumental in driving NVDIMMs to where they are today, with broad market acceptance and industry standardization. In addition to his role at AgigA Tech, Jeff is also the co-chair of the NVDIMM Special Interest Group (SIG) within SNIA/SSSI. During his career, Jeff has provided strategic direction in senior marketing roles for both start-up and public company environments. He has managed product portfolios that span multiple end markets including PC, consumer electronics, enterprise, mobile and operator-class communication systems. His most recent roles have included Sr Director of Marketing at Entropic Communications, VP of Marketing at Staccato Communications, and Business Unit Director of the USB Product Line at Cypress Semiconductor.

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Alan Chen, Principal Software Architect, Radian Memory Systems

As Principal Software Architect, Alan has led design efforts for Radian’s Symphonic Cooperative Flash Management software that involve both host-side functionality and SSD firmware. This type of top to bottom system expertise came naturally for Alan who had previously worked at Aerovironment on hand held drone technology, again working from a top to bottom system-level perspective involving network and radio communication protocols, connecting down to embedded device firmware. Alan has almost twenty years of software design experience, including development of gaming and simulation software, software for real-time systems, and Linux file system internals. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering with a Mathematics minor from California Polytechnic University, Pomona.

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Albert Chen, Engineering Program Director, WDC

Albert works on software solutions at Western Digital. Prior to WD, he worked as program manager at Microsoft and software/firmware development manager at various startups in the bay area. Albert received BS in Computer Science from Cornell University and is currently pursing MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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Yong Chen, Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University

Yong Chen is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Laboratory in the Computer Science Department of Texas Tech University. He is also the Associate Director of the Cloud and Autonomic Computing center at Texas Tech University. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, Cloud computing, and high-performance computing with a focus on building scalable computing systems for data-intensive applications. He has published over 70 research papers in international journals and conferences, and received numerous awards for his research activities including the IEEE TCSC (Technical Committee on Scalable Computing) Young Achievers Award, the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, and several Best Paper Awards. He has also served as editors, chairs, and program committee members for numerous international journals, conferences, and workshops. More information about him can be found at http://www.myweb.ttu.edu/yonchen/.

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Changho Choi, Principal Engineer, Samsung Semiconductor

Dr. Choi leads the Datacenter Solutions Group in Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.'s Memory Solutions Lab. He is primarily involved in the Memory Solutions Lab's Storage Intelligence initiatives including Multi-stream system development and customer engagements. He participates in standards group technical discussions, especially for storage intelligence technology. He has mastered SSD internals, system storage stack, and datacenter solutions. Prior to Samsung, he worked at Cisco systems for nearly six years. His work included mobile and computer networking protocol and architecture, as well as datacenter solutions and cloud computing.

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Neal Christiansen, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft

Neal Christiansen is a Principal Software Development Lead for the NTFS file system team in the Windows Storage, File Systems and Protection Group at Microsoft (Redmond, WA). Neal joined Microsoft in 1999 as a member of the Core File Systems Group working in the File System Filters team. In 2002 he became the Lead for the File System Filters team and was involved with the design and implementation of the Windows FilterManager. In 2007 he became the Lead for the NTFS development team. Neal has 30+ years of system software development experience. He led the design and implementation of the NSS File System for NetWare while at Novell. Neal also led the design and implementation of the Motorola 68000 based WMCS operating system while at Wicat Systems. Neal has a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

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Howard Chu, CTO, Symas

Howard has been writing Free/Open Source software since the 1980s. His work has spanned a wide range of computing topics, including most of the GNU utilities (gcc, gdb, gmake, etc.), networking protocols and tools, kernel and filesystem drivers, and focused on maximizing the useful work from a system. Howard has led the OpenLDAP Project since 2007 and his experience has made OpenLDAP the world’s fastest and most efficient directory software since 2005.

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David Cohen, System Architect, Intel

Dave Cohen is a System Architect and Senior Principle Engineer in Intel’s Data Center Group where he focuses on the system implications of the intersection of networking and storage in the modern data center.

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Ira Cooper, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Ira Cooper is a Principal Software Engineer and Architect at Red Hat, the technical lead for the Red Hat Storage SMB Team, and a member of the Samba Team. His technical interests include storage, networking, virtualization, containers, systems engineering, and systems programming. He has a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has been a fellow at MIT where he focused on distributed systems and systems engineering.

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Damini Ashok Chopra, Software Intern - Office of Chief Technologist, HP

Damini Ashok Chopra is a Software Engineer Intern in the Chief Technologist’s office of HP Storage, where she is working under the mentorship of Doug Voigt, Distinguished Technologist at HP. At HP, she is involved in designing a workload generator for performance characterization of Persistent Memory. She is currently pursuing her MS degree in Computer Engineering from Boston University.

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Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a widely respected storage analyst and consultant. He has over 30 years in the data storage industry with multiple engineering and management positions at high profile companies.

Dr. Coughlin has many publications and six patents to his credit. Tom is also the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide, which was published by Newnes Press. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis (including reports on several digital storage technologies and applications and a newsletter) as well as Data Storage Technical Consulting services. Tom publishes the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, and the Capital Equipment and Technology for the Hard Disk Drive Industry Report.

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Peter Cudhea, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle

Peter Cudhea has been at Sun/Oracle since 2005 and has been member of the ZFS Development Team at Oracle since 2009. He is currently focused on enhancements to replication and off-site recovery. He has over 30 years of experience in distributed computation, databases, and filesystems. He has an MS in Computer Science from MIT, and a BA in Applied Math from Harvard.

