Jose Barreto

Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Biography

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, MCM, MCITS, MCT and many other Microsoft certifications. Jose Barreto is a Principal Program Manager with the Server and Cloud Division at Microsoft, focused on the Windows File Server and the SMB3 protocol. He is an MVP Product Group Lead for File and Storage. He also keeps an active blog at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/.

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Camberley Bates

Managing Director and Sr. Analyst, The Evaluator Group

Biography

Camberley joined Evaluator Group as Managing Director and Analyst in 2009 and is responsible for corporate leadership and coverage of go-to-market and channel strategies. She brings over 20 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at VERITAS, GE-Access and EDS. Having crossed the boundaries of vendor sales, channel engagement, and ownership of a 100-person IT services firm, she possesses a unique 360 view for addressing challenges and delivering solutions.

At her previous consulting firm, Bates Strategy Group, she provided Global 250 and startups with go-to-market strategies. As a VP at VERITAS she led a 65-person worldwide marketing team with highly successful lead generation programs and restructuring of the channel. With GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million in revenues through a solution-practice methodology.

She entered the IT field by working with very large data centers as a director and management executive with EDS and IBM. She holds a BS degree in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business. Camberley can be contacted at Camberley@evaluatorgroup.com.

Camberley possesses a passion for outdoors and, when not IT driven, she can be found skiing, hiking and riding her bike around Colorado.

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Fredrik Forslund

Director - Cloud and Data Center Erasure Solutions, Blancco

Biography

With more than 15 years of experience from the global IT security industry, Mr. Forslund is the founder and CEO of SafeIT Security – a security software company focusing on encryption and selective data erasure – and Director of Cloud and Data Center Erasure Solutions for Blancco Group, a leader in Certified Data Erasure. He focuses on global business development for Certified Data Erasure in data centers, storage solutions and virtual environments by following closely the changes in technology and data privacy legislation worldwide, delivering that information to the market and establishing solutions to support enterprise-wide compliance with data security mandates. Mr. Forslund has recently presented at the European Cloud Expo in London and provided advisory services to government IT management.

Before joining Blancco, Mr. Forslund worked for McKinsey & Company as a management consultant. Mr. Forslund has lived and worked in Europe and the Americas. He holds an MBA from the Duke University and MSC from Stockholm School of Economics.

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Eric Hibbard

CTO Security & Privacy, Hitachi Data Systems

Biography

Eric Hibbard is the CTO Security and Privacy in Hitachi Data Systems where he is responsible for product security strategies. Mr. Hibbard is a senior security professional with 30+ years of experience in ICT, working for government, academia, and industry.

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Richard Kiene

Principal Engineer, Faithlife

Biography

Richard Kiene is a Principal Engineer at Faithlife Corporation, where he leads Operations and Development teams, with a focus on creating, scaling, and automating their private cloud infrastructure. In his spare time, Richard is usually nerding out with his home server lab prototyping new infrastructure solutions, hanging out with his wife and kids, or watching sports.

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Andrea Nelson

Director of Marketing, Storage Group, Intel

Biography

Andrea Nelson is the Director of Marketing of the Storage Group, part of the Data Center Group at Intel. The Storage Group (SG) is responsible for our business strategies addressing the needs of our enterprise storage customers and emerging growth markets aligned to Intel’s Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI), HPC, and Big Data platforms.

Nelson joined Intel in 2001 as a commodity manager in the materials organization. She managed strategic component suppliers providing products for Intel’s Enterprise Products & Services Division (EPSD). In 2003 she moved to the Data Center Group and held positions in server and storage product marketing, server product development, and storage market development, prior to transitioning into her current role leading the storage group marketing team.

Before joining Intel, Nelson worked for Freightliner as a Purchasing Agent, managing chassis component suppliers.

She holds an undergraduate degree in Marketing from Linfield College.

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Gideon Senderov

Director Advanced Storage Products, NEC

Biography

Gideon Senderov has over 21 years of experience within the storage industry in product management, technical marketing, and engineering. As director of Advanced Storage Products at NEC Corporation of America, Gideon is responsible for the product management, strategic direction, and technical marketing of NEC’s storage products in North America, including HYDRAstor scale-out grid storage platform and M-Series SAN storage.

Prior to joining NEC, Gideon held senior product management leadership positions for storage virtualization and storage management software solutions at Attune, MonoSphere, Brocade, TrueSAN and ConvergeNet (acquired by Dell). Previously, Gideon spent seven years at IBM Storage Systems in SCSI and FC firmware development and product and test engineering for ESS (Shark) and RAMAC storage subsystems. Gideon earned a BSEE at the University of Florida, an MSEE from the University of Southern California, and an MBA with honors from Santa Clara University.

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Tonia Williams

CIO & IT Director, Housing Authority of the Cherokee Nation

Biography

Tonia Williams is the CIO and IT Director for the Housing Authority of the Cherokee Nation, where she oversaw the design, build, and implementation of a new IT infrastructure to support a separate and new organization of 180 staff across 14 counties and 19 area offices.

Teague Algie, Software Developer, Cleversafe

Teague is a graduate Illinois Institute of Technology 2011 and has worked for Cleversafe since 2011.

