SDC EMEA 2022 Speakers

Mariusz Barczak

Cloud Software Architect, Intel Corporation

Mariusz joined Intel in 2013.Currently he is a cloud software architect in the Xeon Memory Group (XMG). His work area is finding innovations for storage software running on Xeon. In particular caching solutions, software defined storage, virtualization, and storage analytics. His recent work is focused on mixed media solutions combining Intel Optane technology with other storage components like QLC SSD drives, to deliver efficient and durable storage. Mariusz has 12 years of experience in software development especially in Linux operating system environment.

Jerome Gaysse

Senior Technology and Market Analyst, Silinnov Consulting

Jerome Gaysse is senior technology and market analyst at Silinnov Consulting, a consultancy based on emerging data storage technologies. He also drives the Cloud services offering at SPIE ICS, a leading IT French company. He has strong technical expertise in IP, NVM, FPGAs, and ASICs for the data center market. He successfully worked with major corporate companies, startups, and research institutes in both Europe and the USA. He is a regular presenter at international conferences such as those sponsored by IEEE and SNIA, as well as past Flash Memory Summits. Jerome earned an MSEE from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon (France) with a semiconductor specialty.

Richelle Ahlvers 

Storage Management Architect, Intel Corporation & SNIA SMI Co-Chair and Board Member

Richelle has spent over 25 years in Enterprise Storage R&D teams in a variety of technical roles, leading the architecture, design and development of storage array software, storage management software user experience projects including mobility, developing new storage industry categories including SAN management, storage grid and cloud, and storage technology portfolio solutions. Richelle has been engaged with industry standards initiatives with SNIA and DMTF for many years. She served as the SNIA Technical Council Chair and has been engaged across a breadth of technologies ranging from storage management, to solid state storage, cloud, and green storage. She is Co-Chair of the Storage Management Initiative and leads the SSM Technical Work Group developing the Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API.

Sudhir Balasubramanian

Senior Staff Solution Architect & Global Oracle Practice Lead, VMware

27 + years Oracle hands on experience - Principal Oracle DBA / Architect, Oracle RAC/Data Guard Expert, Experienced in EMC SAN Technologies
Principal Oracle DBA/Oracle Architect (1995 – 2011) [ Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Sony Electronics, Newgen Results (Aspen) ,Teletech Corp, SAIC, Active Network, Sempra Energy Holdings] 
VMware [2012-] Senior Staff Solution Architect & Global Oracle Practice Lead VMware VCA – Cloud ,VMware vBCA Specialist, VMware vExpert Member of the Office of the Chief Technical Ambassador VMware (Alumni) Oracle ACE. Leading Author of “Virtualizing Oracle Business Critical Databases on VMware SDDC”
Recognized Speaker@ Oracle Open World, IOUG, VMworld, VMware Partner Exchange, EMC World, EMC Oracle Summit and Webinars
Industry recognized expert in Oracle Virtualization technologies

Ralph Bohme

Samba Team Lead, SerNet GmbH / Samba Team

Running when not hacking.

Cameron Brett

President, SCSI Trade Assocation & Sr. Director of Cloud and Enterprise Marketing, KIOXIA

Cameron Brett is Director of Enterprise Marketing at KIOXIA America, Inc. He is responsible for enterprise SSD, software and memory outbound marketing and messaging. He also represents KIOXIA as co-chair of the NVM Express marketing workgroup, is president of the SCSI Trade Association, and co-chair of the SNIA CMSI SSD Special Interest Group. A 20-year veteran of the storage industry, he held previous product marketing/management positions with Toshiba, PMC-Sierra, QLogic, Broadcom and Adaptec.

Yingxin Cheng

Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Yingxin Cheng is a Cloud Orchestration Software Engineer in Intel System Software Engineering Group, who has about 10 years working experience in Storage, Such as OpenStack, Ceph. He is currently working on Ceph OSD improvement project Crimson.

Suman Debnath

Principal Developer Advocate, Amazon Web Services

Suman Debnath is a Principal Developer Advocate working on Amazon Elastic File System at Amazon Web Services, primarily focusing on Storage, and its integration with Container, Serverless and Machine Learning. He is passionate about large scale distributed systems and is a vivid fan of Python. His background is in storage performance and tool development, where he has developed various performance benchmarking and monitoring tools.