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Pankaj Datta, Consultant Software Engineer, Isilon Storage Division EMC

Pankaj Datta is a Consultant Software Engineer at the Isilon Storage Division of EMC in Hopkinton, MA. At EMC, he is a technical lead for the team responsible for building cloud enabling technologies for the Isilon cluster. Pankaj has a M.S. in Computer Engg from the Wright State University, Dayton OH and a B.Tech in Electrical Engg from the Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi, India.

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Rob Davis, VP of Storage Technology, Mellanox Technologies

Rob Davis is vice president of storage technology at Mellanox Technologies and was formerly Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic. As a key evaluator and decision-maker, Davis takes responsibility for keeping Mellanox at the forefront of emerging technologies, products, and relevant markets. Davis’ in-depth expertise spans Virtualization, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand, SAS, PCI, and SATA.

Davis joined QLogic in 1999, when it acquired Ancor Corporation—a company that he had been helping to guide and build for the past 18 years. Davis’ involvement with Fibre Channel technology reaches back to its beginnings before 1990; at that time he functioned as an adapter and switch software engineer, moving later into engineering management and technical marketing. Davis’ insights and focus led him to InfiniBand development, both at Ancor and QLogic, and resulted in his representing both companies to the IBTA Marketing working group. Davis served a major adviser on several QLogic’s strategic acquisitions, including NetZen, PathScale, SilverStorm, Little Mountain Group, and Troika Networks. He also oversaw the growth of QLogic’s entire iSCSI product line.

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Scott Davis, Chief Technology Officer, Infinio Systems

As CTO at Infinio, Scott drives product and technology strategy while also acting as a key public-facing company evangelist. He joined Infinio following seven years at VMware, where he was CTO for VMware’s End User Computing Business Unit. He earlier served as VMware's Chief Data Center and Storage Architect in the Corporate CTO Office. Prior to VMware, he was president, CTO and co-founder of Virtual Iron Software, which was acquired by Oracle and became the core of OracleVM. Earlier, he was CTO at Mangosoft, an Internet software and storage company with pioneering peer-to-peer clustering, caching and file system products. Scott holds 16 US patents for clustering, storage and virtualization technologies, and his products have won awards at Comdex, Demo and LinuxWorld.

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Günther Deschner, Developer, Red Hat / Samba Team

Günther Deschner has been part of the Samba Team for over ten years and has worked for various open source companies including SuSE and SerNet. At Red Hat he is now part of the SMB Team for the Red Hat Storage Server (RHSS) where he is working on implementing SMB3 features in Samba.

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Peter Desnoyers, Professor College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University

Peter received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2008. Prior to that he spent fifteen years as an engineer in industry, at Apple, Motorola, and a number of start-ups, after receiving the BS and MS degrees in EECS from MIT in 1988. Peter's research focuses on operating systems, storage, and cloud computing, drawing on his experience to explore practical solutions to the problems of tomorrow's applications and devices. Other interestsinclude; algorithms for Flash storage, Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disk drives, cloud Computing and the Massachusetts Open Cloud and teaching operating systems concepts.

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Zhimin Ding, Principle Engineer Design, Toshiba

Zhimin Ding is a principle design engineer at Toshiba. He is involved with Toshiba’s new generation PCIe-based enterprise SSD products. Prior to Toshiba, Zhimin worked as Chief Architect at Silicon Storage Technology where he helps created various flash storage solutions for mobile and enterprise applications. Zhimin earned a PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and had 18 years of working experience, including several start-ups, in Silicon Valley.

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Austin Donnelly, Principal Research Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

Austin Donnelly is a Principal Research Software Development Engineer (RSDE) in the Systems group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. He obtained his B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge in 1996, and went on to complete his Ph.D. there in 2002.

He has worked on storage technologies for around 20 years, from writing an IDE driver for a research OS, to research on the write-offloading technique used in DiskEnergy to save power. He is currently working on the Pelican system for cold storage in datacentre environments.

In the past, he worked on security enhancements in the C/C++ compiler and C runtime libraries which shipped with Windows 10, and novel in-rack networks based on 3D torus topologies and distributed hash tables.

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Chet Douglas, Principal SW Architect, Intel

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

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Roland Dreier, Member of Technical Staff, Pure Storage

Roland is an architect and developer at Pure Storage, working on enterprise flash storage systems. Roland received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and led the development and integration of InfiniBand RDMA support in Linux. Prior to joining Pure, Roland was a principal engineer in Cisco's UCS server group.

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Sasikanth Eda, Software Engineer, IBM

Sasikanth Eda is a Software Engineer with the IBM Spectrum Scale development team. He works for the integration of OpenStack with Spectrum Scale, focusing on Swift object, Cinder block and Manila file storage components of OpenStack. Sasi holds a Masters degree in Microelectronics from I2IT, Pune.

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Ásgeir Eiriksson, Chief Technology Officer, Chelsio Communications

Ásgeir Eiriksson joined Chelsio from Silicon Graphics, where he was responsible for protocol design, ASIC chip design and implementation, and formal design methodology. A member of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE, Ásgeir holds a PhD and MSEE in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He holds more than 30 patents in computer architecture, computer aided design methods, networking and host interfaces.