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Michael Ault, Oracle FlashSystem Consulting Manager, IBM

Mike Ault has worked with Oracle since 1990. Mike is the author of over 24 books about Oracle. Mike is a frequent presenter at computer conferences He currently works as an Oracle FlashSystem Consulting Manager for IBM.

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Ashar Baig, President - Principal Analyst and Advisor, Analyst Connection

Ashar Baig (pronounced Usher Bég) is the President & Principal Analyst and Advisor at Analyst Connection, an analyst firm focused on Everything cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Public & Private Cloud Storage, Cloud management, Billing, Security & compliance, Managed Services, etc.), Storage and virtualization (SDDC, SDS, VDI/DaaS, Archiving, Active Archiving, eDiscovery, Storage hardware, software, filesystems, I/O, Object Storage, Erasure coding, OpenStack, etc.), Data Protection (Data Backup, DR & BC), WAN (SDN, NFV, Ethernet, MPLS, switches, routers, etc.), Big Data, Mobility (MDM, MAM, MCM, & EMM), High Performance Computing (HPC), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence (BI), & Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

Ashar is the quintessential expert about MSPs, their business / technical needs, and their offerings. He often advises vendors looking to target MSPs or MSPs looking to grow their revenues. Due to his strong and passionate involvement, evangelism, and educational speaking engagements at various industry events in the MSP arena, he is often referred to as “Mr. MSPs”.

Ashar is an industry expert in security, privacy and compliance (regulatory, geographic and service compliance). He often presents at industry conferences on Compliance Standards PCI DSS, HIPAA, GLBA, SOX, etc.

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Bernard Behn, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer, Avere Systems

With over 15 years of experience in the networking and storage industries, Bernie Behn is the Principal Technical Marketing Engineer at Avere Systems. His focus is on architecting, supporting, and maintaining clustered distributed filesystems, as well as testing high-performance NFS/SMB environments with real world applications running on-premises and in the cloud. Previously, Bernie was a Staff Engineer at NetApp working on the Clustered ONTAP Scale-Out storage system, as well as its predecessor the Spinnaker Networks product acquired by NetApp. Prior to NetApp, Bernie cut his teeth working at FORE Systems/Marconi providing technical support engineering for ATM/Ethernet/IP signaling/switching/routing products.

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Luke Behnke, Vice President Product, Bitcasa

As VP-Product at Bitcasa, Luke sets product direction and oversees the product management, design, analytics, and technical support teams, with one major goal: make cloud storage simple for anyone. The first PM at Bitcasa, Luke has overseen numerous product launches, including the recent launch of Bitcasa's CloudFS API platform. He has a B.S. degree in engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from MIT. 

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Lance Broell, Product Marketing Manager, DataDirect Networks

Lance is a high-technology marketing and business development professional (VP of Marketing, Director of Marketing, Product Marketing Manager) with 20 years of experience in corporate branding and marketing, business strategy development and product/services marketing and management for small to large sized organizations.

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Eric Burgener, Research Director Storage, IDC

Eric Burgener serves as a Research Director for IDC’s Storage Practice, which includes Storage Systems, Software and Solutions research offerings, quarterly trackers, end-user research as well as advisory services and consulting programs. Mr. Burgener’s areas of coverage include flash (from a solutions not a component point of view) and storage for virtual environments. He has worked with enterprise storage technologies since 1991, including both hardware and software-based solutions. For most of his career on the vendor side, Mr. Burgener worked with emerging open systems technologies, including high availability in the early 1990s, replication, SAN management and storage virtualization in the late 1990s, continuous data replication and most recently flash and software-defined storage for use in virtual environments.

Prior to joining IDC, Mr. Burgener held various leadership positions in product management, product marketing, business development and technical support at leading high tech companies like Tandem Computers, Sun Microsystems, Veritas Software, ConvergeNet, Dell, Topio, and Mendocino Software. He also worked a stint as an Executive in Residence at Mayfield, a leading venture capital firm based in the Silicon Valley. Most recently, Mr. Burgener was the Vice President of Product Management at Virsto Software, a company acquired by VMware in 2013.

Mr. Burgener holds an undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Craig Carlson, Sr. Technologist - CTO Office, QLogic Corporation

Craig Carlson is a Senior Technologist with the CTO Office at QLogic Corporation. Craig has over 15 years of experience in Storage Networking technologies. He is currently Chair of ANSI INCITS Task Group T11.3, the committee that defines Fibre Channel protocols. He is also Technical editor for the T11 Standards FC-LS-3, and FC-FS-4, as well as the Chair of T11 Standard FC-SW-6. He was also involved with the IEEE 802.1 Data Center Bridging Task Group and is the editor of the IEEE Draft Standard 802.1Qaz (Enhanced Transmission Selection).

Craig’s background includes many years of development of storage networking products including being on of the team of architects for the first public loop Fibre Channel switch. He also has many years of standards experience within ANSI/INCITS T11, IEEE, and IETF. Also, Craig was one of the key contributors to the SANMark Fibre Channel interoperability compliance program.