Olivier Fraimbault

Storage, Technical Sales Manager, IBM Technology Sales, EMEA & SNIA EMEA Board Member

Olivier, a technology enthusiast, spent all his 20+ career in the IT industry with positions in different Geos and companies and most of it in the Storage Industry. Olivier is currently Principal, Storage Technical Sales Manager for IBM in Europe Middle East and Africa. Olivier is an active board member of SNIA EMEA since 2019.Olivier holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) with a major in Software Development from Centrale – Supélec, Paris, as well as a Master in Entrepreneurship from HEC, Paris (MBA).

Steve French

Principal Software Engineer, Azure Storage, Microsoft

Steve French is a member of the Samba team, and Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft (Azure Storage), and long time maintainer (as well as original author) of one of the more active Linux file systems (cifs.ko), and a frequent presenter at SMB and storage conferences.   He was formerly chair of the SNIA CIFS Working group and co-author of the SNIA CIFS Specification.  Formerly he was File System Architect for the IBM Linux Technology Center.

Hemant Gaikwad

Test Senior Principal Engineer, Dell Technologies

Hemant is a Test Architect at Dell EMC Server & Infrastructure Systems Group & works on strategy & optimization for the Systems Management portfolio products. He has initiated and led Performance Engineering, Cloud migration, Automation, Process improvements & Simulation/Emulation related tech vitality activities in the recent past. As an Innovation Evangelist for the entire site, he drives various Innovation related activities across the Server, Storage and Services business units. Apart from this, Hemant likes to spend his free time on cycling, carpentry & photography.

Constantine Gavrilov

Storage Architect & Master Inventor, IBM Israel

My name is Constantine Gavrilov and I am a Software Architect at IBM. I am an accomplished coder and technology leader, and I enjoy using my skills to contribute to technological advances that happen every day at IBM. I graduated from the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel with Master of Science Degree in Chemical Engineering. I have vast experience in networking, clustering, storage, protocols, security, cloud technologies, RAS solutions, and Linux kernel. I have authored multiple patent applications in the fields of Infiniband, RDMA, storage interconnects, storage clustering, software deployment, network and and network protocols. In my spare time, I enjoy contributing to Linux kernel and WireShark protocol analyzer.

Bill Gervasi

Principal Systems Architect, Nantero and Chair, JEDEC Alternative Memory Committee

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

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

Javier Gonzalez

Site Manager, Samsung Semiconductor Denmark Research (SSDR) 

I lead Samsung Memory Solutions' Global Open-Source Team (GOST), where I take care of our open-source activities and manage a distributed team of highly talented engineers. This includes defining strategy, internal / external communication, and day-to-day execution. I am also the founder and site manager for Samsung Semiconductor Denmark Research (SSDR) - Samsung’s Memory Solutions first R&D centre in Europe and fifth worldwide. I am a Ph.D in operating systems with a strong background in technical leadership, experimental research, and Linux Kernel development. My interests lay primarily in the hardware / software co-design space, where systems software, hardware architecture, and open-source meet. I am dedicated to defining safe environments for motivated software engineers to be creative and get things done. I am a contributor to a wide range of open source projects including the Linux Kernel. I am a regular speaker at several top industry and academic conferences.

Pekon Gupta

Solutions Architect, SMART Modular Technologies

Pekon Gupta is currently working as a Solutions Architect with SMART Modular Technologies. His current role involves developing and incubating memory and storage solutions, around emerging technologies like Gen-Z, CCIX, and CXL and FPGA based accelerators, in EDSFF form-factors. He has over 15 years of experience in hardware and system design.

Before joining SMART Modular Pekon was working with Intel, Esencia Tech, Sandisk, Texas Instruments, and Freescale.

Jonmichael Hands

VP, Storage Business Development, Chia

Jonmichael Hands partners with the storage vendors for Chia optimized product development, market modeling, and Chia blockchain integration. Jonmichael spent the last ten years at Intel in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group working on product line management, strategic planning, and technical marketing for the Intel data center SSDs. In addition, he served as the chair for NVM Express (NVMe), SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) SSD special interest group, and Open Compute Project for open storage hardware innovation. Jonmichael started his storage career at Sun Microsystems designing storage arrays (JBODs) and holds an electrical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines.