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Vinod Eswaraprasad, Software Architect, Wipro

Vinod Eswarprasad is a Principal architect at Wipro Technologies working in system software development for server and storage solutions. He has been involved in developing system software modules for fault tolerant systems in open and proprietary architectures for past 18 years. He holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer science from National Institute of Technology, Calcutta, India. In his current role in Product Engineering Services division of Wipro, he is focused on Storage Domain in building file systems, storage appliances for various leading storage vendors.

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

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

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Ulrich Fuchs, Manager, CERN

Ulrich Fuchs studied physics and informatics at the university of Munich, moving to CERN in 1998 for his thesis. After building the data acquisition for one big CERN experiment he joined the CERN computing department for two years as responsible for the batch computing cluster and data recording. After three years he joined the ALICE experiment at CERN in 2003 as responsible for the then-to-be-built data acquisition installation for this experiment and as senior service manager is following its evolution since.

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John Gemignani, Senior Consultant, Isilon Storage Division, EMC

John Gemignani is a Senior Consultant SWE in the Isilon Storage Division of EMC in Seattle, WA. He manages the Enterprise File Services team, which is responsible for the NFS and SMB server protocol support within the OneFS operating system, which powers Isilon’s scale-out NAS appliance. With nearly 30 years of NFS experience, he was worked on NFS servers and clients on a wide variety of 32- and 64-bit operating systems. John has a B.S. in Business Administration (Information Systems) from Manhattan College in New York

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Geoff Gentry, Regional Director, Independent Security Evaluators

Geoff Gentry is Regional Director for Independent Security Evaluators, responsible for driving initiatives that advance security conditions across several industries. He is currently spearheading a National Pilot Program that will revolutionize how a 2+ trillion dollar industry handles our private data. Gentry has led many initiatives in the private sector, including developing and implementing a go-to-market strategy for an Austin, Tex. start-up that captured 70% of market share.

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David Goebel, Software Engineer, Microsoft

David joined Microsoft and the nascent Windows NT group in 1990 as a member of the four person file system team that designed and implemented NTFS. He continued in the file system team until NT 3.51 shipped in 1995, leaving to form a consulting company, Balder Technology Group, to help a wide variety of companies (including Microsoft) write robust kernel mode storage and file system drivers for NT. In 2008 David rejoined Microsoft and in 2011 moved to the Azure team and, for the first time, user mode. While primarily working with the team building the Azure File Service, the many facets and challenges of maintaining a massive and exponentially growing public cloud service steals quite a few cycles dealing with wildly varied storage related issues.

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Chris Golden, Software Engineer, Pure Storage

Chris Golden is a software engineer at Pure Storage. Prior to joining Pure Storage in 2011, he worked at IronPort Systems, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems. He graduated from USC in 2005 with a degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

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Abhijeet Gole, Senior Director of Engineering, Toshiba

Abhijeet is a Sr. Director of Engineering and has over 20 years of experience in storage, software and systems. Before Toshiba, Abhijeet was at Marvell, NetApp and Sun Microsystems. During his spare time he likes to hang glide.

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

Sachin Goswami, Senior Storage Solution Architect of TCS, has over 11 years of experience as technical lead, project management, Vice Chair of Cloud Storage in CCICI and working with SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group, developed CDMI Test Specification (CTP 1.0).  

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Edward Grochowski, Storage Consultant, Self Employed

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

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Poornima Gurusiddaiah, Software Engineer, Red Hat

Poornima Gurusiddaiah is a software Engineer at Redhat, an active developer in Gluster community, have been a co-developer for few of the Gluster features like Leases, File System notifications etc.

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Bob Hansen, VP Systems Architecture, Apeiron Data Systems

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

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Brian Hausauer, Hardware Architect, Intel

Brian Hausauer is a Hardware Architect and Principle Engineer in Intel’s Data Center Group with focus on Ethernet RDMA engine architecture, and the application of RDMA to emerging storage use cases.

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Christopher Hertel, Software Senior Program Engineer, Samba Team / Dell Compellent

Christopher R. Hertel is a long-haul member of the Samba Team, founder of the jCIFS project, author of "Implementing CIFS: The Common Internet File System", and lead author of Microsoft's official SMB/CIFS protocol specifications. He has been working on Windows Ineroperability since 1989. (...or maybe earlier...who can remember?) Chris is currently a Sw. Dev. Sr. Pr. Eng. at Dell/Compellent.

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Dean Hildebrand, IBM Master Inventor and Manager | Cloud Storage Software, IBM

Dean Hildebrand is a Master Inventor and the Manager of the Cloud Storage Software Research group at the IBM Almaden Research Center and a recognized expert in the field of object storage as well as distributed and parallel file systems. He has authored numerous scientific publications, created over 28 patents, and chaired and sat on the program committee of numerous conferences. Dr. Hildebrand pioneered pNFS, demonstrating the feasibility of providing standard and scalable access to any file system. He received a B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 1998 and M.S. and PhD. degrees in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2003 and 2007, respectively.

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Jakob Homan, Distributed Systems Engineer, Microsoft

Jakob Homan has been deeply involved with Hadoop for the past six years. He is a committer and PMC member on the Apache Hadoop project, as well as the Samza, Kafka, Tajo and Giraph projects. Jakob worked on the Hadoop HDFS team at Yahoo! before moving to LinkedIn to work on Hadoop and stream processing. He is now with Microsoft's CISL lab, helping to introduce Hadoop and open source.

