2011 SDC Featured Speakers

Eric Baldeschwieler

CEO, Hortonworks

Biography

Eric is CEO of Hortonworks, Inc. which was formed by the key architects and core Hadoop committers from the Yahoo! Hadoop software engineering team in June 2011 in order to accelerate the development and adoption of Apache Hadoop. Apache Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. Prior to co-founding Hortonworks, Eric served as VP Hadoop Software Engineering for Yahoo!. Eric also served as a technology leader for Inktomi’s web service engine, which Yahoo! acquired in 2003. Prior to Inktomi, Eric developed software for video games, video post production systems and 3D modeling systems. Eric has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Follow Eric on Twitter: @jeric14.

Garth Gibson

Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, and CTO, Panasas Inc

Biography

Garth Gibson is a professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Panasas Inc. Garth received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. While at Berkeley he did the groundwork research and co-wrote the seminal paper on RAID, then Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks, for which he received the 1999 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award for outstanding contributions in the field of information storage. Joining CMU's faculty in 1991, Garth founded CMU's Parallel Data Laboratory (www.pdl.cmu.edu), academia’s premiere storage systems research center, and co-led the Network-Attached Storage Device (NASD) research project that became the basis of the T10 (SCSI) Object-based Storage Devices (OSD) command set for storage. At Panasas Garth led the development of the PanFS Scale Out NAS in use in government and commercial high-performance computing sites, including the world’s first Petaflop computer, Roadrunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Through Panasas, Garth co-instigated the IETF's emerging open standard for parallelism, pNFS, in the next generation of Network File Systems (NFSv4.1). Garth was also the principal investigator of the Department of Energy's Petascale Data Storage Institute in the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program and is the co-director of the Institute for Reliable High Performance Information Technology, a joint effort with Los Alamos. Garth also participates in the Intel Science and Technology Center for Cloud Computing as well as the OpenCirrus cloud computing collaboration with Yahoo!, Intel, HP, etc. and leads a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Center for eScience in the 21st Century, which operates an OpenCloud Hadoop cluster in use for astrophysics, computational biology, geophysics, machine translation, machine learning of the web, blog and twitter publications, and analysis of malware. Garth has sat on a variety of academic and industrial service committees including the Technical Council of the Storage Networking Industry Association and the program and steering committee of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).

Dr. Thomas Pfenning

General Manager, Microsoft

Biography

Thomas Pfenning is the General Manager for Windows File Server technologies in Microsoft's Server and Cloud Division. He manages the engineering team and engages with customers and the partner ecosystem to deliver the components related to remote file access in the Windows server and client operating systems. In the 13 years leading up to his current role Thomas worked on the MSN dialup access network, Windows Networking, Mobile Information Server, WMI, and the Microsoft Sync Framework.

Before joining Microsoft in 1995 Thomas worked as a researcher in computer science with positions at the Nuclear Research Center in Juelich, the University of Bielefeld, and the University of Cologne in Germany. He has a master's degree in Physics and a PhD in Computer Science both from the University of Cologne.

Bret Piatt

Director of Corporate Development, Rackspace

Biography

Bret Piatt is Director of Corporate Development where he is responsible for identifying and pursuing new growth opportunities for Rackspace’s core business through M&A, strategic partnerships, or incubation efforts. He played a crucial role in the formation of OpenStack, the open source cloud software community, as well as building the Cloud Tools ecosystem for the Rackspace Cloud. Previously, Bret was on the Product Management teams for both Rackspace and AT&T, where he was responsible for security and compliance product lines. His technical experience comes from his time at AT&T/SBC, where he designed carrier scale monitoring and management systems, optimized networks for enterprise customers, and performed lab testing on new products from potential suppliers and partners. Bret has more than 12 years experience working for service providers on leading edge projects and technologies from the beginning of VPN services to the currently emerging public cloud computing market. He is a also frequent speaker on cloud computing and big data technology at major industry events.

Jim Pinkerton

Partner Architect, File Server Technologies, Microsoft

Biography

Jim Pinkerton is the Partner Architect responsible for Microsoft’s File Server Technologies, working on advanced scale-out file servers and associated technologies. Jim’s recent work has included helping to create a new oplock model for SMB2, incorporating peer-to-peer capabilities into the file server, high speed file serving (10 gigabit and InfiniBand), and server application storage (RDMA, Remote VSS, SMB MPIO, directory oplocks, etc). He previously led the protocol documentation effort for file access protocols (CIFS, SMB, etc), and open-source engagement for implementation of the protocols (“Samba” project). Previously at Microsoft he was an architect in the core networking team, working on Scalable Networking technologies. He helped to define advanced network device interfaces on Windows, including offload work for TCP, RDMA, IPSec, and the Chimney architecture.

Jim has helped create standards for Microsoft features in the 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 iWARP Consortium. Recently he has worked closely with SNIA, including helping to create an annual file server interop event for SMB and to standardize the XAM specification (an api for remote blob storage focused on compliance requirements).

Andy Walls

Distinguished Engineer and Technical Lead, IBM - Systems and Technology Division

Biography

Andy Walls is the technical lead for IBM Systems and Technology division's deployment of SSDs. Andy has responsibility for developing leading edge Flash solutions across all of IBM's platforms. He also works closely with IBM Software Group to ensure that these solutions provide differentiation for our applications. In addition, Andy is the chief engineer for IBM's DS8000 hardware platform.

Andy been with IBM throughout his 29 year career and was appointed as a Distinguished Engineer with IBM in 2006. He has 23 years experience in all areas of storage systems and has filed nearly 50 patents. He is a regular speaker at industry events on storage and Flash memory and regularly presents to clients, business partners and suppliers on IBM storage systems trends and requirements. He is regularly consulted for advice on systems and IO infrastructure design. Andy earned his BSEE degree at UC Santa Barbara in 1981.