Arvind Jagannath

Product Line Manager, VMware

25+ years of experience in the industry working on networking, storage, embedded, and kernel development. Leads infrastructure and core platform enablement for vSphere, working across the VMware ecosystem of server, IO, and storage partners

Most recently drove platform product management at Cohesity and NetApp. MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth school of Business and a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering

Howard Johnson

Technology Architect, Brocade

Howard Johnson began his career in 1984 developing configuration applications for 3270 Cluster Controllers for McDATA Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.  In 1993, in partnership with IBM, Howard was part of the team that created the ESCON Director Models 3/4/5 as well as the FICON to ESCON Bridge.  As technical leader, he directed the efforts of the technical teams that expanded IBM’s original storage-area networks (SAN) from ESCON to FICON. 

In 2007, Howard joined Brocade, a Broadcom company, as a member of the Fabric Operating Systems Architecture group and is responsible for the technical strategy relating to Brocade’s mainframe infrastructure offerings.  His industry experience lead to a featured interview in Enterprise Executive (2019, issue 6), where he discussed the future of the mainframe, FICON, and Fibre Channel.

Howard is actively involved in the Fibre Channel standards development as part of the INCITS/ANSI T11.3 organization representing Broadcom and is the technical liaison with many of Broadcom’s Fibre Channel industry partners.  Utilizing these relationships, Howard orchestrated standardization of the Fabric Notifications architecture for the Fibre Channel industry and worked with ecosystem partners to develop solutions leveraging Fabric Notifications in the formation of autonomous SAN technology.

Today, Howard is an active member of the Brocade SAN Networking division of Broadcom Limited and continues his technical leadership in enterprise networking solutions.  With more than 37-years of professional experience in high-end processing environments, Howard remains an active advocate of Fibre Channel and enterprise solutions.

Mark Jones

Technical Marketing & Performance, Broadcom

Mark Jones has worked in the enterprise computing industry since 1984. Currently is the Director of Technical Marketing for Broadcom Inc. Emulex Connectivity Division. Mr. Jones comes to Broadcom via the acquisition of Emulex Corporation in 2015 for which he has worked since 2002. For the 18 years prior he worked as a Strategic Solutions Manager for Burroughs/Unisys. Mr. Jones has a Computer Science degree from the University of Redland and currently serves as the President Emeritus of the Fibre Channel Industry Association.

Rohan Kadekodi

PhD Student, University of Texas at Austin

I am a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. I work on building systems software for Persistent Memory. In particular, I have built file systems for persistent memory that are aimed at accelerating legacy applications as well as newer applications that are developed for persistent memory.

Jacek Kalwas

Technical Lead, Intel Poland

Jacek is a technical lead in Intel Ethernet Product Group (EPG) and works on software stack for storge offload on the Intel first generation IPU.He collaborates closely with SPDK community and he is the author of many design and architectural improvement to SPDK to allow support for HW assisted offload. Jacek has 7 years’ experience working on Hardware acceleration projects including encryption, compression or machine learning algorithms. He started his career as a hardware engineer working on HW prototyping and HW emulation.

Vamshi Kandalla

Chief Strategy Office, Granite River Labs and PCI-SIG

Vamshi leads strategic & commercial initiatives at GRL and is passionate about the “right technology at the right time to create value." He champions the organization’s focus and commitment to value through delivering innovative solutions in growth markets.

Vamshi brings to GRL a strong track record of success with 20 plus years’ experience in the semiconductor and systems industry. Prior to GRL, Vamshi was the head of Symmetricom’s Global Embedded Solutions Division responsible for global marketing, product management, technical management and business creation; and held leadership positions with Applied Micro, MosChip Semiconductor and Standard Microsystems (SMSC). Vamshi holds a B.E. in Instrumentation Engineering and an MBA.

Sushantha Kumar 

Lead Architect, Huawei Technologies India (Maintainer SODA Projects)

Sushantha Kumar is a  Lead Architect, Data Management Team at Huawei Technologies India. Member of SODA Foundation. Currently working on a container data management project at SODA Foundation. Prior to this, worked on the paas platform for cloud native applications. Also has exposure on different user access protocols for network devices.