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Tim Hudson, CTO and Technical Director, Cryptsoft

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

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John Hufferd, Consultant Hufferd Enterprises

A new concept has just been accepted for standardized in the Fibre Channel (T11) standards committee; it is called FCoE VN2VN (aka Direct End-Node to End-Node).

The FCoE standard which specifies the encapsulation of Fibre Channel frames into Ethernet Frames is being extended to permit FCoE connections Directly between FC/FCoE End-Nodes. The tutorial will show the Fundamentals of the extended FCoE concept that permits it to operate without FC switches or FCoE Switches (aka FCF) and will describe how it might be exploited in Small, Medium or Enterprise Data Center environments -- including the "Cloud" IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider environments.

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Urayoan Irizarry, Consultant Software Engineer, EMC

Ura is a Consultant Software Engineer for the CoprHD Solution Engineering team in the Emerging Technology Division of EMC Corp. He is responsible for enabling development community for CoprHD SDS Controller open source project. He has been working in the storage software industry for 17 years with wide variety of roles including Software Development, Quality Engineering and Management. Ura prefers to keep himself as a generalist and enjoy switching points of views from assignment to assignment. At the end of the day, it's all just software.

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Sarah Jelinek, Senior SW Engineer, Intel

Sarah Jelinek is a Senior SW Engineer at Intel focused on storage technologies. She has 20 years of experience in storage software and file systems. Her current area of research and development is persistent memory programming, along with design and development of user libraries to enable applications to more easily incorporate persistent memory. Prior to working at Intel Sarah spent 14 years at Sun Microsystems working on the UFS, NFS and ZFS file systems along with storage management software. She has dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She also has a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

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Prasanth Jose, Senior Staff Software Engineer, IBM

Prasanth Jose is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in IBM with specialization in file systems, virtualization and Network Attached Storage. Extensive expertise with Architecture, Design and development of distributed File Systems.

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Sanjay Joshi, CTO Life Sciences, EMC

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

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

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Sangeeth Keeriyadath, Senior Staff Software Engineer, IBM

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

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Eden Kim, CEO, Calypso Systems

Eden is CEO of Calypso Systems, Inc. and chair of the SNIA SSS Technical Working Group and the SSSI Technical Development Committee. Eden has published several papers on SSD performance testing and various SSD product architectures.

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Pete Kirkpatrick, Principal Engineer, Pure Storage

Pete Kirkpatrick is a Principal Engineer at Pure Storage. Pete leads a team of engineers taking products from conception through production, at the component and system levels. Prior to Pure Storage, Pete has held engineering and leadership roles at Violin Memory, Intel, and as the founder and chief architect of Aprius. Pete holds an MSEE from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Soumya Koduri, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat India

Soumya Koduri is an open-source enthusiast, currently working as Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, contributing to GlusterFS and NFS-Ganesha open-source communities.

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Greg Kramer, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Greg has worked at Microsoft on SMB3 / SMB Direct since 2010. His current work focuses on improving SMB performance, reliability and security for enterprise application and private cloud workloads. Prior to joining Microsoft, Greg earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Wright State University while studying evolutionary computation and neural networks.

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Chi-Young Ku, Senior Consultant, Huawei

Chi-Young Ku is a senior consultant at Huawei. His expertise is in parallel query processing. With help from colleague, Steve Morgan, he realized that his skills in designing transactional data structures can be applied to modern file system design. Before Huawei, he consulted for 6 years, and prior to consulting he worked for Oracle and Teradata.

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Karthik Kumar, Senior Application Engineer, Intel

Karthik Kumar is a Sr. Application Engineer at Intel. He works with independent software vendors to optimize their software on Intel server platforms. His areas of expertise include big data and next generation non-volatile memory solutions. He has a PhD and Master of Science from Purdue University in Computer Engineering.

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Rick Kutcipal, Product Planning, Data Center Storage Group, Avago Technologies

Currently serving in Product Planning inside Avago Technologies’ Data Center Storage Group, Rick is a 25 year computer/storage business veteran. The bulk of his high-tech career has been spent at LSI (which was acquired by Avago in 2014) driving product management and outbound marketing for LSI's data storage solutions. Rick has also focused his expertise on high speed interconnects, including SCSI, FC, IB and 10GbE. He has remained active throughout his career in various standards committees, including INCITS T10 and T11, SFF, where he took part in chairing various working groups. Today, Rick serves on the board of the SCSI Trade Association (STA). He earned both a Master’s and Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah.

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Slava Kuznetsov, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Slava Kuznetsov is a Principal Software engineer at Microsoft with 20 years of software development experience on Windows. He joined Microsoft in 2005 and four years later he Joined Cluster team. At Cluster team he was working on fault tolerant networking, file server and distributed storage. The last two years he was mainly focused on software defined hybrid storage.

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Christina Lara, Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Julian is a Software Engineer at IBM's storage organization. With over 5 years experience on NAS products, he has dedicated the last couple years to simulate customer workloads on QA phases. He currently works on test automation for software defined storage products.

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Volker Lendecke, Developer, Samba Team / SerNet

Volker Lendecke is a member of the core Samba Team and Co-founder of SerNet GmbH in Göttingen, Germany.