Craig has also won numerous industry awards including the INCITS Gene Milligan Award for Effective Committee Management for his role as T11.3 Chair, and most recently an FCIA achievement award for his contributions to the growth of Fibre Channel SAN Storage technology.

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Carlos Carrero, Technical Product Manager, Symantec

Carlos Carrero is a Sr. Principal Technical Product Manager from Symantec and has been working with the Information Management team for the last 14 years in areas such as backup, high availability and storage management. He is an assiduous contributor at Symantec blogs and author of several white papers. Over the last couple of years he has been working on defining Software Defined Storage solutions for Symantec.

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David Cerf, Executive President Strategy and Business Development, Crossroads Systems

David Cerf is a member of the Active Archive Alliance and also serves as executive vice president of strategy and business development at Crossroads Systems. With more than 25 years of corporate development experience in the IT industry, David is a frequent speaker on data growth, storage and protection issues at several national industry conferences. Joining Crossroads in 2005, he currently leads global efforts to expand Crossroads innovative data protection solutions and develop relationships with key early technology adopters. Serving as a key member of Crossroads’ executive team, he helps distinguish the company’s future product roadmap and overall business direction. Prior to joining Crossroads, David served as vice president of sales and business development at NexQL, a leading provider of advanced database acceleration technologies. He was also a co-founder of 360World, a national provider of video and imaging solutions. In 1988, as the founder and managing director of the Dallas Business Incubator, he was responsible for the development and funding of more than 50 new high-growth startup companies.

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David Chapa, Global CTO, EMC Emerging Technology Division

As the Global CTO with EMC, Emerging Technology Division, he leads the Global Office of the CTO (GOCTO), whose mission is representing the division’s technology direction and solutions. David has invested nearly 30 years in the storage industry, focusing on data protection, DR/BC practices for high performance, scale out and scale up storage solutions. He has held several senior level technical positions with companies such as Quantum, OpenVision (Veritas), ADIC, Unisys, NetApp and the ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group). Prior to joining EMC, David served as the WW Chief Technology Evangelist (CTE) for Seagate, establishing the strategic technology vision for the division, Cloud Systems and Solutions.

David is an energetic and dynamic speaker who brings a great deal of experiential knowledge, humor, and keen insight to his audience. He has been a featured speaker at major trade events, and has served as panelist on various discussions related to storage futures, disaster recovery, compliance, and data protection strategies. David has written hundreds of articles and blogs on data storage, he is the co-author of “Implementing Backup and Recovery,” the Technical Editor of, “Cloud Security,” “Security 2020,” “CMS Security Handbook”, “Implementing SSL/TLS using Cryptography and TKI” and “Web Commerce Security Design and Development” published by Wiley and Sons, and is recognized worldwide as an authority on the subject of data protection.

David is a member of SNIA’s Data Protection and Capacity Optimization (DPCO) Committee, whose mission is to foster the growth and success of the storage market in the areas of data protection and capacity optimization technologies.

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David Christel, Manager, Unisys

Mr. Christel is a proven leader, having led numerous successful operational teams over the last 20 years. He is focused on sustainable superior delivery and promotes a client-first focus throughout these teams.

With over 20 years of management experience, including 16 years of IT Service Management. Unisys PM for FDIC infrastructure contract, and later, overall program management responsibility for the Unisys shared data center services facility, serving U.S. Courts, TSA, HHS, Census, and DFAS. While over half of Mr. Christel's career has been Federally focused, he also has extensive commercial experience working at Digex, a managed Internet hosting company. He led the ISO20K certification for Unisys Federal Data Center Services and his current program. Mr. Christel is PMP and ITIL V3 certified.

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Barry Cooks, Vice President, Virtual Instruments

Barry Cooks is the vice president of engineering at Virtual Instruments where he leads the product team and is responsible for all aspects of the company's products from inception through delivery and support. He has 15 years of experience in engineering for systems and enterprise software. Before joining Virtual Instruments, Cooks was the senior director of research and development at VMware, where he drove the advancement of the company's availability software solutions.

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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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Tony Cox, Director Business Development, Strategy and Alliances Cryptsoft

Tony Cox is the Business Development, Strategy and Alliances Director at Cryptsoft with over a decade's experience in both the security and identity management fields. He has worked with both state and federal government departments on integration of security technology and public key infrastructure. He has experience in evaluation of multi-million dollar procurement contracts and in the establishment and operation of policy authorities for public key infrastructure for million-plus smartcard token rollouts. Tony is Co-Chair of the OASIS KMIP Technical Comittee and an active participant in the PKCS11 Technical Committees. He is also the Chair of the OASIS KMIP Interoperability Subcommittee, a board member of the SNIA Storage Security Industry Forum, Interop Lead for the OASIS KMIP and PKCS11 RSA Conference showcase and has coordinated results gathering and presentation for multiple OASIS interoperabilty demonstrations.

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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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Mauricio del Prado, Senior Engineer, IBM

Mauricio is an experienced hardware development and manufacturing engineer of networking and storage products. I currently support IBM's LTO Tape Drive and related products as a manufacturing and design engineer in San Jose, CA.