Sanil Kumar D

TOC, AWG Lead, SODA Foundation

TOC Member, Architecture Lead, SODA Foundation, Maintainer KubeEdge(CNCF) ; Chief Architect, Head India SODA Team, Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd; TSC Member Centaurus(LF Project). Product development expertise in the areas of Linux, Open Source, ARM Ecosystem, Cloud, Data Management and Emerging Technologies(like Edge Computing, Blockchain, Distributed Computing). He holds multiple patents, published papers & presented sessions and keynotes in international conferences; was Linux Foundation Yocto Project Advisory Board member; Active collaboration within Industry through LF, IEEE, CCICI, SNIA; Organizer of tech events and meetup groups (CNCF and SODA Foundation). Currently focusing on Open Source Ecosystem, Technology Roadmap for SODA Foundation Projects for Unified Data Framework. He does blog/creative writing at skdwriting.wordpress.com. Keen to work with developers and enable their careers through open source. Recipient of Zinnov Industry award for Senior Technical Role Model for technical contributions.

Dr. Sweta Kumari

Research Scientist, Huawei Technologies

I joined as a Research Scientist at Unstructured Data Storage Lab, Huawei Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. My current areas of research are Progress guarantees, Blockchain, RDMA, Efficient Cache Coherence Protocol, Nested Transactions, Parallel and Distributed Computing. Prior to that, I joined the Dept. of CSE, Technion Israel Institute of Technology as a Postdoctoral Scientist and worked with Prof. Hagit Attiya. I have done a Ph.D. from the Dept. of CSE, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India. I have published multiple research papers at renowned international conferences and journals. Some of my research work has been recognized by pioneering researchers and received a couple of appreciations, “Best Student Paper Award” and “Best Poster Awards”. I am a PC member of ICDCIT 2022 and reviewed multiple papers of various conferences and journals like DISC’20/18, IndoSys’19, SRDS’18, HLPP’18, CODS-COMAD’18/19, ICDCN’18/17/16, OPODIS’17, ICDCIT’16, ICIT’15, IEEE access and Computing Journal. I have done M.Tech from the Dept. of CSE, MANIT Bhopal, India. Before that, I worked as a Programmer Analyst Trainee at Cognizant Technology Solution Pune, India. I have done B.Tech in Information Technology from RCEW, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India and was awarded with honors from the University.

Or Lapid

Storage Field Apps Engineer, Micron Technology Inc

Or Lapid is a Storage Field Apps Engineer, based in Israel, the “start-up nation” which historically has been fertile ground for very successful enterprise storage innovators. Or is specialized in Micron’s SSDs and collaborating with Global Storage/Enterprise OEM’s, Start-ups, and Eco-System partners on SSD architecture, technology, and workloads. Or holds an Electronics Engineering Degree and has been working in the Semiconductor industry for 15 years.

Karol Latecki

Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer, Intel Poland

Karol Latecki is a Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer at Intel in Intel Network Platforms Group, SPDK project. He is responsible for quarterly SPDK performance benchmarks, validation and managing the Continuous Integration infrastructure. Karol has been with Intel since 2017 and holds a M.S. in Computer Science, and a B.S.E in Telecommunications and Electronics from Gdansk University of Technology.

Volker Lendecke

Developer, SerNet GmbH

Volker is co-founder of SerNet GmbH in Göttingen, Germany and member of the Samba Team and one of the main developers working on winbind and Microsoft Active Directory integration. Volker is a frequent speaker at SDC in the US and has given a few talks on the AD topic. 

Chunmei Liu

Software Engineer, Intel Corporation, Shanghai

Chunmei Liu is a senior Cloud Orchestration Software Engineer in Intel System Software Engineering Group, who has over 15 years experience in network, virtualization and storage, such as Lenovo Firewall, open source virtualization Xen, Intel virtualization EVMM, Android, EMC CoprHD and CEPH. Currently she is working on SDS(software designed storage) project named CEPH, working on Crimson which is an improvement of CEPH OSD.