Ric Wheeler

File System Team Manager and Architect, Red Hat

Biography

Ric works at Red Hat as the manager and architect of the file system team. He has extensive experience in storage and file systems after spending ten years at EMC in its Symmetrix and Centera groups, four years at The Open Group's Research Institute and four years at Thinking Machines working on the CM5 operating system. In the distant past, Ric worked on the original MOSIX process migration system at Hebrew University's distributed systems laboratory. For the past ten years, he has been active in the Linux file system and IO world where he helped organize workshops, inform open source developers about high end storage and helped advance the robustness of the Linux IO & file system stack.

2011 SDC SPEAKERS

Michael Adam, Senior Software Engineer, Samba Team / SerNet 

Michael has studied maths and computer science. He works as a senior software engineer and consultant at SerNet GmbH in Germany and is responsible for the project management in the company's Samba division. As a member of the Samba Team, Michael is specialized on clustered Samba and also works on the CTDB software. 

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Dr. Jens-Peter Akelbein, Research, IBM Germany Research and Development

Dr. Jens-Peter Akelbein received his diploma in electrical engineering by the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany.  For his research work on intelligent mass storages devices based on file-level protocols he received his PhD in electrical engineering by the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg, Germany. Since 1999 he works in IBM. Former responsibilities were in the development teams for the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager especially on Backup and Hierarchical Storage Management. As part of the IBM Linux Technology Center his team developed the service product IBM Scale-out File Services being productized as storage product IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS). Jens-Peter is head of the department Storage Systems Architecture in IBM R&D in Mainz, Germany.

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Jeremy Allison, Computer Programmer, Google

Jeremy Allison is a computer programmer famous for his contributions to the free software community, notably to Samba, a re-implementation of SMB/CIFS networking protocol, released under the GNU General Public License. Jeremy Allison is the co-lead of the Samba Team.     He works for Google, who fund his work on Samba.

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Leo Prasath Arulraj, Software Development Engineer, Amazon Web Services

Leo Arulraj is a Software Development Engineer with Amazon Web Services team working on a low latency , highly scalable no-sql database webservice in the Simple Database team. He has also worked on the publishing workflow infrastructure for Kindle E-Periodicals and other Digital Products at Amazon. He holds a M.S. in Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin Madison where he was advised by Profs. Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. His master's research focus was on File and Storage systems. He will be speaking at the Storage Developer Conference on his research on Storage Device Emulators which won a Best Paper award at FAST 2011. He also holds a B.Eng. in Computer Science from the College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai, India.

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Jose Barreto, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Jose Barreto is an experienced IT Professional, with over 20 years in the field working in different technical roles. He graduated in Computer Science at the Universidade Federal do Ceara in Brazil in 1989 and holds several industry certifications, including CISSP, ITIL, MCITS, MCT and many other Microsoft certifications. Jose Barreto is currently working as a Senior Program Manager with the File Server Foundation team at Microsoft. He also keeps an active blog at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/"

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Seikh Basiruddin, Member Technical Staff, NetApp

Seikh completed his undergrad (B.Tech) from National Institute of Technology , Hamirpur in Conmputer Science and my graduation (M.S.) from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani ( India) in Software Systems.Seikh has been working in SAN  area more than 5.5 years. Since his undergrad days, he is giving presentation in various area. He also is representing in various technical group locally in NetApp. Recently, one of his R&D projects was to analyze the performance analysis of ISER over normal iSCSI stack.

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Roopesh Battepati, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft

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

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Dr. Anupam Bhide, CEO/Founder, Calsoft, Inc

Dr. Anupam Bhide is a seasoned entrepreneur with more than 21 years of experience in IT Industry. His visionary leadership has been the quintessential guiding factor for Calsoft to become a leading Outsourced Software Product Development company. His strength lies in identifying and unlocking optimal value for high-technology companies. Previously, Anupam led business units at companies like HP, IBM, and Oracle. He has published over 20 papers in various international conferences and won the best paper award at VLDB database conference. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Univ. of California-Berkeley, an MS from University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B. Tech from IIT-Mumbai.

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Kai Blin, Embedded Developer, Samba team

Kai Blin is a computational biologist working on a Ph.D. in Biotechnology at the University of Tübingen. He spends his spare time working on Samba, an Open Source implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol. Kai holds a M.Sc. in computational biology from the University of Tübingen. He has been a member of the Samba Team since 2007.

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Bill Bolosky, Member, Microsoft Research

Bill Bolosky has been a member of Microsoft Research since 1992. He has interests in areas loosely centered around distributed systems, storage and operating systems but feels free to branch out to work on any problems that seem interesting, ranging from process priority management for IO bound processes to gene sequencing. He has published in most of the major systems conferences with regularity if not great frequency, and has even helped Microsoft ship a product or two. He's currently the PC co-chair for FAST '12.

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Dhruba Borthakur, Project Lead, Open Source Apache, Hadoop Distributed File System, Facebook

Dhruba Borthakur is the Project Lead for the Open Source Apache Hadoop Distributed File System. He has been associated with Hadoop almost since its inception while working for Yahoo. He currently works for Facebook and is instrumental in scaling Facebook's hadoop cluster to 30 PetaBytes. Dhruba also is a contributor to the open source Apache HBase project.

