2013 SDC Featured Speakers

Jason Brown

Senior Software Engineer, Netflix

Biography

Jason is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, where he's been for the last five years. He is also a a committer on the Apache Cassandra project. Jason holds a Master’s degree in Music Composition is searching for time to write a second opera.

Gerald Carter

Senior Consulting Software Engineer, EMC, Isilon Storage Division

Biography

Gerald Carter is a Sr. Consulting Software Engineer in the protocols group at EMC/Isilon and leads the user-space file services platform engineering team. He joined EMC through the acquisition of Likewise Software in March, 2012, where he served as CTO. He has been developing, writing about, and teaching on Open Source and IT related topics since the late 90's at events such as LISA, LinuxWorld Expo, SANE, SambaXP, OSCON, and SNIA SDC. He has authored both "LDAP System Administration" and the third edition of "Using Samba" and for O'Reilly Publishing. He has held positions at HP and VA Linux systems and previously served on the Usenix Association's Board of Directors.

Andrew Edwards

Principal Architect, Windows Azure Storage, Microsoft

Biography

Andrew Edwards is a Principal SDE on the Windows Azure Storage team. He is responsible for driving broad changes into the Windows Azure Storage system to improve performance, maintain reliability, and enable new features. Andrew has worked on Windows Azure for the last six years, and has worked at Microsoft since 1997. He graduated from the University of Washington.

Julia Palmer

Storage Protection and Data Manager, Go Daddy

Biography

Julia Palmer is the Manager of Storage Engineering and Backup and Restore Engineering and Operations teams at Go Daddy. Go Daddy now dominates the domain, website hosting and SSL industries. With over 17 years’ experience in the Information Technology Industry, Julia Palmer leads Go Daddy Storage and Data Protection projects and initiatives for external and internal Go Daddy customers. Julia earned an MS in Computer Science at the Belorussian State University of Informatics and Radio Electronics.

Justin Richardson

Senior Storage Engineer, Go Daddy

Biography

Justin is responsible for creating storage solutions that will perform in high impact environments. Specializing in NetApp NAS solutions that include MultiStore vFilers, Flash Cache, Snapmirror. Strong understanding of NAS/SAN performance and analytics. Responsible for driving down cost while maintaining high level of reliability and performance.

Andy Rudoff

Intel, SNIA NVM Programming TWG

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.

Addison Snell

CEO, Intersect360 Research

Biography

Coming Soon

Addison Snell is the CEO of Intersect360 Research and a veteran of the High Performance Computing industry. He launched the company in 2007 as Tabor Research, a division of Tabor Communications, and served as that company's VP/GM until he and his partner, Christopher Willard, Ph.D., acquired Tabor Research in 2009. During his tenure, Addison has established Intersect360 Research as a premier source of market information, analysis, and consulting. He was named one of 2010's "People to Watch" by HPCwire. Addison was previously an analyst for IDC, where he was well-known among industry stakeholders. Prior to IDC, he gained recognition as a marketing leader and spokesperson for SGI's supercomputing products and strategy. Addison holds a master's degree from the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University.

Satyam Vaghani

CTO, PernixData

Biography

Satyam Vaghani is co-founder and CTO at PernixData, a company that leverages server flash to enable scale-out storage performance that is independent of capacity. Earlier, he was VMware's Principal Engineer and Storage CTO where he spent 10 years delivering fundamental storage innovations in vSphere. He is most known for creating the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) that set a storage standard for server virtualization. He has authored 50+ patents, led industry-wide changes in storage systems and standards via VAAI, and has been a regular speaker at VMworld and other industry and academic forums. Satyam received his Masters in CS from Stanford and a Bachelors in CS from BITS Pilani.

Ken Wood

CTO – Technology & Strategy, Office of Technology and Planning, Hitachi Data Systems

Biography

As the CTO and Director of Technology and Strategy in the Global Office of Technology and Planning, Ken Wood researches the industry and gathers customer, and non-customer, requirements for solving IT problems by incubating, developing and bringing to market, solutions that only Hitachi can uniquely provide. In this role, Ken is responsible for developing the company’s long-term product strategies, vision and reference architectures using Hitachi’s entire technology portfolio, while also exploring and applying these technologies to new and existing business opportunities. Ken has served for four years on the Storage Networking Industry Association’s Technical Council and five years on the Data Management Forum’s Board of Directors. Ken holds a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. degree in Software Engineering. Ken also blogs for HDS at www.hds.com/blogs

2013 SDC SPEAKERS

Michael Adam, Senior Software Engineer, SerNet GmbH

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

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Andrew Baptist, Lead Architect, Cleversafe, Inc

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

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Jose Baretto, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

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

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Andrew Bartlett, Samba Developer, Samba Team

Andrew Bartlett is a member of the Samba Team, focussing on the Samba 4.0 Active Directory Domain Controller. Andrew has a passion for building products that 'just work' as the interoperate with Microsoft's Windows systems on a first-class basis, using native protocols.

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Jim Benton, Principal Software Design Engineer, Microsoft

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

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Stuart Berman, Chief Executive Jeda Networks

Stuart brings over 30 years of experience in the Enterprise networking and data storage industries. Previous to Jeda Networks, Stuart was the SVP & CTO of Emulex Corporation (NYSE ELX). In 2005, InfoWorld voted Stuart one of the top 25 CTO’s of the year. Stuart was founder of 3 prior successful startups and has 15 issued patents and over two dozen pending patent applications. The products created from these patents have generated over $1B in revenue and have been referenced by over 100 subsequent patents. Stuart has presented internationally to Fortune 1000 corporations on Data Center technology and trends. Stuart graduated from UC San Diego, cum laude, and received his Masters in Computer Science from UCLA.