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Jeff Dodson, Hardware Architect, Avago Technologies

Jeff Dodson is a senior hardware architect in the Data Center Solutions Group at Avago Technologies. Prior to Avago, Mr. Dodson was the hardware architect for next generation PCI Express Switches at PLX Technology (acquired by Avago 2014). He helped define numerous families of switches including the current ExpressFabric features that support full fabric box-to-box connectivity via PCIe to servers and other I/O within data center racks.

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Sylvain Dubois, VP of Strategic Marketing and Business Development, Crossbar

Sylvain Dubois joined the Crossbar management team in 2013 as Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Business Development. With over 13 years of semiconductor experience in business development and strategic product marketing, he brings a proven ability to analyze market trends, identify new, profitable business opportunities and create precise product positioning that is in perfect sync with market demands to drive market share leadership and business results.

Prior to joining Crossbar, Mr. Dubois led strategic product positioning and market engagement for developing new products at Spansion. Responsible for identifying new growth opportunities and expanding the product portfolio, Mr. Dubois was instrumental in defining the Spansion Flash memory product roadmap.

From 2002-2006, Mr. Dubois was a System-on-Chip architect of OMAP application processors at Texas Instruments. Mr. Dubois was in charge of the architecture and technology roadmap of DRAM and Flash memory controllers, and developed strategic relationships with major DRAM and Flash memory suppliers.

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Craig Dunwoody, CTO, GraphStream Incorporated

Craig Dunwoody is co-founder and CTO of two companies: GraphStream, a data-infrastructure system integrator, and Birchbridge, which is developing a next-generation scalable software+hardware platform for datacenters. Previously, he developed graphics-platform software in the Advanced Systems Division at Silicon Graphics, after earning BSEE, MSEE, and MSCS degrees from Stanford University.

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Mike Emard, Senior Program Manager StorSimple, Microsoft , Senior Engineer, IBM

Mike Emard has held many software engineering roles including developer, architect, DBA, and program management. The last two years he has been working as a Senior Program Manager on the StorSimple engineering team.”

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Brian Evans, Global Director of the Solutions Lab, HGST - a Western Digital Company

Brian Evans has over 15 years of experience within the storage industry in systems engineering, professional services and solutions development. As Global Director of the Solutions Lab at HGST, Brian leads a team responsible for the development and testing of flash based solutions that involve both HGST’s hardware and software.

Prior to joining HGST, Brian led various teams involved in the design, implementation and supporting of high speed storage systems for companies like BlueArc (acquired by HDS), Kaminario, and SANZ. Brian holds a B.S in Physics with a Minor in Mathematics from Eckerd College.

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Russ Fellows, Sr. Partner, Evaluator Group

Russ brings over 25 years of diverse experience in the IT industry to his role as Sr. Partner and Analyst at Evaluator Group. Prior to joining Evaluator Group in 2006, Russ has worked in a variety of Engineering, IT, Marketing and Management functions.

Currently Russ focuses on storage technologies, along with storage performance test tools and benchmarks. He works with testing and measuring application performance with both vendors and end-users.

Additionally, Russ focuses new storage technologies, virtualization, storage security, and data protection.

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Doug Ferguson, Senior Solution Consultant, Hitachi Data Systems Federal Corporation

Doug Ferguson is a Senior Solutions Consultant with Hitachi Data Systems Federal Corporation. Doug has been with HDS and HDS Federal for over eight years with experience in enterprise storage systems and other Hitachi technologies. Doug has broad expertise in the storage field including his previous role with StorageTek as a Sales Engineer. Doug’s background includes networking, converged telephony and systems implementation. Doug is an avid hiker, biker and Pickleball champion. He won the Colorado Senior Games Pickleball Championship for Singles 50-55.

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Philippe Goodwin, Research Director Storage, IDC

Phil Goodwin is a Research Director within IDC’s Storage Systems and Software research practice. He provides detailed insight and analysis on evolving industry trends, vendor performance, and the impact of new technology adoption. He is responsible for producing and delivering timely, in-depth market research with a specific focus on Data Protection, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, and Data Availability. Phil takes a holistic view of these markets, and covers risk analysis, service level requirements and cost/benefit calculations in his research.

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Edward Grochowski, Consultant

Dr. Ed Grochowski is a well known speaker on magnetic and solid state storage technology. He began his career with IBM

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Bob Hansen, VP Systems Architecture, Apeiron Data Systems

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

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Ted Harrington, Executive Partner, Independent Security Evaluators

Ted Harrington drives thought leadership initiatives for Independent Security Evaluators. He is a sought-after speaker, presenting at high-profile conferences in a range of industries, including National Association of Broadcasters, Content Delivery & Security Association, Hotel Technology Next Generation, Information Systems Audit and Control Association, Hollywood IT Society, Media & Entertainment Services Alliance, Hotel Finance and Technology Professionals, Circle City Con, ESRI Summit, Global Academic Network, Association of IT Professionals, and others.