Dhruba has an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a B.S. in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. He has 17 issued patents. He hosts a Hadoop blog at http://hadoopblog.blogspot.com/

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Molly Brown, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft

Molly Brown works in the Windows File Server Team at Microsoft. Molly began her career at Microsoft in 1999 and has worked in a variety of local and remote file system and storage areas. Her first project was working on the Windows File System Filters team. After working in that area for three years, her next project was working on the Windows File System Cache Manager.  Molly’s team currently owns the technologies for roaming user state from file servers to Windows client machines and SMB/BranchCache. Molly has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Virginia and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

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Dr. John Busch, Founder and CTO, Schooner

Dr. John Busch, Founder, Chairman and CTO  Dr. John Busch is the founder of Schooner. Prior to Schooner, John was director of computer system architecture at Sun Microsystems Laboratories from 1999 through 2006. In this role, John led research in multi-core processors, multi-tier scale-out architectures, and advanced high-performance computer systems. John received the President's Award for Innovation at Sun. Prior to Sun, John was VP of engineering and business partnerships with Diba, Inc., and was general manager of the Diba division after Sun acquired it in 1997. From 1989 to 1994, John was cofounder, CTO and VP of engineering of Clarity Software, and led the creation of advanced multi-media composition and communication products for Sun, HP, and IBM computer systems (which were awarded UNIX World Product of the Year). From 1976 to 1993, John led many successful R&D programs at Hewlett Packard in Computer Systems Research and Development. John earned a Ph.D. in computer systems architecture from UCLA, an M.S. in mathematics from UCLA, an M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, and attended the Sloan Program at Stanford.

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James Cain, Principal Software Architect, Quantel Limited

James Westland Cain has worked as a software developer in the Television and Film post production industries for over 15 years, the last 10 of which have been spent with Quantel R&D. He specialises in designing file based workflow solutions that are in daily use across many parts of the world, with large broadcast customers such as BBC, ESPN & WDR, and many post production facilities using his innovations. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Advanced Software Engineering by Reading University in 2003.

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Gerald Carter, CTO, Likewise Software

Gerald Carter is currently serving as CTO for Likewise Software and is responsible for the company's platform strategy and architecture.  He is heavily involved in the Likewise open source initiative to simplify integration into Microsoft dominated networks for both network administrators and application developers.  Gerald has been developing, writing about, and teaching on Open Source since the late 90's at events such as LISA, LinuxWorld Expo, SANE, SambaXP, OSCON, and the SNIA SDC.  He was a member of the Samba core development team from 1998 - 2009 and has authored both "LDAP System Administration" and the third edition of "Using Samba" and for O'Reilly Publishing.   He held previous positions at HP and VA Linux systems and previously served on the Usenix Association's Board of Directors.

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Dennis Chapman, Senior Technical Director, NetApp

Dennis Chapman  Senior Technical Director - NetApp  1989 - current    Dennis cut his teeth on the Z80 writing BDOS drivers for CP/M in the late 70s on S-100 hardware at a startup. That progressed to Unix development using SVr3 on a 386. He wrote a simple streams based SMB server for customer running DOS 3.2.  A veteran of over 32 years in the industry and 23 in Silicon Valley mostly spent at Amdahl and NetApp. In Amdahl, he worked in the UTS group in file protocols, networking and architecture. At NetApp, he has worked in a number of areas including new product design and development, frequent customer engagements and is currently the Senior Technical Director for the Microsoft Business Unit.

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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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Ira Cooper, Senior Systems Software Engineer, The MathWorks, Inc

Ira Cooper is a Senior Systems Software Engineer at The MathWorks. He was instrumental in the design and implementation of the current NAS system used for testing their massive MATLAB and Simulink codebase. Currently, he works on systems engineering issues such as sizing, virtualization, and optimization issues with their Build and Test team. He has a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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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.  Tom is a frequent presenter at trade shows and technical conference and an organizer of several industry events.  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 in 2008. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis (including regular reports on digital storage technologies and applications such as professional media and entertainment and consumer electronics and a newsletter).  His company, Coughlin Associates also provides consulting services.  Tom is active with SMPTE, IDEMA, SNIA, the IEEE Magnetics Society, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society, and other professional organizations.  He is currently marketing director for the SNIA SSSI.  Tom is the founder and organizer of the Annual Storage Visions Conference (www.storagevisions.com), a partner to the annual Consumer Electronics Show as well as the Creative Storage Conference.  Tom is also the chairman of the annual Flash Memory Summit.  He is a Leader in the Gerson Lehrman Group Councils of Advisors and a member of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley (CNSV).  For more information go to www.tomcoughlin.com.  Coughlin Associates can be contacted at 408-978-8184 or by email at tom@tomcoughlin.com.

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Marty Czekalski, Vice President SCSI Trade Association; Interface & Emerging Architecture Program Manager, Seagate

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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Sanjeev Datla, Senior Director of Engineering, Emulex

Sanjeev Datla, senior director of engineering, joined Emulex in August 2010 as a part of ServerEngines acquisition, where he served as co-founder. Prior to Emulex, Sanjeev served as Director of Technology and System Architecture at ServerEngines, where he contributed to the concept, architecture and development of ServerEngines' highly successful BladeEngine line of 10 Gigabit Ethernet Enterprise I/O controllers and Pilot line of Server Management Controllers. Prior to co-founding ServerEngines, Sanjeev held various engineering leadership positions at ServerWorks, NEC Electronics and S3 Graphics. Sanjeev holds a Masters Degree in Electronics Design from Indian Institute of Science, and a Bachelors Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Osmania University in India.

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Steven Danneman, Senior Software Developer, Isilon Systems

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

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Prafulla Deuskar, Storage Networking Architect, Intel

Prafulla Deuskar is a Storage Networking Architect in LAN Access Division at Intel. His current interests lie in iSCSI/FCoE, IO Virtualization and network performance.