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

  • Senior Architect in the RDBMS development group at Oracle Corp, designed some of the key features of Oracle8
  • Founder-member of the DB2/6000 Parallel Edition team at IBM Research Center
  • Visiting Faculty at University of California – Berkeley
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of California-Berkeley
  • BS in Computer Science: Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and MS: University of Wisconsin-Madison

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James Cain, Principal Software Architect, Quantel Ltd

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 & News & Sports Broadcasters, globally. The products James has helped create are in daily use at companies such as The BBC, ESPN, Rogers & Fox Sports and have helped make films such as Titanic 3D, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo & Avatar. 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.

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Gerald Carter, Sr. Consulting Software Engineer, EMC

Gerald Carter is a Sr. Consulting Software Engineer in protocols group at EMC/Isilon and manages the user-space file services platform engineering team. He joined EMC through the acquisition of Likewise Software in March, 2012, where he served as CTO. He has been developing, writing about, and teaching on Open Source and IT related topics since the late 90's at events such as LISA, LinuxWorld Expo, SANE, SambaXP, OSCON, and SNIA SDC. He has authored both "LDAP System Administration" and the third edition of "Using Samba" and for O'Reilly Publishing. He has held positions at HP and VA Linux systems and previously served on the Usenix Association's Board of Directors.

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Albert Chen, Western Digital

WD - Engineer Program Director MSFT - Sr. Program Manager MaXXan/Ciphermax - Network Applications Manager ARIO Data Networks - Sustaining Engineering Manager Nishan Systems - Software Engineer Cornell University - BSCS '99 Stanford University - MSCS '15 (expected)

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Neal Christiansen, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft

Neal Christiansen, Principal Software Development Lead, Microsoft Corporation Neal Christiansen is a Principal Software Development Lead for the Resilient File Systems team in the Windows Storage and File Systems Group at Microsoft (Redmond WA). His team's primary responsibility is the development of the Windows NTFS File System. 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. 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 for Wicat Systems. Neal has a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

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Floyd Christofferson, Board Member, Active Archive Alliance

Floyd Christofferson is a board member of the Active Archive Alliance and the director of storage product marketing at SGI. As a professional focused on content management and storage workflows over the last 25 years, Floyd has paid particular attention to the technology associated with effective management of massive volumes of data, both from the perspective of hardware strategies and of workflow. Prior to joining SGI, Floyd's work was focused in the broadcast industry, where he was focused on file-based content management and distribution strategies.

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Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

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

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

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Marty Czekalski, President, SCSI Trade Association

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

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Kalyan Das, Chief Architect Storage Protocols, Huawei Technologies

Kalyan Das Kalyan Das has joined Huawei over a year ago as Chief Architect, Storage Protocols. Here he is involved in designing and implementing Huawei’s NAS solution from ground up. Prior to joining Huawei, he was Principal Architect at Citrix for over 10 years for their WAN optimization product, which was part of an acquisition of a start-up, where Kalyan was a founding member. He started his career at Digital Equipment Corporation and worked there for about 12 years before moving on to Alta Vista, the search company. Jun Liu Jun Liu is a software architect for Huawei for more than 8 years and has had a key role in the development of NAS Protocol, Multi-Path, Data Protect Software and Disaster Recovery storage solution.

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Biplob Debnath, Research Staff Member, NEC Laboratories America

Biplob Debnath is a research staff member at NEC Laboratories America. He received a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota. His most recent works have been focusing on nonvolatile memory, data deduplication, and key-value store design.

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Don Deel, Chair SNIA Technical Council

Don Deel is a Senior Technologist in the Office of the CTO at EMC, with over 30 years of industry experience working with storage, networking, server, and management technologies. He has been active in storage-related standards development activities for many years, and has pioneering experience with the HIPPI, Fibre Channel, and SMI-S standards. He has held a number of positions within the SNIA since the early days of the organization, and has been recognized for his contributions several times. He is currently serving as the SNIA Technical Council Chair, as the Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Chair, and as the Storage Management Initiative Technical Development Committee Chair.

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Dale Degen, Sr. Marketing Manager, HP Storage

Dale Degen is a worldwide senior marketing manager for HP Storage. In this role, he is responsible for the Software-Defined Storage portfolio, as well as all aspects of life cycle marketing management including roadmap definition, product launch and sustaining support at a global level. Additionally, Degen has launched multiple generations of storage area network (SAN) solutions while managing explosive year-over-year growth.

Prior to joining LeftHand Networks in 2008, Degen worked in the mobile phone industry on embedded software solutions for two years. Additionally, Degen spent six years in the silicon industry, focusing on expanding internet access into emerging markets around the world.

Previous to his hardware/software go-to-market experience, Degen served as an active duty tank officer in the United States Army for five years. He holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Colorado, and a Bachelor of Science from the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.