Mr. Harrington holds several special appointments, including to the University of Southern California Entertainment Technology Center (Project Cloud Security Team), Hotel Technology Next Generation (Co-Chair, Electronic Access Control Working Group), the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (Advisory Board Member), and to the Georgetown University Alumni As-sociation of San Diego (Executive Committee, Speaker Bureau). He is a contributing author to several industry publications, including the M&E Journal, Content Delivery & Security Association Newsletter, and others. He was recently named one of San Diego

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Walt Hubis, Owner, Hubis Technical Associates

Walt is the owner of Hubis Technical Associates. He provides expertise related to storage interface and storage security standards organizations with a focus on protocols and software interfaces and how innovative and disruptive computer storage technologies impact these standards. Walt has over twenty-five years of experience in storage systems engineering in both development and managerial positions and has authored several key patents in RAID and other storage related technologies. He is the vice-chair of the SNIA SSSI Initiative and has served as the Chair of the Trusted Computing Group Key Management Services Subgroup, Chair of the IEEE SISWG P1619.3 Key Management subcommittee, and Secretary of the IEEE Security in Storage work group (SISWG). Walt holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering.

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Yasumori Hino, General Manager, Panasonic Corporation

Yasumori Hino is a General Manager with Panasonic Corporation. Yasumori has 22 years of experience with R&D section for the creation of Blu-ray format, the developing LSI and Optical Drive system.

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Chirag Jog, VP of Engineering, MSys and Clogeny

Chirag Jog is the VP of Engineering for MSys and Clogeny. In 2009, Chirag cofounded Clogeny Technologies and served as the CTO of the company till its acquisition by MSys in 2014. Chirag is an expert programmer and has deep knowledge of hardware as well. He has over a decade of experience working with some of the most cutting edge tools and technologies. During his long career, he built some innovative products in the cloud space on SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. His expertise covers DevOps and automation tools (such as Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, etc.) and cloud computing (private, public and hybrid clouds).

At MSys, Chirag manages the entire engineering division and oversees the development and delivery activities of various projects.

Before MSys, Chirag worked for several reputed organizations including IBM India, Websym Technologies, AMCC, etc. He holds a BE in computer science and information technology from the Pune Institute of Technology. Chirag can be reached through his social profiles in LinkedIn or Twitter.

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Mark Jones, President, Fibre Channel Industry Association

Mark Jones is the chairman and president of the FCIA (Fibre Channel Industry Association) and the Sr. Director of technical marketing for Emulex. Mr. Jones is a thirty year veteran of the technology industry and has held both engineering and marketing positions at prominent companies in the computing industry.

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Woon Jung, Senior Software Engineer, PernixData

Woon Jung is a senior software engineer at PernixData, where he has been a key member of the engineering team since company launch in early 2012. Prior to joining PernixData, Woon spent time as an engineer at VMware for nearly seven years. Woon earned his bachelors and masters degrees in engineering and computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Randy Kerns, Senior Strategist, Evaluator Group

In his role as Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, Randy Kerns draws from over 35 years of experience helping storage companies design and develop products.

Randy was Vice President of Storage Strategy and Planning at Sun Microsystems. Among his other positions, Randy developed disk and tape systems for mainframe attachment at IBM, StorageTek, and two start-up companies. He also designed disk systems at Fujitsu and Tandem Computers.

Prior to joining Evaluator Group, Randy served as CTO for ProStor where he brought products to market addressing long term archive for Information Technology and the Healthcare and Media / Entertainment markets.

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Eden Kim, CEO, Calypso Testers

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

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Wayne Lam, Chairman/CEO, Cirrus Data

Wayne has over 25 years of experience in the enterprise storage industry, and has exceptional ability in bringing new technologies to market. Wayne was a co-founder of FalconStor Software and was largely responsible for most of its successful storage products. In his career Wayne had founded and co-founded multiple high tech companies, and has led them to successful conclusion. The products created by these companies have been licensed by many storage OEMs throughout the world. With experience in every aspect of the product life-cycle, Wayne has a proven track record in conceiving product ideas by engaging enterprise customers, then quickly creating start-up companies to bring the ideas to market. With his vast technical expertise and keen business acumen, Wayne is able to communicate effectively to enterprise customers and partners how the products and technologies benefit real life enterprise storage applications. Wayne received a BE in Electrical Engineering from Cooper Union College, 1986. While still in Cooper Union, Wayne started his first company in electronic document imaging and optical storage

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Michael Letschin, Director of Product Management, Solutions Nexenta

Michael has over 15 years of experience in the IT industry, ranging from Systems Engineer through IT director. Most recently a Sales Engineer and now Product Marketing/Management Manager for Nexenta Systems. He holds an MBA from Mt. St Marys University and technical certifications from multiple storage and virtualization vendors. He was awarded the VMware vExpert award each of the past three years for his work on his blog (thesolutionsarchitect.net), on social media (@mletschin) and in the IT community as a whole.

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Christian Madsen, Engineering Manager, Seagate Technology

Christian leads Seagate’s Cloud Health Analytics Group. The group creates predictive algorithms and develops scalable software solutions with analytics capabilities. Prior to joining Seagate in 2013 Christian worked as a Research Associate in theoretical physics at the James R Macdonald Lab. Christian graduated with a PhD in Physics from Aarhus University in 2010.