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David Dodgson, Software Engineer, Unisys

David Dodgson has been a software engineer with Unisys Corp. for over thirty years.  He has worked on programming languages such as COBOL and C++, operating systems, and storage solutions.  David is currently on the architecture team for the Unisys Stealth Security project concentrating on security of data-in-motion, data-at-rest, and in the cloud.  He has a B.S. degree in Mathematics, a B.S. in Computer Engineering, an M.S. degree in Computer Science, and an M.B.A.

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Fleur Dragan, Consultant Software Engineer, EMC

Fleur Dragan is a Consultant Software Engineer in the Cloud Infrastructure Group at EMC where she works on programming APIs, language bindings, and virtualization. Prior to EMC, she worked on technology infrastructure for video and animation at both small and large firms. She is experienced in Java, Ruby/Rails and workflow animation, bringing tools directly to artists and animators. Fleur holds a Bachelor's degree in Applied Math/Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Kevin Farlee, Storage Engine Program Manager, SQL, Microsoft

Kevin Farlee has over 25 years in the industry, in both database as well as storage management software.  In his current role as a Storage Engine Program Manager on the Microsoft SQL Server team, he brings these threads together.  Current projects include SQL backup/restore/snapshots, and Unstructured data storage techniques in SQL Server.

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Dr. Sam Fineberg, Information Management Chief Technologist, HP

Dr. Fineberg is Chief Technologist for HP’s Information Management Software group. In this role, he sets the technical strategy for HP’s information management products.  Dr. Fineberg is an expert in storage, search, classification, deduplication, content management, archiving, and records management.    He has over 20 years of experience, and has participated in many key industry standards initiatives including the SNIA Long Term Retention Technical Working Group, SNIA eXtensible Access Mode (XAM), the Direct Access File System (DAFS), Message Passing Interface (MPI), MPI-2 I/O, and the NAS Parallel Benchmarks.

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Jered Floyd, Chief Technology Officer and Founder, Permabit Technology Corporation

As a founder of the company, Jered Floyd developed much of Permabit’s core product architecture before expanding his role to deploy effective software development methodologies for the company’s rapid growth.  Today, he explores strategic future directions for Permabit’s data optimization technology and products, and delivers the public technology face of the company.  Prior to Permabit, Floyd was a Research Scientist on the Microbial Engineering project at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working to bridge the gap between biological and computational systems. Floyd holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

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Wei Fu, Software Design Engineer, Likewise Software

Wei Joined Likewise Software in 2007 as a software design engineer and has contributed to multiple areas within the Likewise Open Platform.  She was a primary developer on the Likewise registry and has most recently turned her attention to file systems.  She graduated with a PhD in computer science from Washington State University (WSU) in 2007.

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Srinivasa Reddy Gandlaparthi, NetApp, Bangalore India

Currently working at NetApp as Software Architect for SMI-S Providers (External Arrays)  Experienced in defining SMI-S profiles, designing and developing SMI-S providers  Provided Architecture for Intel Server Management Software for more than 3 generations of the Software

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Matthew George, Sr. Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

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

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Jeff Goldner, Principal Architect, Microsoft

Jeff Goldner, Maven of Standards Based Management, Microsoft Corporation  Jeff is a strange, eclectic guy that for some reason - unknown even to himself - has spent most of his career in storage, fighting windmills like storage management. He’s had one good thought in his career, although considered highly silly at the time -  that storage management should be standards based. After years of blackmailing people behind closed doors, that is now coming to fruition.

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Nishi Gupta, Senior Storage Architect

Nishi Gupta is an associate of Tata Consultancy Services with 6 years of work experience. She is working as a senior Storage architect. Her focus area is Data Protection and cloud storage. She has been involved in developing NDMP test framework and a data protection application by integrating Open Source Solution and storage. She also has experienced on developing plugin for NetBackup OST for a leading storage vendor.

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Jim Handy, President, Objective Analysis

Jim Handy is President of Objective Analysis, a strategic marketing and market research firm for the semiconductor industry.  He has over 30 years of electronic industry experience, including 14 years as an industry analyst with Dataquest and Semico Research.  He is a frequent presenter at trade shows and has written hundreds of articles and reports.  He is often quoted in the electronics trade press and other media.
 

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Todd Harris, Sr. Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

Todd Harris has been working in Hyper-V storage at Microsoft since the first release, on both VM and host-side virtualization stack drivers.  For the last couple years he has been specifically focusing his efforts on improving and extending the VHD support in Windows and Hyper-V.

 

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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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Bharath Hegde, Software Engineer, EMC Data Storage Limited

Bharath Hegde is a Software Engineer with EMC. He has over 2 years of experience in storage technologies, windows system programming and testing. He is a graduate from R.V College of Engineering, Bangalore with a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication. In his current role, he is working on EMC archival products. His interests are Cloud Storage, system programming and embedded systems.

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Christopher Hertel, Storage Architect and CIFS Geek

Chris Hertel is CTO of ubiqx Consulting, Inc., author of the book "Implementing CIFS", lead author of the Microsoft SMB/CIFS specifications, and a ruminant mammal (Geekus geekus) with long legs, humped shoulders, and broadly palmated antlers.    Chris is also a long-haul member of the Samba Team, founding member of the jCIFS project, and a member of two Minnesota food cooperatives.

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John Hufferd, Hufferd Enterprises

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

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

Dr. M. K. Jibbe is a technical director at NetApp (APBU: Array Product Business Unit)). At the technical level, he leads the test architect and Quality Team in US and in India as a test technologist and a quality Czar. As a architect lead, Dr. Jibbe and his group define the test strategy and test processes,  and develop the test plans which maps to  the product requirements for all the NetApp APBU . As a Quality Czar, Dr. Jibbe identifies high priority internal and external gaps to achieve zero test escapes and Field issues respectively. Dr. Jibbe has been awarded 22 US / Canada patents, 45 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 and Modeling, 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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Mark Jones, Director Technical Marketing, Emulex

Mark Jones joined Emulex in 2002 and serves as director of technical marketing. Mr. Jones has over 20 years of experience in the enterprise server computing industry. Prior to joining Emulex, Mark Jones was product manager of server systems for Unisys. Mr. Jones holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science.