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David Deming, President, Solution Technology

Founder and CTO of Solution Technology. With a degree in Electronics Engineering and more than 25 years of industry experience, David has designed many courses covering a wide range of storage networking technologies. David is actively involved in the various storage-related industry associations, has designed and coordinated interoperability testing for the FCIA and was the Interoperability Program Leader. David also coordinated the industry's largest Interoperability Lab demonstration for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and he organized the interoperability demonstrations for the SNIA Technology Center grand opening. David has been a voting member of the NCITS T11 Fibre Channel standards committee and has served on T10 (SCSI) and T10.1 (SSA) standards committees. David is an active member of the SNIA Interoperability and Education Committees where he has received recognition for his efforts and contributions.

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Krishanu Dhar, Test Lead, NetApp

Krishanu Dhar is a test lead and has been with NetApp for the last 2 years. During this tenure he was responsible for qualifying Engenio Storage Arrays and very recently has started looking at automation of storage workflows.

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Ron Emerick, Principal HW Engineer, Oracle

Ron Emerick is an Principal Hardware Engineer in Oracle Corporation Systems Group. He is a IO Architect working on IO Infrastructure and Architecture for Oracle systems. Ron is an active member of the PCI SIG and has been involved in IO architectures for many years. Prior to joining Oracle, Ron was a IO Architect at Sun Mircosystems, Storage Area Network Specialist at StorageTek, designing and implementing SANs throughout the country. He has over 30 years of Industry Experience in IO, Storage and Application and OS Development (writing HEX code, Assembly Language). He enjoys his family, hiking, travel, golf and taking long walks at the beach (or anywhere else) with his wife.

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Adam Emerson, Developer, CohortFS, LLC

Adam C. Emerson has made extensive contributions to the Ganesha user-space NFS server, especially pNFS support, extensive improvements to its caching system, and improved NFSv4.1 protocol support. He has also participated in the CohortFS design process for data placement, encryption, and metadata striping.

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Vinod Eswaraprasad, Lead Architect, WiPro Technologies

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

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Sam Fineberg, Distinguished Technologist Hewlett-Packard Company

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

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Steven French, Senior Engineer SMB3 Architecture, IBM

Steve French has been developing file systems for over 20 years. He is a member of the Samba team. He was the co-author of the SNIA CIFS Specification. He was the original author, and is maintainer of the Linux cifs/smb2/smb3 kernel client. He is responsible for SMB3 design for IBM's Storage Appliances.

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Joe Giardino, Senior Development Lead, Microsoft

Joe Giardino is a Senior Development Lead on the Windows Azure Storage team and focuses on the client experience for Windows Azure Storage developers. His primary goal is to help clients create fast cloud applications that scale in a simple and consistent way. Most Recently, Joe has been focused on driving performance improvements and wider platform availability in the client experience for Windows Azure Storage. He joined Microsoft in 2008 and graduated from the University of Illinois.

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Mahadev Goankar, Technical Architect iGATE Computer Systems ltd.

Mahadev Gaonkar is technical architect with iGATE working on design and development of enterprise storage products. His core area of expertise is storage management applications and distributed file system. He has an in-depth experience of developing management softwares for storage HBA, network attached storage array and scale-out NAS systems.

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

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

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Ashish Goyal, Pricipal Software Engineer, EMC

Ashish Goyal is working with EMC since last 4 years as Pricipal Software Engineer. He is working on archiving products including archiving of Big Data and archiving to Cloud.;

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Marlin Gwaltney, Quality Architect, NetApp

Bio Pending

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Bob Hansen, Consultant

Mr. Hansen is a seasoned professional with more than 25 years of experience in the storage industry. Bob has held both management and technical positions in several OEM and semi-conductor companies including NetApp, Xyratex, Agilent and HP. He is currently a consultant focused on enterprise data center storage solutions. He also has contributed to several industry standards organizations including the Storage Performance Council, T10, SCSI Trade Association and the Storage Bridge Bay Working group where he served as board chair.

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Tom Haynes, Ph.D., Sr. Engineer, NetApp

Tom is a Sr Software Engineer at NetApp. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Tulsa in AI. Tom has been involved in file systems and NFS in particular for 10 years, working for both Sun and NetApp. He is the primary editor for the RFC 3530bis (NFSv4.0) revision and the editor for the NFSv4.2 internet draft.

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Steffen Hellmold, Vice President of Marketing, Everspin Technologies

Steffen Hellmold has more than 15 years of industry experience in senior product marketing, technical marketing and business development roles in both the semiconductor memory and storage sub-systems industries. Before joining Everspin, Steffen served in executive management positions at Sandforce Inc., Seagate Technology, Lexar Media, Inc. (a subsidiary of Micron Technology), Samsung Semiconductor and SMART Modular Technologies. He received his master's of science in electrical engineering and master’s of business administration from Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany and holds three issued patents in non-volatile memory and storage products.

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

Christopher R. Hertel is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he gets to play with cluster file systems and Samba and SMB2...the kind of stuff that only storage geeks call "fun". Chris is also a long-haul member of the Samba Team, a founding member of the jCIFS project, and the lead author of most of the truly useful SMB1 protocol documentation available today (the SMB2 docs are someone else's fault). Chris has also been adjunct facutly, and is now a member of the academic advisory board, for the Information Technology Infrastructure (ITI) program at the University of Minnesota's College of Continuing Education.

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Scott Horan, Integration Engineer, Cleversafe, Inc.

Scott Horan is a leading driver of Cleversafe's effort to integrate with other protocols and applications. As Cleversafe's Integration Engineer, he has particular expertise with the S3 and OpenStack protocols and has pioneered compatibility for these protocols with dispersed storage systems.