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Chuck Lever, Linux Kernel Architect, Oracle

Chuck Lever is a long-standing member of the Linux NFS community, having contributed IPv6 support and support for NFSv4 migration among other features. He maintains FedFS for Linux, and has recently become a lead developer of the Linux NFS/RDMA implementation.

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Richard Levy, CEO and President, Peer Fusion

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

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Haoyuan Li, CEO, Tachyon Nexus

Haoyuan Li is founder and CEO of Tachyon Nexus. He is also a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate in AMPLab at UC Berkeley, where he co-created Tachyon, an open source memory-centric distributed storage system. He is also a founding committer of Apache Spark. Before Berkeley, he worked at Conviva and Google. Haoyuan has a M.S. from Cornell University and a B.S. from Peking University.

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Jeff Li, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft

Jeff Li is a Senior Software Engineer with Microsoft Corporation, Mountain View, working on System Center Virtual Machine Manager with a focus on storage management and disaster recovery for 3 and half years. Prior to Microsoft, he worked at VMware on virtualization management for 6 and half years as development manager and senior software engineer. Before that, he was the co-founder and CTO of Imaxia Inc, a software development and service company with a focus on bio informatics. Jeff Li holds Master of Science from University of Memphis, double bachelor degrees in Precision Instrument and Computer Science from Tsinghua University, and certificates of Project Management, and Strategic Decision and Risk Management from Stanford University.

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Chris Lionetti, Reference Architect, NetApp

A veteran in the storage industry who has been building complex Systems/SANs for 20+ years. Has been actively involved with SNIA from the start and been an engineer for HP, Dell, Microsoft, and is currently employed by NetApp as a Reference Architect.

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Dan Lovinger, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

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

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Qingchao Luo, Massive Storage Chief Architect, Huawei

Qingchao Luo is the architect of Huawei Storage Business Unit. From 2012, he led the Universal Distributed Storage product design and development. During 2008~2011, he was the chief architect of scale-out NAS N8000 in Huawei Symantec Joint Venture, and achieved the best SPECsfs2008 score. Before 2008, he focused on storage foundation cluster file system in Symantec/Veritas. He has a M.S. in computer system architecture from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

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Ao Ma, Principal Engineer, EMC

Ao Ma is a principal engineer at the Advanced Development Group of EMC Core Technology Division, part of the CTO office, where he works on innovations in file system and storage technologies.

He published papers on top storage system conferences and journals. Ao also has 1 patent granted, 6 patents filed, and was awarded the Excellence@EMC Platinum Award (2014) and Excellence@EMC Gold Award(2013) for his contribution to the company.

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Meghana Madhusudhan, Software Engineer, Red Hat

Meghana Madhusudhan is a Software Engineer at Red Hat, contributing to GlusterFS and NFS-Ganesha open-source communities.

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Jim Malina, Technologist, WDC

Jim Malina is a Technologist of System Architecture at Western Digital. I’ve made a career finding simple solutions for complex problems. Currently evangelizing “storage stack” solutions for next generation of recording media for public and private cloud applications. Previously I was in Texas Instruments Digital Light Processing group, developing system solutions for light modulation devices for display and communication technologies. I’ve pioneered Digital Signal Processing usage in display, communication, light modulation and storage technologies. I began my career at Seagate’s R&D facility in Los Angeles and have assumed roles of increasing responsibility in both management and technology.

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Bill Martin, Principal Engineer Storage Standards, Samsung

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

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Brian Mason, MTS-SW, Netapp

Brian Mason works on REST API at Netapp. He has 25 years of experience in developing software specializing in Management Software for Storage Systems. He has a Master in Computer Science from the University of IL in Springfield and has been lecturing and teaching programming for the past 15 years.

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Nathaniel McCallum, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Nathaniel McCallum is a Sr. Software Engineer at Red Hat. He lives in Kentucky with his wife and five children. When not working or trying to retain parental sanity, Nathaniel enjoys reading classic literature in Greek or Latin, particularly the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and listening to the choral works of Palestrina.

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Greg McSorley, Vice President, SCSI Trade Association

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

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Vernon Miller, Performance Engineer, IBM

Vernon is a performance engineer at IBM working on Spectrum Scale software and solutions. Vernon has been involved with performance evaluation of various block, file, NAS, and cloud based products for over 10 years. Vernon contributed to the SPEC SFS2014 benchmark suite. Vernon has a Master of Science degree in Physics from the University of Arizona.

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Yahya H. Mirza, Aclectic Systems Inc

Yahya H. Mirza’s original background was aeronautical engineering, specializing in hypersonic aircraft design and scramjet propulsion. Yahya was initially employed by Battelle Research Labs. His experience at NASA Ames in 1989 simulating the hypersonic aerodynamics of Waveriders on the Cray-YMP, brought him to an important realization. A clear need exists for integrated software tools that enables creative exploration, utilizing a combination of procedural techniques, physical simulation and domain specific languages. To pursue this direction, through his first start-up in 1991, Yahya initiated a cooperative research and development agreement with Wright Patterson Air Force Base. This experience was followed by three years as a visiting researcher in the UIUC Smalltalk Research Group. Through his follow on start-up attempts, Yahya has worked on system software or 3D simulation / graphics based application software projects for Spatial Technologies, Microsoft, CatDaddy Games, Source Dynamics, Pixar Animation Studios, Small Machines Inc. and Xilinx. Yahya’s interest in feature film production is motivated by his life-long passion for the creative process which he pursues through his original acoustic guitar and piano compositions.