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John Kilroy, Principal Software Engineer, EMC

Prior to joining EMC, John had a long tenure at IBM's Lotus Software Division where he led a number of development teams contributing technology to IBM WebSphere, IBM Portal Server, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Connections. He has a number of Java-oriented software patents and holds an MBA and an MSCS from Boston University.

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Eden Kim, CEO,
Calypso Systems, Inc

CEO and founder of Calypso Systems, Inc., industry leader in Solid state storage performance test. Chair, SNIA SSS Technical Working Group. SSS TWG released Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification 1.0

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Scott Kipp, Senior Technologist, FCIA. 

Scott Kipp represents Brocade in multiple standards organizations and industry associations and has written several books on storage networking and fiber optics. Scott contributes to multiple standards organizations including ANSI T11, IEEE 802.3, OIF, IEEE 1619, SNIA, OASIS, IETF and Multi Sourcing Agreements. He specializes in high-speed fiber optic technology. Kipp is on the Board of Directors for the Ethernet Alliance and has written three books for the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), another entitled Broadband Entertainment and co-authored the Handbook on Fiber Optic Data Communications.  He has a Bachelors and a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California.

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Frederick Knight, Standards Technologist, NetApp

Frederick Knight is a Principal Engineer in the Office of the CTO at NetApp.    He represents NetApp in several National and International Storage Standards bodies and industry associations, including T10 (SCSI), T11 (Fibre Channel), T13 (ATA), IETF (iSCSI), SNIA, and FCIA.  He is the chair of the SNIA Hypervisor Storage Interfaces working group, primary author of the SNIA HSI White Paper, and author of the new IETF iSCSI update RFC.  He is also the developer of the first native FCoE target device in the industry.    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, Compaq, and HP where he worked on clustered operating system and I/O subsystem design.

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Michael Ko, CTO Office, Huawei Symantec

Michael Ko has been working on storage related research for 25 years and holds 16 U.S. patents.  He currently leads the standards team at the CTO Office at Huawei Symantec.  Prior to that he was a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center.  He is also a current member of the SNIA Technical Council.

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Greg Kramer, Ph.D., Development Engineer, Microsoft

Greg Kramer is a developer in the Windows File Server Team. Greg joined Microsoft in 2007 as a member of the Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) team where he was responsible for adding cluster support to the replication engine. Greg is currently working for the SMB team and is focused on security and performance. Before joining Microsoft, he worked on a variety of autonomous robotics and genetic algorithm research projects for the US Air Force and Wright State University.
 

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David Kruse, Principal 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 7.  He has also worked on related storage technologies at Microsoft, including the Offline Files abilities in Windows and the WebDAV redirector.

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Wesley Leggette, Lead Software Engineer, Cleversafe

Wesley Leggette, Lead Software Engineer at Cleversafe, was employee number and hails from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Wesley has done extensive research in distributed file systems, security, and dispersed storage systems.

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Volker Lendecke, Member Samba Team, Co-founder SerNet GmbH, Germany

Volker Lendecke is member of the Samba Team and Co-Founder of SerNet GmbH in Germany, independent Samba consulting, development and support organization.

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Paul Long, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft

Paul Long, Technical Evangelist for Windows Interoperability Tools Team Paul Long focuses on connecting with our public by publishing information via our blog, http://blogs.technet.com/netmon, as well as providing support on our forums, http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/netmon. He takes customer experiences and helps to drive product direction and functionality. 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, Principal Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation Dan Lovinger is in the Windows File Server team with a current focus on systems architecture and performance. Since joining what was then the Windows NT Base team in 1995, he has worked across the local and remote/distributed file systems and their kernel support. 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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Sreenidhi Lyangar, Senior Technical Lead, Data Storage Systems, EMC

Sreenidhi Iyangar is a senior technical lead working with EMC data storage systems with 14 years of experience in system programming, operating system, data storage and device drivers. He is a graduate from Mysore University with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in Computer Science.     In his current role, he works as a lead for a major archiving product which supports cloud data storage. He provides consultancy on technologies related to archiving and backup in EMC. His interest includes archiving, backup, virtualization and cloud storage

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

MSME, PE with twenty five years experience in related industries Gus Holds several US and International patents related to Carbon  Fiber   

Founder and CEO of three companies Venture backed Composite Rotor: Centrifuges and Rotors for Biotech industry   Composite Products: High-End Audio/Video  Green Platform Corp: Anti-Vibration Solutions for spinning storage for higher performance and reliability

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Chris Marsh, Market Development Manager, Spectra Logic

Christopher Marsh joined Spectra Logic in 2007 and has served in both sales and marketing roles for the organization. His field of expertise includes thorough knowledge in data storage, disaster recovery, automated tape technology, computer security and encoding and cryptography. In his current role as market development manager for Spectra, Marsh is responsible for research and analysis of the general IT commercial market. He develops, manages and oversees strategic relationship management with industry partners to maximize mutual corporate benefits. Chris is also an active member of SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative, Cloud Archive Special Interest group, and a part-time member in the Long Term Retention Technical Working Group. He manages content creation for Spectra Logic’s Active Archive and Cloud initiatives.

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William Martin, Engineer Consultant, Emulex

Bill Martin has been involved in storage standards and product development since the early 1980s. He serves on SNIA as chair of the Data Integrity Technical Work Group in addition to active participation in the INCITS T11, INCITS T10, and INCITS T13 standards committees, holding positions of vice chair, workgroup chair, secretary, and editor. He also participates in the Fibre Channel Industry Association, leading industry plugfests for the development of Fibre Channel and FCoE; and the Serial ATA International Organization. Bill currently works in the Office of Technology for Emulex leading industry storage standards. Bill has been recognized by INCITS and FCIA for his contribution to standardization of storage protocols and interoperability.