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Tai Horgan, Software Engineer, EMC Isilon Storage Division

Tai Horgan is a Software Development Engineer at EMC's Isilon Storage Division, and a member of its NFS Protocol team. He received a B.S. Degree in Computer Science from the University of Oregon in 2010. Tai came to Isilon in 2011 after a brief stint in game development, and has spent the last two years developing their current and next-generation NFS implementations.

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Cheng Huang, Researcher, Microsoft Research

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

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Tim Hudson, Technical Director, Cryptsoft Pty Ltd

Tim Hudson has been involved in the field of network and system security for more than 20 years. Tim Hudson is a Technical Director at Cryptsoft Pty Ltd 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, Owner/Consultant, Hufferd Enterprises

John Hufferd, Consultant, Hufferd Enterprises John Hufferd is currently a Consultant for his own company – Hufferd Enterprises. Prior to this he was the Senior Executive Director of Technology at Brocade Communications, John Hufferd was responsible for defining Brocade’s technology direction and strategy of storage networks including iSCSI based, FC based, FCoE based, and NAS (CIFS, CIFS) networks. John has over 40 years in the storage and networking industries; and prior to joining Brocade, John retired from the IBM Corporation after 38 years, where he was focused on Systems, Storage, and Storage Networking Strategies. John was a member of the IETF the IBTA (InfiniBand Trade Association) and the T11 Fibre Channel Standards Group -- BB5/6 which is focused on FCoE. John also has held positions on the board of advisors for 7 different companies, and has authored the definitive book on iSCSI called "iSCSI -- The Universal Storage Connection", published by Addison-Wesley.

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Smitha Jayaram, Wipro Technologies

Matt Kurjanowicz is a software engineer on the File Server and Clustering team at Microsoft. Recently, Matt implemented the storage components for sharing VHDX files among multiple virtual machines. Matt’s past work at Microsoft includes replicated storage, highly available network communications, and distributed state systems.

Matt also has previous experience in big data mining and in providing emergency medical services.

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

Dr. M. K. Jibbe is a Director at NetApp (APG). At the technical level, he leads the Quality Architect Team in US and in India as a test technologist and a quality Czar. As an architect lead, Dr. Jibbe and his group define and design the test requirements and test processes for all the NetApp APG Storage products. Dr. Jibbe has been awarded 25 US / Canada patents, 25 others in Patent Pending State, and published over 52 papers in different technical Conferences held in USA, South America, Europe, and India. Dr. M. K. Jibbe is an Adjunct Professor at The Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, USA. Dr. Jibbe teaches classes related to SAN, NAS, hardware simulation, Failover Drivers, Interface protocols (FC, FCOE, iSCSI, SAS, and IB), Computer Architecture, Programming Languages and Standards, and other Basic Electrical and Computer engineering classes

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Sandeep Joshi, Manager, EMC

Sandeep Joshi Sandeep works for EMC/Isilon. He currently works in the area of NDMP backup.

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Dieter Kasper, Principal Architect, Fujitsu

25 years in the IT development, mainly Enterprise Storage

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

Frederick Knight is a Principal Engineer in the Office of the CTO at NetApp. He has over 30 years of experience in the computer and storage industry. Fred currently represents NetApp in several National and International Storage Standards bodies and industry associations, including T10 (SCSI/SAS), T11 (Fibre Channel/FCoE), T13 (ATA), IETF (iSCSI), and SNIA.

He is a member of the SNIA Technical Council and the chair of the SNIA Hypervisor Storage Interfaces working group where he was the primary author of the SNIA HSI White Paper. He is also the author of the new IETF iSCSI update RFC, and the editor for the T10 SES-3 standard. Fred has also received the INCITS Technical Excellence Award for his contributions to both T10 and T11.

Fred is the developer of the first native FCoE target device in the industry (based on a FAS2070). At NetApp, he contributes to technology and product strategy and serves as a consulting engineer to product groups across the company. Prior to joining NetApp, Fred was a Consulting Engineer with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Compaq, and HP where he worked on clustered operating system and I/O subsystem design.

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Brian Koropoff, Consulting Software Engineer, EMC Isilon

Brian Koropoff is a Consulting Software Engineer at EMC Isilon and author of Pike.

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Greg Kramer, Sr. Software Engineer, Microsoft

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

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David Kruse, Principal Software Development Lead, Microsoft

David Kruse is a Lead Software Developer at Microsoft, and has been working on SMB/CIFS at Microsoft for all major releases from Windows 2000 through Windows 8.  He has also worked on related storage technologies at Microsoft, including the Offline Files abilities in Windows and the WebDAV redirector.  During a presentation in previous years around SMB 2, he stated that there likely would be no need for an SMB 3 during his career.  Evidently, he was wrong.

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Parag Kulkarni, VP Engineering, Calsoft Inc.

Key strength lies in quickly understanding product requirements and translating them into architectural and engineering specs for implementation.

  • Leads the engineering team at Calsoft.
  • Led the development of Database Editions product at Veritas (Symantec)
  • A key contributing member at leading storage companies like Informix (IBM)
  • Masters of Technology in Computer Science from IIT Roorkee
  • Degree in Industrial Management from University of Indore, India

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Matt Kurjanowicz, Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

Matt Kurjanowicz is a software engineer on the File Server and Clustering team at Microsoft. Recently, Matt implemented the storage components for sharing VHDX files among multiple virtual machines. Matt’s past work at Microsoft includes replicated storage, highly available network communications, and distributed state systems.