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Rupin Mohan, Chief Technologist - Storage Networking, HP

Rupin Mohan is Chief Technologist, Storage Networking at Hewlett-Packard responsible for development of Storage Networking products, business and strategy, and product plans in HP Storage. Rupin has twenty years proven track record delivering outstanding technology products and business results. In his current role at Hewlett-Packard, he leads strategic initiatives, business analysis, cross-functional lifecycle management of a large portfolio of products and drives execution of large scale global R&D projects.

Rupin has 16 patents (1 patent granted, 15 patents filed) and 23 invention disclosures. He is a prolific speaker speaking at industry conferences. Rupin is on Board of Directors of SNIA and FCIA. Rupin completed his Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) from MIT Sloan School of Management where he was accepted as a Sloan Fellow. He also holds a Master’s of Science (MS) in Engineering from Tufts University and Bachelors of Engineering (BE) in Computer Engineering from Delhi Institute of Technology.

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Stephen Morgan, Senior Staff Research Engineer, Huawei

Mr. Morgan has over 30 years experience in operating systems design and implementation including file systems, storage, networking, and security. He holds almost 20 patents including as co-inventor of the AIX Logical Volume Manager. He holds a bachelors degree from MIT.

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Richard Morris, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle

For the past 5 years, Rich has been been a ZFS developer for Oracle. Prior to that, Rich was a ZFS developer for Sun Microsystems.

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Peter Murray, Product Evangelist, Load DynamiX

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

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Ramin Neshati, PCI-SIG Board Member and Marketing Chair, PCI-SIG

Dr. Ramin Neshati works at Intel Corporation as an Engineering and Technology Manager in the I/O Technology Standards group and sits on the PCI-SIG Board of Directors, where he is the Treasurer of the organization and chairs the PCIe Marketing Workgroup. In addition, Dr. Neshati chairs the Software Workgroup in the MIPI Alliance. He lives in Portland, Oregon

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Wael Noureddine, VP Technology, Chelsio Communications

Wael Noureddine leads the research and development efforts for Chelsio’s core server adapter products, and is responsible for hardware architecture and protocol design. Wael holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University.

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Mark OConnell, Distinguished Engineer, EMC

Mark O'Connell is a distinguished engineer at EMC and has worked on a variety of products, including Operating Systems, File systems, and NAS products. Since the early 2000s he has worked on scale-out object storage systems, including Centera, Atmos, and ECS.

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Adrian Palmer, Drive Development Engineering, Seagate Technologies

Adrian Palmer holds a MS of Electrical Engineering and a BS of Computer Engineering and Math, all from the University of Wyoming. He has spent over 10 years in Systems Administration, and has hobbyist experience in Linux and UNIX systems, creating router/gateway and NAS systems. In 1999, he was the first public high school student to earn an MCSE. Adrian currently works at Seagate and leads the SMR Friendly File System (SMRFFS) project, contributing to the open source community.

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Satadru Pan, Software Engineer, Facebook

Satadru Pan works at Facebook and He has a passion for building web scale distributed infrastructure. Currently he is working on building and scaling Facebook’s blob storage system, which stores and serves all the photos/videos of of the site. In past he has worked on search engine ranking and few other distributed system problems.

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Nick Principe, Senior Software Engineer, EMC

Nick Principe is a Senior Software Engineer at EMC working on customer-focused performance engineering. Nick has worked in the performance engineering field for over 10 years, focusing on the performance measurement and analysis of NAS systems. Nick has also contributed to the development of two SPEC SFS benchmarks. Nick has a B.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.

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Mark Rabinovich, R and D Manager, Visuality Systems

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

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Sriram Rao, Partner Scientist Manager, Microsoft

Sriram Rao leads the systems side of CISL, an applied research group that works closely with Microsoft's Big Data teams (namely, Scope/Cosmos/HDInsight). He has been closely involved in building a scale-out resource management infrastructure using Hadoop/YARN and tiered storage. Prior to Microsoft, Sriram was the primary designer/implementer of KFS (Kosmos filesystem) which was subsequently released as an open source project. KFS has since been deployed on large clusters at Quantcast, where it has become their primary data store and is used to process over 20PB/day.

Since joining Microsoft in 2012, he has been a strong advocate for embracing/enhancing OSS infrastructure components as a way to (quickly) develop new services on Azure.

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Hannes Reinecke, Senior Engineer, SUSE

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. Now working at SUSE Labs with focus on storage and mainframe. Principal contact point for storage 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, 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 I've got involved in the SMR effort, adapting the Linux storage stack to make it SMR-friendly.

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Da Qi Ren, Staff Research Engineer, Huawei

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

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Liwei Ren, Scientific Adviser, Trend Micro

Dr. Liwei Ren is a researcher in both data compression and data security. His research interests also include cyber security and practical algorithms. He is a senior researcher and domain architect responsible for advanced security solutions and data security at Trend Micro. Prior to Trend Micro, he was the chief scientist and co-founder of Provilla, a leading vendor of endpoint based DLP solution which was acquired by Trend Micro. Prior to Provilla, he worked at InnoPath Software as a principal researcher. Before InnoPath, he worked with several hi-tech companies as senior software engineer. Dr. Ren is a frequent speaker at industrial conferences and academic seminars. His moderate accomplishments include 10+ academic publications in mathematics, 20+ issued US patents, and founding a data security start up with successful exit. Dr. Ren received his Ph.D in mathematics and MS in information science from University of Pittsburgh. He also holds both MS and BS degrees in mathematics from Tsinghua University.