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Brian Mason, MTS SW 4, NetApp

Brian Mason is a Staff Software Engineer in the Engenio Storage Group at LSI. Brian has a Master in Computer Science and 20 years of experience in software development specializing in management platforms. Brian has taught software development and lectured at conferences around the country including SNIA Developer, Oracle Open World and Java One conferences

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Harry Mason, Director Industry Marketing, NetApp

Harry Mason leads NetApp’s standards participation activities corporate wide, and participates in several storage related, standards’ activities. Mason has served on the Board of the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), has been the President of the SCSI Trade Association (STA) for each of the past nine years, and is a regular participant in the SNIA SSSI working Group. With over 25 years of storage and semiconductor industry experience, he has been closely involved with numerous industry milestones including the introduction of the industry's first PCI component, the entry of NCR Microelectronics into the merchant semiconductor market and the launch of LSI's host adapters in the indirect sales channel. Mason came to LSI through the company's 1998 acquisition of Symbios Logic. Prior to Symbios Logic, he worked for NCR Microelectronics and Texas Instruments. For these companies, he held various senior positions with responsibilities that ranged from product line management to strategic marketing and served as the business unit director for storage products for a number of years. Mason graduated with a BSEE and MSEE from the University of Missouri at Columbia.   

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Avraham Meir, CTO, Anobit

Avraham Meir is an internationally recognized authority in NAND Flash technology and products, and holds numerous patents pertaining to this field. Prior to joining Anobit, Mr. Meir was VP of Corporate Engineering at Sandisk, and the CTO of M-Systems, a leading provider of removable storage solutions (acquired by Sandisk). Previously, he held senior technical positions at Tadiran Communications, a leading provider of military communication systems. Mr. Meir holds a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering (Summa Cum Laude) from Tel Aviv University.

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Anthony Mungal, Consulting Corporate Systems Engineer, EMC Corporation

Anthony G. Mungal is a Consulting Corporate Systems Engineer with the EMC Corporation in Massachussetts.  He lives, and is based, out of Boca Raton, Florida.  He joined EMC from the Amdahl Corporation in July 1993 and has held various positions including: Consulting Systems Engineer, SE Consultant  and Senior Product Manager.  He is a 33+ year veteran of the IT industry and has earned numerous distinction and special recognition awards while holding sales, marketing and technical positions which included: Product Manager, Large Systems Account Specialist, Regional Systems Engineer, Regional Product Specialist, National Systems Engineering Manager, DASD Product Manager, Senior Systems Programmer, Lead Business Systems Analyst, and Senior Programmer.    He is a graduate of the University of Toronto double majoring with honours in both Mathematics and Computer Science.  He has participated on many IT discussion panels, authored and published numerous papers on Processor Performance, Memory Management, I/O Subsystems Configuration & Performance, Storage Management, IT Infrastructure and Architecture Design & Implementation, and other related topics which he has presented at major technical forums such as the Computer Measurement Group (National and Regional Conferences), CMG International Conferences (Australia, South Africa & the UK), SHARE, GUIDE and an assortment of other local IT related user groups and conferences.  He is an active member, and holds executive positions with the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), CMG Canada, and Florida CMG (FLCMG).  He is also an active member of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE).

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Peter Murray, Product Manager, SwiftTest

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 SwiftTest, 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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Dr. David Pease, Senior Technical Staff Member Manager, IBM Almaden Research Center

Dr. David Pease has 40 years of experience in computer technology. He has spent the last half of this time at IBM Research, where he is currently a Senior Technical Staff Member and Manager; he is also an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Engineering department at U. C. Santa Cruz.     During his time at IBM, Dr. Pease has specialized in storage-related research topics; among his many projects, he was a member of the original DVD Technical Working Group, where he was pivotal in the creation and use of the UDF file system for DVD (and now Blu-Ray) disks. Dr. Pease is the inventor of the LTFS technology, and continues to be the development manager and lead architect for that project.

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Steve Peters, Storage Management Software, PMC-Sierra

Steve Peters has worked in the storage industry for 25+ years and is an employee of PMC-Sierra. He is one of the original authors of the SMI-S standard. While at PMC-Sierra, they have become the first company produce a SMI-S compliant PCI RAID card.

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Evgeny Popovich, Senior Softwaare Engineer, Likewise Software

Evgeny Popovich is Senior Software Engineer at Likewise Software.  He has more than 11 years of software development experience, 6 of which he has been working on protocols development for various NAS products.  Evgeny is currently working on NFS development and interoperability projects, while in the past he led a protocols development team at Exanet, and a military simulators development team at IDF BattleLab.  Evgeny holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Sciences from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

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Shirish Phatak, VP of Technology Shirish Phatak, Altior, Inc

Shirish H. Phatak, is the Vice President of Technology for Altior Inc. (formerly Cebatech Inc.), where he is responsible for building integrated hardware/software solutions. Shirish began his career as the Founder and CTO of Tacit Networks Inc, a company in the Wan Optimization and Wide Area File Services (WAFS) space, where he led the architecture, design and development of Linux and Windows based Wide Area File Services appliance and software offerings. Subsequently, after Tacit was successfully acquired by Packeteer, Inc, Shirish became the CTO for Packeteer’s Wide Area File Services group where he led the development and design of integrated networking and storage appliance offering that combined WAFS with network monitoring and QOS. Most recently Shirish has been an independent consultant where he has worked with a multitude of startups and larger companies primarily on product and technical strategy in areas of Hardware Offloads, Wan Optimization, Network Attached Storage and Cloud Computing. Shirish has an MPhil in Computer Science from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and an MTech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