Matt also has previous experience in big data mining and in providing emergency medical services.

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Aapo Kyrola, Ph.D. student, CMU Computer Science Department

Aapo Kyrola is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Guy Blelloch and Carlos Guestrin. Before graduate studies he was the technical founder of Habbo Hotel (http://www.habbo.com) back in year 2000, one of the largest web-based virtual worlds that over hundred million users have visited. Recently he has been helping launch a new startup that unveiled a fully automatic activity and location tracker for smart phones in January 2013, http://moves-app.com.

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Volker Lendecke, Co-Founder of SerNet, GmbH

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

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Wesley Leggette, Software Architect, Cleversafe, Inc.

Wesley Leggette has been a Software Architect for Cleversafe for more than 7 years and has had a key role in the development of its dispersed storage technology. Cleversafe’s approach to solving the growing storage needs of unstructured data presented Wesley with the unique opportunity to work on an emerging technology and bring it to full fruition. Today, Cleversafe is one of the few innovative companies capable of solving the complex needs of petabyte-scale storage. Wesley will continue to move well beyond those capacity needs in his development efforts for the company.

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Ilja Livenson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Ilja Livenson is an open-source developer and research engineer at KTH PDC, which he has joined in 2010 after receiving his M.Sc. in computer science at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Ilja has previous experience working as a developer, system administrator and security analyst in several industry and academic projects, including developing of the medical health system (eHL), helping to extend EGEE to the Baltics (EU FP6/7 BalticGrid I and II), supporting the CERN CMS user community, and working on the peer-to-peer virtual-world platform (EU FP7 VirtualLife). During the last 2 years Ilja was leading the development of the OpenNode cloud toolkit as well as development of the open-source proxy server, the latter being a topic of this presentation.

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

Paul Long is a program manager, Protocol Manager, Protocol Engineering Framework focusing primarily on the UI. Paul publishes information about our current tools via our blog, http://blogs.technet.com/netmon, as well as providing support on our forums, http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/netmon. Previously he worked as a networking support specialist in the Critical Problem Resolution (CPR) group for 10 years where he provided corporate level support for the most difficult customer issues.

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Dan Lovinger, Principal Software Architect, 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, Cloud Storage 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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Jim Malina, Technologist, Western Digital

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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Bret McKee, Distinguished Technologist, Hewlett Packard

Bret McKee is a Distinguished Technologist working for Hewlett Packard’s Storage business. He has worked at HP since 1986. He has a BS and MS in Computer Science from Iowa State University.

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Ethan Miller, Professor, University of California

Ethan Miller Professor, University of California; Director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, Associate Director of the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC). Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS) and the Associate Director of the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC).

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Manish Motwani, Lead Software Developer, Cleversafe, Inc.

Manish Motwani is the storage guru at Cleversafe. In his seven years with the company, he has pioneered new techniques for virtualizing, managing, and healing data in Petabyte-scale systems. As a Lead Software Engineer Manish has specialized in the global namespace, data migration and balancing to make dispersed storage one of the most scalable ways of storing data.

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Peter Murray, Senior Product Specialist, SwiftTest, Inc.

Peter is an expert with over 25 years of experience implementing, testing and maintaining secure, fast and highly-available networks and applications. In his role as Product Specialist, Peter’s continuous liaising with customers and prospects ensures that SwiftTest’s products meet market requirements and that customers use their products to maximum benefit.

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Arun Murthy, Co-founder, Hortonworks

Arun is VP, Apache Hadoop at the Apache Software Foundation i.e. Chair of the Apache Hadoop PMC and has been a full time contributor to Hadoop since the project inception in 2006. He is also the lead of the MapReduce project and has focused on building NextGen MapReduce (YARN). Prior to co-founding Hortonworks, Arun was responsible for all MapReduce code and configuration deployed across the 42,000+ servers at Yahoo!. In essence, he was responsible for running Apache Hadoop’s MapReduce as a service for Yahoo!. Also, he jointly holds the current world sorting record using Apache Hadoop. Follow Arun on Twitter: @acmurthy.

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Philippe Nicolas, Director of Product Strategy, Scality

Philippe Nicolas is a recognized storage industry expert with 20 years of experience. He currently drives the Product Strategy at Scality (www.scality.com). Before, he launched The IT Press Tour and initiated a P2P dispersed storage software project named KerStor. Previously, he was at Brocade for 2 years as technology evangelist and strategist and spent nearly 10 years at Veritas Software and Symantec. Prior 1997, he served various technical positions at SGI and Compaq. He holds an engineering degree in computer sciences from ESI. In parallel, Philippe started the SNIA Europe France regional committee in 2001, and he served as Chairman for France until February 2010. He was also 2 times board director of the SNIA Europe in 2001-2002 and between 2007 and 2009. He created also 4 SNIA Tutorials around Data Sharing, File Storage, Massive Scalability and Cloud Storage since 2002. He received in 2005 the "Outstanding Service Award", from the SNIA Europe, for his industry and association contribution and he's a founding member of SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative. He owns 2 famous French Storage blogs (http://filestorage.blogspot.com/ and http://continuousdataprotection.blogspot.com/), #1 independent storage blog in France, with 1000+ blogposts and 6+ years of existence. His twitter account is @CDP_FST.