Bill Martin

SSD IO Standards, Samsung 

Bill has been involved in the storage industry for over 35 years, starting in 1983 with the development of a proprietary optical interface for HP storage, architecting the HP Tachyon interface chip for Fibre Channel, serving on industry consortiums and standards bodies for storage including SNIA, INCITS T11, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, SATA-IO, and NVMe. He has demonstrable skills in gaining industry agreement in a variety of technologies and bringing together competitors for the advancement of the industry. In addition to his role representing Samsung in SSD IO Standards, Bill currently holds the following industry leadership roles: Chair SNIA CMSI, Co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, Board member of the NVMe Board of Directors, Chair of INCITS T10, Secretary of INCITS T13. Bill has been the editor of numerous industry standards including:

• Editor of the SNIA Computational Storage Architecture Model;
• Editor of the SNIA Computational Storage API;
• Editor of the SNIA Key Value Storage API;
• Editor of SCSI Block Commands – 5 (SBC-5);
• Editor Fibre Channel - Framing and Signaling - 4;
• Editor Fibre Channel - Simplified Configurations and Management; 

Additionally he is an author of numerous proposals to the following standards bodies: NVMe, SNIA, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, and INCITS T11. Bill has received numerous industry recognitions for his contributions to the storage industry over the past decades including: SNIA Volunteer of the Year award 2021, INCITS Gene Milligan award for effective committee management 2016, INCITS Merit award 2013, FCIA Achievement award 2010, INCITS Outstanding Leadership Team award 2007, INCITS Technical Excellence award 2005, FCIA Lifetime Achievement award 2005, and SNIA Outstanding Theme lead for the interop lab 2004.

Alex McDonald

Chair, SNIA EMEA and SNIA Technical Council

Alex was with NetApp until late 2020, after more than 40 years in a variety of roles with some of the best known names in the software industry. With a background in software development, support, sales and a period as an independent consultant, Alex is currently Chair of SNIA EMEA, the SNIA CSI (Cloud Storage Initiative), vice-chair of the SNIA ESF (Ethernet Storage Forum) and co-chair of the SNIA SSSI (Solid State Storage Initiative), and a major contributor to SNIA’s extensive library of web-based education.

Stefan Metzmacher

Developer, SerNet GmbH and Samba Team

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

Danny Moore

Senior Manager, CXL Product Management, Rambus

Danny is a product level management expert with 20+ years’ experience in industry focused primarily on the data center. Much of his career has been focused on PCIe, PCIe switching and fabrics, working with CSPs to expand composable infrastructure for both compute and storage. Currently Danny is driving engagement in the CXL Consortium Marketing Working Group and product planning at Rambus.

Michael Oros

Executive Director, SNIA

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

Kannadasan Palani

Senior Test Manager, Msys Technologies

Kannadasan is a Senior test manager with 14+ yrs of experience in the Data Storage domain. He carries good experience in Testing multiple storage vendor products and qualifying them by testing with 3rd party software. At MSys, Kannadasan is working on Cloud Storage with AI/ML projects and Has very good experience on Red Hat Ceph Storage, Kubernetes, CI/CD tools, Jenkins and managing multi-cloud infrastructure by using Terraform.

Pravin Ranjan

Senior System Architect, Huawei Technologies India (Maintainer SODA Projects)

Pravin Ranjan has over 6 years of Industry experience in Linux, FileSystems, Cloud Technology, and Open Source areas. He holds an M.Tech degree from NIT Trichy, and published multiple papers in international conferences including IEEE. Currently focusing on the technology and ecosystem development for SODA Foundation projects like multi-cloud and Container Data Management.

Amit Kumar Roushan

System Architect, Huawei Technologies India (Maintainer SODA Projects)

Amit is a System Architect at Huawei Technologies India. He spent 9+ years in developing Cache technology, Cloud solution and Blockchain technology. Currently focusing on Open Source ecosystem and SODA foundation projects for Data protection for Container workload. He has done public speaking in Mesoscon, SODACON and local events.