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Jason Resch, Software Architect, Cleversafe

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

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José Rivera, Software Engineer, Red Hat / Samba Team

José Rivera spends his time at Red Hat working on improving clustered Samba and integrating Samba with distributed filesystems and clustered resource managers. Prior to Red Hat he was part of the team responsible for creating and overhauling the official SMB1 specifications ([MS-CIFS] and [MS-SMB]) published by Microsoft. José became a part of the Samba Team over a year ago but has yet to run away screaming. He likes cats and musical instruments that involve hitting things.

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Gil Russell, Principal Analyst, Semiscape

Gil Russell is Principal Analyst at Semiscape, an IT consulting firm he founded in July 2005. Mr. Russell specializes in dynamic and non-volatile memory technologies and their application in memory storage systems. He has participated in JEDEC standards committees since 1992 and is the architect of Reduced Latency DRAM. Previously, he managed new product definition activities; participated as a team member of new product development engineering groups; technical lead of new product introductions; technical interface and technical liaison to external partnerships at Infineon Technologies, Siemens Microelectronics, Samsung Semiconductor & NEC.

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Ramnath Sai Sagar, Cloud Technical Marketing Manager, Mellanox

Ramnath Sai Sagar is a Technical Marketing Manager at Mellanox Technologies, where he primarily focuses on Cloud and BigData related technologies. He has a strong background in both R&D and marketing. Prior to joining Mellanox, he had worked as RDMA Performance and Solution Architect at Emulex Corporation, and in some of the premier research projects in European labs - Brain Mind Institute (BMI) at EPFL, Switzerland and Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. He has publications in some of the leading conferences and journals in scientific computing and holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Anna University, India.

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Arthur Sainio, Senior Director Marketing, Smart Modular

Arthur Sainio is a Director of Product Marketing at SMART Modular Technologies. Arthur has been driving new product launch and business development activities at SMART since 1998. Prior to SMART, Arthur worked as a product marketing manager at Hitachi Semiconductor America. While there, his focus was on DRAM, SRAM and Flash technologies. Arthur holds a MBA from San Francisco State University and a MS from Arizona State University.

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Sudipta Sengupta, Principal Research Scientist, Microsoft Research

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

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

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Dmitriy Setrakyan, VP of Engineering, GridGain Systems

Dmitriy Setrakyan is founder and EVP of Engineering at GridGain Systems. Dmitriy has been designing, architecting and developing software and applications for over 15 years and has expertise in the development of distributed computing systems, middleware platforms, financial trading systems, CRM applications and similar systems.

Prior to GridGain, Dmitriy worked at eBay where he was responsible for the architecture of performance sensitive high-traffic components of an add-serving system processing several billion hits a day. Before that Dmitriy served as a Lead Architect at Fitech Labs, focusing on high-performance software for trading systems, where he jump-started a new distributed caching and grid computing product line scaling out to 100s computers.

Dmitriy holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of California at Davis specializing in Networking and Algorithms.

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Veda Shankar, Technical Marketing Manager, RedHat

Veda Shankar is a Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat and has extensive experience with Red Hat Storage, he joined the company through the Gluster acquisition. He is a customer oriented IT specialist with a unique combination of experience in product development, marketing and sales engineering. He has been part of many startup ventures in the Silicon Valley with products ranging from embedded consumer electronics platform to enterprise software. He holds a MS degree in Computer Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology.

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Abhijith Shenoy, Engineer, Hedvig

Abhijith Shenoy is a member of Hedvig’s technical staff. Abhijith is part of a team responsible for developing a distribute storage platform that provides traditional storage capabilities in a new software-defined architecture. Abhijith has worked extensively on data protection, deduplication, compression, and data management techniques. Abhijith also leads Hedvig’s efforts to demonstrate its software to customers and prospects. Abhijith joins Hedvig from University of Urbana Champagne where he earned his Masters degree in Computer Science. Prior to university, Abhijith worked for Cisco and other technology providers in various technical roles.

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David Slik, Technical Director Object Storage, NetApp

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

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Matt Starr, Chief Technical Officer, Spectra Logic

Matt Starr’s tenure with Spectra Logic spans 24 years and includes experience in service, hardware design, software development, operating systems, electronic design and management. As CTO, he is responsible for the company’s engineering department, manufacturing operations and planning division. Matt served as the lead engineering architect for the design and production of Spectra’s Tape Series library family. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

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Tom Talpey, Architect, Microsoft

Tom Talpey is an Architect in the File Server Team at Microsoft. His responsibilities include SMB 3, SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), and all the protocols and technologies that support the SMB ecosystem. Tom has worked for many years in the areas of network filesystems, network transports and RDMA, and recently has been working on applying these to remote access of Persistent Memory, working within the SNIA Nonvolatile Memory Programming TWG, and others. He is a frequent presenter at Storage Developer Conference events.

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J.R. Tipton, Development Lead, Microsoft

JR Tipton is a Principal Development Lead at Microsoft. His experience in transactional systems and file systems led him to his work on ReFS and in particular ReFS v2. His previous SDC talk was an introduction to the new file system ReFS.