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Adi Oltean, Principal Software Design Engineer, Microsoft

Adi Oltean is a Principal SDE in the Hybrid Storage Services team (part of Windows Server), having more than 14 years of expertise in developing storage technologies within Microsoft. Adi has actively contributed to the development of many core services already shipping in Windows (both client and server), such as Volume Shadow Copy and Volume Management services, backup and system restore, File Server Resource Manager, Defrag, File Classification Infrastructure, and more recently the Data Deduplication service shipping in Windows Server 2012. Being passionate about hot areas such as synchronization, deduplication, data classification and enterprise cloud services, his main focus is prototyping, architecting and shipping next-generation storage services. During his tenure at Microsoft, Adi has co-authored more than 25 patents in various areas: storage management, virtual machine technology, data compression, networking optimization, and more.

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Chuck Paridon, Storage Performance Architect, Hewlett Packard

Chuck Paridon, Storage Performance Architect, Hewlett Packard Chuck is a 25 year veteran in computer system and storage subsystem performance analysis. He is currently responsible for the development and delivery of Storage Performance collateral in the form of field performance troubleshooting and pre-sales consulting. He is a member of the SNIA Solid State and Green Storage Technical workgroups, and the Storage Performance Council. Chuck earned a BS Mechanical Engineering (Univ. of Akron, OH) and an MS Computer Science (Cal State Univ., Chico)

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Vladimir Petter, Principal Software Design Engineer, Microsoft

Vladimir Petter is a Principal Software Design Engineer at Microsoft. He has over 20 year of experience in Software Development. For the past 7 years he has been working as part of the Microsoft Failover Clustering team on various aspects of the cluster. In the past two releases of the Windows he was focusing on the Cluster Shared Volume file system. Before Microsoft he worked for various startups in the California Bay Area, focusing on video streaming and building security and automation solutions. Vladimir has a Bachelor in Mathematics and Master in Computer Science from Daugavpils University (Latvia).
 

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Aruna Prabakar, Software Engineer, EMC

Aruna has 13 years experience in the industry with a MS in computer science from California State University East Bay, currently working as a consultant software engineer and leading this code coverage project for whole of engineering from both QA and Development perspective.

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Amritam Putatunda, Technical Marketing Engineer, Ixia

Amritam Putatunda started his career as a Devtest engineer for Cisco next-generation routers and switches. Mr. Putatunda initially joined Ixia as a Quality and Assurance Engineer and has transitioned into Technical Marketing Engineer for the Storage business of Ixia. In the past few years, Amritam has been instrumental in ideating several storage validation features that have been introduced into Ixia’s product lines. He is presently based out of Singapore and handles product management initiatives for Ixia’s Application and Security business for the APAC region.

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Simona Rabinovici-Cohen, Research Staff Member, IBM

Simona Rabinovici-Cohen is a research staff member at the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, Israel. She holds M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in computer science, both from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Simona leads Preservation DataStores in the Cloud that provides preservation-aware cloud based storage services to ENSURE European Union integrated project. Preservation DataStores was also the storage infrastructure component in the concluded CASPAR integrated project. In SNIA, Simona co-chairs Long Term Retention technical working group that develops the Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF). Prior to that, Simona was the leader of various projects in the area of information integration and knowledge management systems, including kiosk technology deployed in the Hermitage museum in Russia, data integration for performance management, integrated medical records, de-identification, biomedical information integration, and IBM Clinical Genomics solution.

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Rajesh Radhakrishnan, Chief Architect and Principal Consultant, Zygous LLC

Mr. Rajesh Radhakrishnan is the Chief Architect and Principal Consultant at Zygous LLC from August 2013. Earlier Mr. Radhakrishnan was a senior managing consultant and Executive Architect for IBM Global Technology Services (GTS). His current client engagements involve global ITIL program management, service-level management, and service availability/continuity management. Prior to joining IBM, he was an independent IT architect at Zygous, LLC, for two years and a senior technical consultant at Sun Microsystems, for nearly five years. He was also a senior technical staff member at Metamor Worldwide for five years and consulted for numerous Fortune 500 companies. He specializes in enterprise architecture and service management consulting, business continuance, high availability, high-end systems, storage technologies, and technical project management.

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Sanjay Radia, Co-founder, Hortonworks

Sanjay is an Apache Hadoop committer and member of the Apache Hadoop PMC. Prior to co-founding Hortonworks, Sanjay was the architect of the Hadoop HDFS project at Yahoo!. He has also held senior engineering positions at Sun Microsystems and INRIA, where he developed software for distributed systems and grid/utility computing infrastructures. Sanjay has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Canada. Follow Sanjay on Twitter: @srr.

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Narain C. Ramdass, Manager, EMC

Bio Pending

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Giorgio Regni, CTO, Scality

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

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Jason Resch, Senior Software Engineer, Cleversafe, Inc.

Jason Resch is an innovative force at Cleversafe. In his seven years with the company, he has become the most prolific inventor having hundreds of pending and issued patent applications. As a Lead Software Engineer Jason has specialized in information security, information dispersal algorithms, and reliability analysis.

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Alma Riska, Consulting Software Engineer, EMC

Alma Riska is a Consultant Software Engineer in the Advanced Storage Division at EMC where she works on resilience at scale, reliability and performance. Prior to joining EMC, she worked as a researcher at Seagate Research studying reliability, performance isolation and the interaction between disk drives and storage systems. Alma holds a PhD from the College of William & Mary and two U.S. patents.