Dr. Archit Somani

Research Scientist, Huawei R&D

Currently, I am a Research Scientist at Unstructured Data Storage Lab, Huawei Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and worked with Prof. Hagit Attiya. My research interests lie in Persistent Memory, Blockchain, Efficient Data Structure for Indexed File Systems, Composable Concurrent Data Structures, Transactional Memory systems, and Dynamic Distributed Algorithms. I have completed my Ph.D. in CSE from IIT Hyderabad, India. I have received a “Best Student Paper Award” at SSS’18 and “Best Poster Awards” at NETYS’18 and ICDCN’19 International Conferences. I have published many research papers in top international conferences such as PODC, SSS, NETYS and I&C journals. I am a PC member of 18th ICDCIT 2022. I have reviewed the papers of various conferences and journals like DISC’20/18, IndoSys’19, SRDS’18, HLPP’18, CODS-COMAD’18/19, ICDCN’18/17/16, OPODIS’17, ICDCIT’16, ICIT’15, IEEE access and Journal of Grid Computing. I have earned Masters from MANIT Bhopal, India and Bachelors from ITM, Bhilwara, India and received honors.

Konrad Sztyber

Cloud Software Development Engineer, Intel Poland

Konrad is a software engineer at Network and Edge Group at Intel and a core maintainer in the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) project. He joined Intel in 2015 and has been working on various storage related technologies with a recent focus on NVMe and NVMe-oF. Konrad graduated Poznan University of Technology and has a MS degree in computer science.

Miki Takahashi

Executive Vice President of Engineering, Granite River Labs and PCI-SIG

Miki Takahashi is heavily involved in standardization activity with customers, working groups and standards bodies. As a recognized technology leader, he is a frequent speaker on signal integrity topics at technical seminars and events. He currently chairs several working groups such as SD card association (Memory) and Open Alliance (Automotive).
Before joining GRL he spent 10 years at NEC, managing high speed interface IP design for PCI Express and contributing to PCI Express specification development for PCI-SIG. He moved to the US in 2004 to provide critical liaison between North America and the NEC high speed interface division headquartered in Japan. Other roles include positions with O2Micro and Advanced Chip Express. 

Fausto Vaninetti

Technical Solutions Architect, Cisco Systems

Fausto S. Vaninetti is a senior Technical Solutions Architect for Datacenter at Cisco Systems. With over 20-year experience in the ICT sector, his primary focus is on storage networking, datacenter optical interconnection, unified computing and converged architectures. He holds responsibility across EMEAR and has been a speaker at several industry events. He is based off the Milan office, Italy.

Ganesh Babu Vasudevan

Senior Staff Engineer, Samsung Semiconductor India R&D

11 years of experience in Industry, works in Storage Domain with experience in uSD/eMMC/SATA Qualifications and handling Customer claims.

Mohan Raj Veerasamy

Associate Director, Samsung Semiconductor India R&D

15+ years of experience in leading teams Technically leading SATA Team. And also Experience in eMMC product qualification, with Expertise in UFS protocol and test suite development additionally Exposure to NVMe driver validation.

Prasad Venkatachar

Senior Director, Products & Solutions, Pliops

Prasad Venkatachar is an experienced IT professional with 20 years of combined experience in Product Strategy, Management, Marketing, Solution Architecture & Services. He had  served several fortune 500 enterprise customers to deliver business value outcomes through Database & Big Data Solutions on Cloud & data center environments. Prasad leads Database and Big Data product solutions at Pliops. Before Joining Pliops, he worked at Lenovo, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SanDisk, and i2 Technologies. A regular speaker in several industry conferences -Microsoft, Oracle Industry and developer conferences. He holds Database (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM) and several cloud ( Azure, AWS & GCP ) certifications. He received Batchelor's Degree from Bangalore University and MBA from JWMI Management Institute.

Rahul Vishwakarma

Graduate Student, California State University

Rahul Vishwakarma is a graduate student in Computer Science at California State University, Long Beach. He has an overall of more than twelve years of industrial experience. He drove solutions for Data Protection and helped customers protect their data with Data Domain (de-duplication based backup storage) at Dell Technologies for four years and designed HPE ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA reference architecture at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He loves solving challenging problems across interdisciplinary domains and holds several US patents (65+) in Data Storage, Persistent Memory, DNA-Based memory, Blockchain and Machine Learning.

Tomasz Zawadzki

Cloud Software Architect, Intel Poland

Tomek is a Cloud Software Architect at Intel and a core maintainer for the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK). He has been working various on storage and networking related projects and his recent focus areas include NVMe, NVMe-oF and blobstore (persistent, power-fail safe block allocator).

Tong Zhang

Chief Scientist, Scaleflux