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Mark Rabinovich, R&D Manager, Visuality Systems

With 25 years of software development experience Mark heads the development of the NQ CIFS and CAX Products range being also the Software Architect for the same product lines. 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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Simona Rabinovici-Cohen, Research Staff Member, IBM Research - Haifa

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, a new European Union integrated project that may utilize the VISION Cloud infrastructure. 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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Shiv Rajpal, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft

Shiv Rajpal is a development lead in the Storage and File system team at Microsoft. For the past 15+ years, he has designed and implemented embedded systems, device drivers, applications in storage space on multiple operating system and platforms. Formerly, he was the development lead for the core storage driver stack in Windows and currently leads a development team working on building infrastructure for storage provisioning and management on Windows.

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Senthil Rajaram, Program Manager, Microsoft 

Senthil Rajaram has been working in the storage and filesystem area for the last decade. Starting off as a developer @ IBM in their SANFS project, he contributed to their Linux, Solaris, and the Windows OS clients. At Microsoft, he has been program manager for NTFS, UDFS, Cache Manager and various other components. For the last few years, he has been involved with Hyper-V specifically focusing on the virtualized storage stack improvements

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Robert Randall, Senior Software Architect, Micron Technologies, Inc.

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

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Giorgio Regni, CTO, Scality

Giorgio Regni is the CTO of Scality, a startup focused on large scale storage infrastructures.

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Jason Resch, Senior Software Engineer, Cleversafe

Jason Resch is a senior software developer at Cleversafe with expertise in information security.  He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. 

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Jim Rice, Principal Engineer, EMC

Jim is a Principal Engineer at EMC, working on the Cloud Tiering Appliance, a policy-based file virtualization and archival product which transparently moves data between primary storage and various secondary tiers, including the cloud. He was also a developer for EMC's File Virtualization Appliance, which performs in-band multiprotocol data movement between NAS devices. Jim worked at Rainfinity Corporation, before it was acquired by EMC, on various network and file virtualization products. He began his career at Hewlett Packard, where he held positions in testing, development and research on software frameworks and the OpenView management suite. Jim earned his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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Alma Riska, Consultant Software Engineer, EMC

Alma Riska is a Consultant Software Engineer in the Cloud  Infrastructure Group 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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Prasenjit Sarkar , Computer Science researcher and Master Inventor, IBM Research

Prasenjit Sarkar is a computer science researcher and Master Inventor with IBM Research who focuses on storage cloud research. He has made key architectural contributions in the areas of scalable file systems as well as prior work in self-management, optimization, fault analysis, storage provisioning and orchestration.. His initial research at IBM focused on the then-emerging field of storage networking over IP. In addition to authoring IETF industry standards, Prasenjit was instrumental in architecting and releasing the industry's first iSCSI storage controller in June 2001. This technology has been licensed to several vendors, including Adaptec. Dr. Sarkar has received five patents and three IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards. A native of Calcutta, West Bengal, India, Dr. Sarkar received his bachelors degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technoolgy, Kharagpur in 1992 and his masters and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Arizona in 1994 and 1998, respectively. After graduation, he joined the research staff at IBM Almaden.

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Sudipta Sengupta, Senior Research Scientist, Microsoft Research

Sudipta Sengupta is currently at Microsoft Research, where he is working on non-volatile memory for cloud/server applications, data deduplication, data center systems and networking, peer-to-peer applications, and wireless networking. Previously, he spent five years at Bell Laboratories, the R&D Division of Lucent Technologies. Before that, he was with Tellium, an optical networking pioneer, that grew from an early-stage startup to a public company during his tenure there.    Dr. Sengupta received a Ph.D. and an M.S. in EECS from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India. He was awarded the President of India Gold Medal at IIT-Kanpur for graduating at the top of his class. Dr. Sengupta has published 65+ research papers in some of the top conferences, journals, and technical magazines. He has authored 40+ patents (granted or pending) in the area of computer systems and networking.    Dr. Sengupta won the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize for 2008 for his work on oblivious routing of Internet traffic. At Bell Labs, he received the President's Teamwork Achievement Award for technology transfer of research into Lucent products. His work on peer-to-peer based distribution of real-time layered video received the IEEE ICME 2009 Best Paper Award. At Microsoft, he received the Gold Star Award which recognizes excellence in leadership and contributions for Microsoft's long term success.

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Richard Sharpe, Software Architect, Scale Computing

Richard Sharpe is a Software Architect at Scale Computing. He has contributed to a number of open source projects including Samba, Wireshark and SCST and he has worked both with block-level storage and file-level storage.

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Spencer Shepler, Performance Architect, Microsoft Corporation

Spencer Shepler has been in the distributed file systems industry for over 20 years.  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 drawn to performance measurement and improvement.  First by leading the SPEC SFS committee to a release of the SPEC NFS benchmark and more recently with the release of the filebench benchmark.  Spencer has been responsible for some portion of NFS version 4 since its start in the IETF and is currently the working group's co-chair.

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Prateek Sinha, Storage Solutions Developer, Tata Consultancy Services

Prateek Sinha is a Storage Solutions Developer with Tata Consultancy Services with 3 years of work experience who focuses on Data Protection and Storage Solutioning area of the Storage Domain.

He has been involved in designing and developing data protection applications, that provides application aware backup and recovery capabilities for Enterprise Applications(like email server or industry specific applications), by integrating them with Storage Systems. Also, he has been involved conducting multiple Proof-Of-Concepts on Storage Solutioning area.