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Gregory Touretsky, Product Manager, Infinidat

Gregory Touretsky has recently joined Infinidat as a Product Manager. Prior to that he has been Solutions Architect within Intel IT, focusing on distributed computing and storage solutions, data sharing and cloud. Gregory holds MSc in Computers Engineering from Novosibirsk State Technical University and MBA from Tel-Aviv University.

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Tim Van Ash, VP of Product Management, Load DynamiX

With over 20 years in the industry, Tim has held executive positions at CA, Nimsoft, HP and Mercury Interactive focused on addressing the challenges of IT operations. Most recently Tim was Vice President of Product Management for CA Technologies’ Application Performance Management portfolio. During his time at CA, Tim held strategic roles in Big Data Analytics and led the transformation of Nimsoft into a complete management suite encompassing data center monitoring and service management.   Prior to CA, Tim led HP Software’s SaaS products group.

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Yogesh Vedpathak, Software Developer, Cleversafe

As a software developer at Cleversafe, Yogesh’s main focus is on development of high throughput highly scalable networks for distributing data in highly scalable storage systems. During his 5 years at Cleversafe he has invented techniques to detect and recover from faulty networks, boosting throughput on high latency networks. He has BS in Computer Engineering and MS in Computer Science. Yogesh a SNIA certified storage professional and is a third time SDC speaker.

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Amit Virmani, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft

Amit Virmani is a Senior Software Engineer with Microsoft Corp, Mountain View, working on System Center Virtual Machine Manager. He has been working at Microsoft on server virtualization and storage management for past 9 years. Prior to Microsoft, he worked at Infosys Technologies on Microsoft technologies as well.

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Doug Voigt, Distinguished Technologist, HP

Doug Voigt is a Distinguished Technologist in the Chief Technologist’s office of HP’s Storage Division. He is co-chair of the SNIA NVM Programming Model and a member of the SNIA Technical Council. Doug has over 35 years of development experience in disk drives, disk arrays, storage management and non-volatile memory. He holds CS and EE degrees from Cornell University and 33 US patents, primarily in virtual arrays.

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Paul von Behren, Software Architect, Intel

Paul von Behren is a Software Architect at Intel Corporation. He is currently involved with software enabling using of byte-addressable persistent memory, is co-chair of SNIA’s NVM Programming Technical Work Group and editor of SNIA’s NVM Programming Model specification. His background includes software for managing Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SAS storage devices, multi path management software, and RAID systems. He helped lead the creation of the SNIA Storage Management Initiative – Standard (SMI-S) and Multipath Management API standards, and contributed a number of other storage and management software standards.

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Tejas Wanjari, Senior Software Engineer, EMC Data Domain

Tejas Wanjari is Senior Software Engineer at EMC Data Domain where he is involved in the design and architecture of distributed systems infrastructure and Data Domain OS. Previously he was a member of Parallel Data Lab (PDL) at Carnegie Mellon University while pursuing his Masters.

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Zane Wei, Director, Huawei

Mr. Zane Wei has been the head of the Shannon Lab, the head of the IT Research Lab of Central Research Institute, and the head of strategy and planning of corporate hardware technology in Huawei Technologies. He received his master degree from HKUST (Hongkong University of Science and Technology) and bachelor degree from UESTC, respectively. His research interests are in high performance computing, computer architecture, and cloud computing. He has great efforts in the research of high throughput computing (HTC) systems, software/hardware design, and computer fault tolerant techniques. He has received the honor of CEO Award of Excellence several times due to his outstanding contributions. He has many patents, has published a number of journal and conference papers. He has also served as a Technical Committee Member for many high quality conferences, including HPCA, ICCCN and etc. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM.

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Dr. Thomas Willhalm, Senior Application Engineer, Intel

Dr. Thomas Willhalm is a Sr. Application Engineer at Intel who consults independent software vendors in optimizing their software for Intel architecture. His area of expertise are enterprise applications and data bases with a focus on SIMD and next-gen NVM solutions.

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Zhongbing Yang, System Architect, Huawei

Bio pending

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Mai Zheng, Assistant Professor Computer Science Department - College of Arts and Sciences, New Mexico State University

Mai Zheng is an Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Ohio State University in 2015. He was a visiting scholar at HP Labs in summer 2013. His research interests are in the broad areas of computer systems, including storage systems, parallel and distributed systems, cloud computing, and high-performance computing. He is particularly interested in anything related to data storage (e.g., non-volatile memory, file systems, cloud storage, data-intensive computing, etc). He is starting the Data Storage Lab @NMSU, where members play with the latest storage technology and strive to advance the reliability, performance, efficiency, and usability for data, for people.

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Yuan Zhou, Software Engineer, Intel Asia R&D

Yuan Zhou is a Senior Software Development Engineer in the Software and Service Group for Intel Corporation, working in the Big Data Technology team primarily focused on Cloud Storage Software. He has been working in Databases, Virtualization and Cloud computing for most of his 5+ year career at Intel. Recently, Yuan became an OpenStack Contributor and played a key role in the development of the OpenStack Swift Erasure Coding project. Yuan spent his best years in Tongji University and got a Master's Degree in Computer System Architecture

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Zhenyun Zhuang, Senior Performance Engineer, LinkedIn

Currently a senior software engineer at LinkedIn Corp., he received his PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. He also received his MS degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University and BE degree in Information Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He has been actively conducting research in various areas including system and Java performance, Cloud Computing, wireless communications, mobile networks, distributed systems, and middleware platforms.

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