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Dennis Martin, President, Demartek

Dennis Martin is the founder and President of Demartek (www.demartek.com), a computer industry analyst organization with its own ISO 17025 accredited test lab. Demartek focuses on lab validation testing and performance testing of storage and related hardware and software products and is recognized by the EPA as an official test lab for ENERGY STAR Data Center Storage. Dennis has been working in the Information Technology industry since 1980, primarily involved in software development and project management in mainframe, UNIX, and Windows environments. These include a variety of large and small end-user customers, and engineering and marketing positions for storage vendors such as StorageTek. Dennis has made numerous presentations at conferences and has authored many industry articles. Dennis has been a Microsoft File System Storage MVP since 2005.

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Rob McCammon, Director of Product Management, Cleversafe

Rob McCammon brings more than 15 years of high-tech product management experience to Cleversafe as the company's Director of Product Management.

Prior to joining Cleversafe in 2012, Rob served as the Vice President of Product Management at Open Kernel Labs for 5 years. Open Kernel Labs is an innovative provider of virtualization software used in mobile phones and automobiles.

Rob has a BSEE in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MS Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California, and a Master in Management from Northwestern University.

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Alex McDonald, Office of the CTO, NetApp

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

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J Metz, R&D Engineer, Cisco

J is currently an R&D Engineer for the Office of the CTO, Solid State Systems Group, but has a broad and eclectic background of both academic, corporate, and industry experience. He received his Ph.D in Mass Communication Technology from the University of Georgia, before starting 15+ years of his storage career. J has been a fundamental contributor to technologies and solutions such as Cisco’s Unified Ports, Multihop and Dynamic FCoE, and solid state solutions. He is an award-winning public speaker, author, and contributor to industry trade publications. He has been active in industry standards, with membership on the Board of Directors for the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and the NVMe Promotor's Board.

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Rupin Mohan, Senior Manager Strategy and Planning, Hewlett-Packard

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

Rupin has 1 patent granted, 9 patents filed (pending) and 14 invention disclosures for storage products at Hewlett-Packard. In 2013, he won the Silver Innovation Award for patent filing on protocol agnostic storage access in a Software Defined Network (SDN) topology.

He is a prolific speaker speaking at industry conferences. In 2010, he won Best Speaker Award at HP Storage Ambassadors conference. Rupin is also a Board Member and Marketing Chairman of Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA).

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Peter Murray, Marketing Director, Load DynamiX

Peter is a performance testing expert with over 30 years of experience implementing, trouble-shooting, and maintaining secure, fast, and highly available networks and storage systems. In his role as Technical Evangelist, Peter works with customers, prospects, and partners to ensure Load DynamiX storage performance validation products meet market requirements and are used to maximum benefit.

Peter serves as Co-chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Solid State Storage System Technical Working Group (S4TWG). Peter additionally serves on the SNIA Technical Council.

Prior to Load DynamiX, Peter served on technical teams at network equipment manufacturing companies including F5 Networks, Spirent Communications and Nortel Networks. While at Spirent, Peter was extensively involved with L4-7 stateful device and network testing and has amassed over 20 years of technical experience within the network equipment manufacturing industry and another 10 years in the testing industry.

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Jun Nakano, Deputy General Manager, Sony

Jun Nakano is a Deputy General Manager of Sony Corporation. He joined the company as a recording media engineer to develop Mini Disc. Thereafter, Jun Nakano has been dedicating himself to commercialize various kinds of optical disc systems, such as DVD and Blu-ray TM. Particularly for Blu-ray TM, he and his team played a very important role in developing recording media and contributed a lot in making the format. Now, Jun Nakano is focusing on realizing an ultimate optical disc system to store ever-increasing digital data safely for an extremely long period.

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Philippe Nicolas, Senior Director, Industry Strategy, Scality

Philippe Nicolas is a recognized storage industry expert with more than 20 years of experience. He currently drives the Industry Strategy at Scality after leading the Product Strategy since October 2011. In addition, he is an advisor at Guardtime and Solix. 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 in different technology and product roles. Prior 1997, he served various technical positions at SGI and Compaq. He holds an engineering degree in computer sciences from ESI.

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Mark OConnell, Distinguished Engineer, EMC

Mark OConnell is an EMC Distinguished Engineer and currently works within the Advanced Software Division at EMC Corporation. With more than 37,000 employees worldwide, EMC is the world leader in products, services, and solutions for information management. Among the products Mark covers is ViPR, a next general object storage system with support for heterogeneous storage and APIs, EMC Atmos, the industrys leading multi-petabyte information management solution, and EMC Centera, the industrys leading compliance and archiving offering.

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Johnathan Paul, Senior R&D Expert, Siemens Medical Solutions

John Paul is a Senior R&D Key Expert in the Managed Services Organization. He has been with Siemens for 33 years, with various technical responsibilities across the mainframe, networking, and open systems technologies. His recent focus has been on virtualization of the Intel platform using VMWare

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Sean Pike, Program Director for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) and eDiscovery, IDC

C. Sean Pike is the Program Director for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) and eDiscovery in IDC’s Storage Systems Research Group.