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José Rivera, Software Engineer, Red Hat

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

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Ronnie Sahlberg, Site Reliability Engineer, Google

Ronnie Sahlberg Ronnie has long experience from file and block storage as a developer. Ronnie has previously worked for EMC and IBM but is now working with other things at Google. Wireshark, NAS and block developer. Currently spending time on building a proper iSCSI test suite.

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Leah Schoeb, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group

Leah Schoeb is a Senior Partner with the Evaluator Group bringing expertise ranging from cloud infrastructure and virtualization to storage performance. She draws from over 20 years of experience in the computer industry helping systems companies with performance optimization, marketing positioning, benchmark evidence creation, and guiding industry standards development for server, virtualized, and storage solutions.

Prior to joining Evaluator Group Leah has served in several leadership roles both on the engineering and marketing sides for performance for companies, such as, VMware, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Intel, and Amdahl. Recently she has developed and executed long-term plans for the generation of new cloud computing performance evidence and used novel means to disseminate it to the industry. Leah has also participated and provided thought leadership for industry groups such as, Transaction Performance Council (TPC), Storage Performance Council (SPC), and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). She currently serves the SNIA as the Vice Chairperson of the Technical Council and the Chair of the Green Storage Initiative.

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Stacy Schwarz-Gardner, Strategic Technical Architect, Spectra Logic

Data growth and global data access have forced organizations to rethink how they manage data life cycle. Data management cloud platforms leveraging active archive technologies and principles are designed for data access, scalability, and long-term data management regardless of the storage medium utilized. Tiered storage is just one element of a data management cloud. Active archive principles enable data life cycle management across tier and location while enforcing retention and other compliance attributes. Choosing the appropriate media type for long-term storage of data assets based on access profile and criticality to the organization will be key for future proofing data management strategies.

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Dhishankar Sengupta, Test Architect, NetApp

Dhishankar Sengupta is a Test Architect at NetApp (APG). At the technical level, he leads the test architect and Quality Team in India as a test technologist. As an architect he helps define and design the test requirements and test processes for all the NetApp Management Software Storage products. Dhishankar has 7 invention disclosures in Patent Pending State.

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Sudipta Sengupta, Sr. Researcher, Microsoft

Sudipta Sengupta is at Microsoft Research, working on non-volatile memory aware systems, data deduplication for server and cloud, storage virtualization, and data center systems and networking. His work on data deduplication ships in the new primary data deduplication feature in Windows Server 2012. Previously, Dr. Sengupta spent five years at Bell Laboratories, the Research Division of Lucent Technologies.

Dr. Sengupta was awarded the IEEE William R. Bennett Prize for 2011 and the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize for 2008 for his work on oblivious routing of network traffic. At Microsoft, he received the Gold Star Award which recognizes excellence in leadership and contributions for Microsoft's long term success. At Bell Labs, he received the President's Teamwork Achievement Award for technology transfer of research into Lucent products. Dr. Sengupta is an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He 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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Richard Sharpe, Samba Team Member, Panzura

Richard Sharpe is a Samba Team member, He has contributed to Ethereal/Wireshark, Samba and SCST.

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Spencer Shepler, Performance Architect, Microsoft

Spencer Shepler has been in the distributed file systems industry for more than 2 decades.  For most of that time, his primary focus has been on the development and deployment of the Network File System (NFS), building implementations at IBM, Sun Microsystems, and now at Microsoft.  Spencer has always been fascinated with performance measurement and improvement.  First by leading the SPEC SFS committee to a release of the SPEC NFS benchmark and more recently with the work at Microsoft to characterize workloads for the Windows SMB3.0 protocol.

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Tracy Shintaku , Distinguished Technologist, HP Server Engineering R&D, HP

As a senior member of HP’s Hyperscale Engineering Team, Tracy works directly with organizations to help design, build and operate the most extreme and scalable infrastructures. Tracy has first-hand customer experiences pushing the boundaries of scalability of both hardware and software while optimizing for data center costs and operational efficiency. Tracy has over 30 years in the Industry and most recently, spent nearly13 years working for Sun and Oracle with marque Silicon Valley Internet companies.

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David Slik, Technical Director, Object Storage, NetApp

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

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Suresh Srinivas, Hortonworks

Suresh is an Apache Hadoop committer and member of the Apache Hadoop PMC. He is a long term active contributor to the Apache Hadoop project. Prior to co-foundingHortonworks, he served as a software architect at Yahoo! working on Apache Hadoop HDFS, where he developed features and supported some of the largest installations of Hadoop clusters. Suresh also worked for Sylantro Systems in various senior technical leadership roles and developed scalable real-time infrastructure for hosted communications services.