He has developed a Data Protection application by integrating Open Source Solution and Proprietary Storage System. This solution is a glue code between Open Source Application and Storage System which provides Online Backup, Recovery and Disaster Recovery feature for the open source application. He has also filed a patent for this solution.

He has conducted PoC's for an application that is widely used in Oil & Gas Industry for storing the information related to mining and oil drilling.Prateek has worked  on the approach that how different open source software can be integrated so they can work collaborative manner to address a business requirement and to achieve this he had worked on the Open Storage System (Opensolaris 09.06) where he had done a number of POC's.

Using the similar concept he is working on other solutions that can be developed by integration of Storage Systems with Applications that can provide end-to-end solutions.

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David Slik, Technical Director, Object Storage, NetApp, Inc.

David Slik is the Technical Director for Object Storage at NetApp, Inc. He has been involved in object storage for over a decade, both at Bycast and NetApp, is the Co-Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group, and is a principal author of the CDMI standard.

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Esther Spanjer, Director SSD Technical Marketing

Esther Spanjer is Director of SSD Technical Marketing at SMART. With more than 14 years of experience in the flash industry, she has gained valuable knowledge on the requirements for flash-based storage solutions in embedded, industrial and enterprise storage applications. She has authored more than 20 articles in international publications and conference proceedings, and has been chosen to speak at a number of industry events, including IDEMA, DiskCon, Flash Memory Summits, Server Blade Summit, Storage Networking World and previous Storage Developers Conference. She formerly worked for msystems and STEC, and holds a B.Sc. degree in Electronic Engineering from the Technical University Amsterdam and MBA from Presidio Graduate School.

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Aravind Velamur Srinivasan, Senior Software Engineer, Isilon Systems, Inc. 

Aravind Srinivasan is a Software Development Engineer at Isilon Systems in Seattle, WA makers of scale-out storage systems.  He is part of the SMB team for the past 2 years at Isilon. Aravind has a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

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Curtis Stevens, Western Digital

Curtis Stevens has been working in the disk drive industry for over 20 years standardizing new technologies. In the 1990’s Curtis helped standardize Booting from CD-ROMs, Booting from many floppy technologies, booting from 1394, and booting from USB. Curtis is currently the technical editor for the ATA/ATAPI Command Set series of standards, the UAS series of standards, and the EDD (legacy BIOS) series of standards. Curtis is also chair of the IDEMA SMR WG and the IEEE 1667 Standards group. Curtis is currently employed by WD and is responsible for Standardization and internal feature specification.

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Brad Stone, Vice President Product Management, Nexenta Systems

Brad Stone is the VP of Product Management at Nexenta Systems, the leading provider of  OpenStorage solutions. Prior to Nexenta, Brad built a policy-based storage platform for commodity storage  for MenloWare. He was also CTO at Resonate delivering high availability solutions and held various architecture  positions at Hewlett-Packard.

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Sivakumar Subramani, Senior Project Leader, Wipro Technologies

Sivakumar Subramani is Technical lead Wipro Technologies with over 10+ years of experience in systems programming, embedded systems board level diagnostics and network device drivers. He holds Mater of Science degree in Software Engineering from BITS, Pilani, Rajasthan, India. Currently he is working as a consultant to a market leader in 10Gbe, working on their next generation 10Gbe adapters. His interests include Storage virtualization, storage networking and device driver development.

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Thomas Talpey, Software Architect, Microsoft

Tom Talpey is an Architect at Microsoft in the Windows File Server filesharing technologies area. He has extensive experience in networks, network filesystems including SMB and NFS, protocols and standards. Mr. Talpey serves as Project Coordinator of the Unix Extensions for SMB2 protocol initiative.
 

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Mikko Varpiola, Senior Security Expert, Codenomicon

Mr. Mikko Varpiola is a founder and Senior Security Expert. Before founding the company he was a key researcher at a globally recognized security testing research group, Oulu University Secure Programming Group (OUSPG). As a member of OUSPG he has been actively participating on development of secure programming practices and automation of software security testing.

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Shaun Walsh, Vice President Marketing, Emulex

Shaun Walsh joined Emulex in 2008 and serves as vice president of marketing. Walsh brings more than 25 years of storage and networking experience to Emulex and is responsible for the Company's global marketing strategy including outbound product and solution marketing, OEM and channel marketing and marketing communications, as well as corporate branding. Walsh is also responsible for creating industry thought leadership programs, and serves as the main spokesperson with global media and analysts.

Walsh has held various executive and senior management positions at Quantum, Overland Storage, JNI, STEC, Dot Hill and QLogic. Walsh holds a Bachelor of Science degree in management from Pepperdine University.

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Sage Weil Ph.D., Co-founder, New Dream Network

Sage Weil designed Ceph as part of his PhD research in Storage Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since graduating, he has continued to refine the system with the goal of providing a stable next generation distributed storage and file system for Linux. Prior to his graduate work, Sage helped found New Dream Network, the company behind DreamHost.com, who now supports a small team of Ceph developers.

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Dmitry Yusupov, Vice President Software, Founder, Nexenta Systems

Dmitry is co-creator of the iSCSI stack that was accepted into the Linux kernel with his co-founder of Nexenta Systems, Alex Aizman. This same Open-iSCSI project, forms the basis of most iSCSI solutions used today. Their experiences attempting to build enterprise class storage with the Linux kernel encouraged both to create the innovative hybrid operating system, Nexenta Core Platform (www.nexenta.org).

Prior to founding Nexenta Systems, Dmitry was at Neterion, Inc., where he led the development of high performance 10G networking driver architectures for Linux and Solaris operating systems. Prior to Neterion, Dmitry was at Silverback Systems where with Alex Aizman he was working on iSCSI and TCP/IP offload driver architecture for Linux and embedded operating systems.

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