Mr. Pike provides competitive intelligence and strategic advisory on technologies and solutions for governance, risk, and compliance and legal discovery. He examines the implications of emerging technology and legal and regulatory developments on organizations’ risk and compliance programs, information governance and data privacy initiatives, and legal discovery efforts. He also tracks the convergence of information management, storage, security, and IT operations technologies and the impact on various governance and discovery use cases.

Mr. Pike joined IDC in 2014 with 17 years of experience blending operational security, audit, and risk functions with the demands of regulatory and compliance programs within highly regulated industry. As both a hands on practitioner and attorney, Mr. Pike is uniquely positioned to interpret the legal and regulatory landscape providing insight on products and services designed to meet rapidly changing requirements.

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Amita Potnis, Research Manager, IDC

Amita Potnis is a Research Manager within IDC's Storage practice, which includes Storage Systems, Software and Solutions research offerings, Trackers and other data products, end-user research as well as advisory services and consulting programs. She provides detailed insight and analysis on evolving industry trends, vendor performance, and the impact of new technology adoption. Ms. Potnis is responsible for producing and delivering timely, in-depth market research with a specific focus on File and Object Based Storage Solutions, Disk Storage Systems tracker and Media and Entertainment.

Prior to joining the Storage Systems group at IDC, Ms. Potnis worked with the IDC Storage Pricing team for six years, where she was responsible for tracking and providing tactical pricing information on a wide range of mid-range and enterprise storage equipment for IBM and Sun . She also worked with ZDNetIndia.com and Reliance Industries Limited in India where she was responsible for designing and implementing various internet related projects.

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Ibrahim Rahmani, Director of Product Marketing, DataCore

Ibrahim 'Ibby' Rahmani is the Director of Product Marketing at Datacore Storage. Ibby has 15 years of experience working with storage technology.

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Saeed Raja, Director of Product Marketing and Management, SanDisk

Saeed Raja is a Director of Product Marketing and Management for SanDisk’s Enterprise Software team. Saeed has 18 years of experience in product management and product strategy roles in the high-tech industry. At SanDisk, Saeed leads software development to increase the performance and optimization of applications on flash storage. The key areas of focus include In-Memory Compute, Real-Time Analytics, NoSQL databases, and In-Memory Database Grids. Prior to joining SanDisk, Saeed Raja was Director of Product Management at VCE. He was responsible for launching Vblock Systems optimized for tier 1 Business Critical Applications, specifically Vblock System for SAP HANA, Vblock System for Big Data and Analytics, and Vblock System for VDI. Before VCE, Saeed has worked at EMC, NetApp and Hewlett Packard in product management and product strategy roles. Saeed holds MBA from Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York.

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Liwei Ren, Senior Software Architect, Trend Micro

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

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Thomas Rivera, Senior Technical Associate, HDS

Thomas Rivera has over 29 years of experience in the storage industry, specializing in file services and data protection technology, and is a Senior Technology Associate, with Hitachi Data Systems. Thomas is also an active member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), participating as chair of the Data Protection and Capacity Optimization (DPCO) Committee, and is also a member of SNIA’s Storage Security Technical Working Group as well as the Analytics & Big Data Committee.

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Nithya Ruff, Director - Open Source Strategy, SanDisk

Nithya Ruff has been a proponent of open source since 1999 when she was exposed to it during her time at Silicon Graphics. Since then, she has directed her career to become an evangelist for open source at several leading edge technology companies, including Wind River/Intel, Tripwire, Cranite Systems and now SanDisk. As a champion for open source within these companies, she's urged each to join the Linux Foundation and to create internal OSS teams. Currently, she is responsible for open source strategy at SanDisk, leveraging her role to build her own internal OSS team along with the SanDisk Women's Innovation Network. In addition, she is a key open source contributor to the SanDisk Enterprise blog and has also spoken at the Linux Conference for the past five years on a variety of topics related to OSS.

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Tom Sas, Product Manager, Hewlett-Packard

Tom Sas is the Worldwide Product Manager for Hewlett-Packard’s StoreOnce Backup products within Hewlett-Packard's Storage Division. Tom is responsible for both the current and future product management aspects of the StoreOnce products. Tom also represents HP’s interests in SNIA’s Data Protection and Capacity Optimization Committee.

Tom has been with Hewlett-Packard for 35 years, 22 of those working with the Nearline automated storage products. Previous to his current position, Tom has provided product management for the Magneto-Optical and Ultra Density Optical Jukebox products as well as Virtual Library Systems, business forecasting and new product introduction coordination for HP’s Nearline division. Tom has spoken on various storage topics at conferences such as HP Discover, MER (Managing Electronic Records), ARMA, QStar and other partner conference.

Tom has degrees from the University of Northern Colorado and Colorado State University and works out of Hewlett-Packard’s Fort Collins, Colorado office.