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Aravind Velamur Srinivasan, Senior Software Engineer, EMC

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

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Tom Talpey, Architect, Microsoft

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

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Niraj Tolia, Chief Architect, Maginatics

Niraj Tolia is the Chief Architect at Maginatics and a founding member of the Maginatics team. With a background in distributed systems, storage systems, virtualization and operating systems, Niraj currently leads Maginatics' technical design and architecture and is involved in every aspect of product definition and strategy. Before joining Maginatics, Niraj was a senior researcher in the Exascale Computing Lab at HP Labs. There he led research into data-intensive computing, next-generation non-volatile memories, Infrastructure-as-a-Service systems, and next-generation data centers. Niraj received his PhD in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a part of the Parallel Data Lab and conducted research on distributed storage systems with an emphasis on wide area network data transfer. He also received his BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Gregory Touretsky, Solutions Architect ,Intel

Gregory Touretsky is Solutions Architect in the Intel IT organization. He is interested in distributed computing and storage solutions, data sharing and cloud topics. Gregory holds MSc in Computers Engineering from Novosibirsk State Technical University and MBA from Tel-Aviv University. His email is gregory.touretsky at intel.com

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Satoshi Uda, Assistant Professor, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST)

Satoshi UDA, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor at Research Center for Advanced Computing Infrastructure, JAIST. He is a specialist on Internet architecture and campus ICT infrastructure. He also has activities as Research Fellow at National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Board member at WIDE Project and NOC generalist (co-chair) at Interop Tokyo ShowNet NOC Team.

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Apurva Vaidya, Technical Architect, iGATE

Apurva Vaidya is a Technical Architect at iGATE in the Storage Networks and Computing (SNC) Team and is responsible for architecting solutions in Storage. Apurva has around 10 years of storage domain experience with iGATE, and has held various technical and engineering leadership positions. He has worked on Windows and Linux drivers, File systems, Firmware and management applications. Apurva holds a master’s degree in Software Engineering and a bachelor's degree in Information Technology.

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Lazarus Vekiarides

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

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Paul von Behren, Software Architect, Intel Corporation

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

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Rick Walsworth, Director Product Marketing, EMC

Sr. Software Engineer at Intel, Currently focusing on cloud infrastructure area, especially cloud storage. Prior experience involves Telecom OSS, SAP ERP and Enterprise system benchmarking.

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Yaguang Wang, Sr. Software Engineer ,Intel

Sr. Software Engineer at Intel, Currently focusing on cloud infrastructure area, especially cloud storage. Prior experience involves Telecom OSS, SAP ERP and Enterprise system benchmarking.

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John Webster, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group

John Webster is a Senior Partner with Evaluator Group where he specializes in Big Data analytics architectures and associated storage technologies. He has been an industry analyst specializing in storage for 22 years and has spoken at past SDC events. He currently publishes a Forbes blog entitled "Inescapable Data" where he discusses these topics.

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Sage Weil, Founder and Chief Architect, Inktank

Sage Weil is the creator of the Ceph project. Sage originally designed Ceph as part of his PhD research in Storage Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since graduating, he has continued to refine the system with the goal of providing a stable next generation distributed storage system for Linux. Sage is a co-founder of DreamHost and as a teenager he created and sold WebRing.

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Michael Willett, Storage Security Strategist, Samsung

Dr. Willett received his Masters /PhD/mathematics from NC State University. After a career as a university professor of mathematics and computer science, Dr. Willett joined IBM as a design architect, moving into IBM's Cryptography Competency Center. Recently, Dr. Willett was a Senior Director at Seagate Research, focusing on security functionality on hard drives, including self-encryption. Currently, Dr. Willett serves as a consultant on the marketing of storage-based security. Presently, Dr. Willett is working with Samsung as a storage security strategist, helping to define their self-encryption strategy across Samsung’s portfolio of storage products.

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Chris Winter, Director Product Management, SafeNet

Chris Winter has over 20 years of experience in technical management roles for storage, security and encryption products. His background includes engineering, product management and product line director positions at Veritas, MaXXan, NeoScale, SonicWALL, LSI, and NetApp before joining SafeNet. Chris has experience in all aspects of storage and encryption product development, from market definition to user acceptance, and everything in between. He has presented at industry security and storage conferences around the world as well as reseller and developer’s conferences and CIO forums. He brings a unique, broad perspective both to the challenges facing the industry today and the difficulties that end users experience making critical technology decisions.

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Felix Xavier, Co-Founder and CTO, CloudByte

Felix has more than 15 years of development and technology management experience. With the right blend of expertise in both networking and storage technologies, he co-founded CloudByte. Felix has built many high-energy technology teams, re-architected products and developed core features from scratch. Most recently, Felix helped NetApp gain leadership position in storage array-based data protection, by driving innovations around its product suite. He has filed numerous patents with the US patent office around core storage technologies. Prior to this, Felix worked at Juniper, Novell and IBM, where he handled networking technologies, including LAN, WAN and security protocols and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). Felix has a master’s degrees in technology and business administration.

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Dr. Ying Xu, R&D Lead, Aspera Inc.

Dr. Ying Xu leads a number of R&D initiatives around high-speed data transport, bandwidth control and, most recently, systems aspects of big data at Aspera Inc. He joined Aspera in 2006, after finishing his PhD degree in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he investigated QoS issues in networked systems. As well as being published in journals such as IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Dr. Xu has also authored and co-authored four pending patents at Aspera R&D, and is an active code contributor to Aspera's core data transfer engine.

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Alan Yoder, Senior Manager Storage Standards, Huawei

Alan Yoder, Ph.D. is Senior Manager, Storage Standards of Huawei Technologies, joining in 2012. Alan had been at NetApp since earning his Ph.D. in distributed systems in 1997, working on protocols, management frameworks, management applications, management partnerships, the Manage ONTAP™ SDK, and other projects. He also has experience in construction and industrial accounting, CAD design and programming, GUI design and development and project management. He holds Bachelors, MSEE and Ph.D. degrees from Goshen College and the University of Notre Dame.

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Boris Zuckerman, Distinguish Technologist, HP

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

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