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Leah Schoeb, Storage Solutions and Performance Manager, Intel

Leah Schoeb currently runs the Storage Solutions and Performance Group at Intel bringing expertise ranging from cloud infrastructure and virtualization to system and storage performance. Her latest work with solid state technology. She draws from 25 years of experience in the computer industry helping systems companies with performance engineering and optimization, market positioning, benchmark evidence creation, and guiding industry standards development for server, virtualized, and storage solutions. Leah has served in several leadership roles for performance for companies, such as, VMware, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Intel, and Amdahl. She has developed and executed long-term plans for the generation of new solid state technology and cloud computing performance. 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 an elected member of the Technical Council and a co-chair of the Solid State Storage System Technical Work Group.

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Veda Shankar, Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat

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

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Osamu Shimizu, Research Engineer - Recording Media Research Laboratories, FUJIFILM Corporation

Osamu Shimizu is a research engineer at the Recording Media Research Laboratories, FUJIFILM Corporation, where he specializes in magnetic recording technologies. His current interest is the development of high-capacity magnetic tape media with barium ferrite particles. He is an expert member of the Technical Committee of Magnetic Recording & Information Storage at The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers. He is also a Senior Member of IEEE. He has published dozens of papers in international journals and conference proceedings on magnetism and/or magnetic recording technologies. He was awarded the Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2011 for the publication of 29.5-Gb/in2 Recording Areal Density on Barium Ferrite Tape. He received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Material Science from the University of Electro Communications and a Ph.D. degree from Ibaraki University.

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Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, Director of Product Management, Maxta

Kiran combines technical, marketing, and leadership skills in his role of managing products from the concept and release stages to the revenue stage. He joined Maxta in 2013 after spending nearly five years as Lead Software Product Manager for Hewlett-Packard, where he led server virtualization strategy for HP’s 3PAR Storage division. He was also a Product Manager for application and data availability specialist Mendocino Software, as well as a Technical Marketing Engineer for NetApp. Prior to NetApp, he was a Software Engineer and Team Leader for NetIQ, a provider of IT system management solutions to global customers. Before that, he served in a variety of technical roles including Senior Planning and Development for IT services company Taos Mountain. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Mysore, a master’s degree in computer science from Pace University, and an MBA in marketing and entrepreneurship from Santa Clara University.

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Derek Stadnicki, Partner, DiscreteIO

With over fifteen years of experience in many aspects of the IT industry Derek is a professional with a deep skill set in infrastructure and data center management. He has spent ten years in infrastructure support deployment and design, with a focus on data center management, shared service infrastructure and infrastructure automation, storage management, backup and disaster recovery. To complement my infrastructure experience; he also spent five years in web development and application support.

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Rajagopal Vaideeswaran, Principal Software Engineer, Symantec

Rajagopal is a Principal Software Engineer from Symantec Software (Veritas), India and has been working with Veritas Volume Manager, an Enterprise Storage product in the UNIX/Linux platform for the last 10+ years. He has done his MSc (Tech) Information Systems from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, INDIA and is interested in researching on the Memory technologies for Data Centers. He is a Technical Expert in designing and implementing high quality and cost efficient solutions for Global 2000 customers. He has prior experience in presenting Storage and High Availability solutions to Customers and troubleshooting product issues in mission critical environments.

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Anil Vasudeva, President and Chief Analyst, IMEX Research

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

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Lazarus Vekiarides, CTO and Co-founder, ClearSky Data

Laz Vekiarides is the chief technology officer and co-founder of ClearSky, an enterprise technology startup currently operating in stealth. He has served in key technical and leadership roles delivering breakthrough technologies to market; prior to ClearSky, Vekiarides served as the executive director of software engineering for Dell’s EqualLogic Storage Engineering group. He joined Dell from EqualLogic, which was acquired in early 2008, where he was a member of the core leadership team. Vekiarides played a key role in the company’s early success as a senior engineering manager and architect for the PS Series SAN arrays and host tools.

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John Webster, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group

John Webster is a senior industry analyst focused on the area of data storage technologies; these include hardware, software, and services management. Specialties include storage and big data analytics, data management, virtualization, and analysis of storage infrastructure acquisition alternatives. He has been a speaker at previous DSI and SNW events and publishes a blog on Forbes.com called "inescapable Data".

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Rob Whiteley, Vice President, Marketing, Hedvig

Rob Whiteley is the VP of Marketing at Hedvig. He joins Hedvig from Riverbed and Forrester Research where he held a series of technical and product leadership roles. Rob graduated from Tufts University with a BS in Computer Engineering.

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Michael Willett, Storage Security Strategist, Samsung

Dr. Michael Willett received a Bachelor of Science degree from the US Air Force Academy (Top Secret clearance) and a Masters and PhD in 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. Later, Dr. Willett joined Fiderus, a security and privacy consulting practice, subsequently accepting a position with Wave Systems. Recently, Dr. Willett was a Senior Director at Seagate Research, focusing on security functionality on hard drives, including self-encryption, related standardization, product rollout, patent development, and partner liaison. Currently, Dr. Willett serves as a consultant on the marketing of storage-based security. Dr. Willett also chaired the OASIS Privacy Management Reference Model Technical Committee (PMRM TC), which has developed an operational reference model for implementing privacy requirements. Presently, Dr. Willett is working with Samsung as a storage security strategist, helping to define their self-encryption strategy across Samsung.

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