SDC EMEA 2019 Speakers

	Dr. Thomas Willhalm Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation Dr. Thomas Willhalm is a Principal Engineer at Intel who consults independent software vendors in optimizing their software for Intel architecture. His area of expertise are enterprise applications and data bases and with a focus on persistent memory for the last 7 years.
	Yosef Shatsky Storage Security and Software Architect, IBM Yosef is an architect at IBM focusing on data reduction and security in block storage systems. He has worked on many aspects of data reduction including compression, deduplication, capacity management, and overhead efficiency of RAID and garbage collection. More recently, he has also taken on the role of security architect responsible for all security aspects of the storage system. Yosef has 20 years of experience in R&D and has filed nearly 20 patents. He holds an M.Sc in computer science from the Open University of Israel.
	Yohay Lasri QA Manager, Visuality Systems Yohay is the QA Manager at Visuality Systems. As QA manager, responsibilities are to oversee the relationship between developers, testers, and marketing in order to validate the quality of Visuality Systems products.Prior to joining Visuality Systems I managed a QA group at Elbit Systems an Israeli defense industry company.
	Muli Ben-Yehuda Co-Founder and CTO, Lightbits Labs Muli Ben-Yehuda is the CTO and co-founder of Lightbits Labs, a startup focused on developing cloud infrastructure including networked storage. He is one of the inventors of the NVMe/TCP standard. He was previously Chief Scientist at Stratoscale, where he helped develop software that provides AWS-like features in private clouds, including block and object storage and database-as-a-service. He has also been a researcher and master inventor at IBM, where he was instrumental in developing hypervisor support for zero-cost high-speed I/O: all of the benefits of virtualized I/O with none of the overhead. He is widely recognized as an expert in machine and I/O virtualization and has given talks at many conferences, workshops, and universities, including OSDI (where he received the best paper award), ASPLOS, EuroSys, SYSTOR, VEE, Linux OLS, FAST, and Flash Memory Summit. He holds an MSc in Computer Science (summa cum laude) from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and a BA (cum laude) from the Open University of Israel.
	Rakesh Cheerla Senior Product Manager, Xilinx Rakesh Cheerla is a Senior Product Manager who defines and drives the Xilinx Storage roadmap and actively engages with the Data Center, Enterprise and Cloud infrastructure customers. He is a technologist and a business leader with over 24 years experience in Product Definition, Business Development, and Engineering, combining a deep interest in understanding customer needs with a hands-on technical expertise in chips, systems, and software to develop innovative product solutions.
	Dr. Anat Eyal Program Director, NVMe Competency Center, IBM Dr. Anat Eyal has been working in the Storage industry since 2000. In 2014, Anat joined IBM to manage the XIV/ A9000 development. Currently, she leads the NVMe Competency Center for Distributed Storage in IBM. Prior to that she held various R&D positions including Director of Engineering in ScaleIO/EMC, Principal Development Manager in Microsoft, Director of Core Technology in Exanet, and Postdoc Researcher in the University of Pennsylvania. Anat holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and M.Sc. in Management Sciences from Tel Aviv University.
	Steven French Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft Azure Storage 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.
	David Goebel Software Design Engineer, Microsoft David joined Microsoft and the nascent Windows NT group in 1990 as a member of the four person file system team that designed and implemented NTFS. He continued in the file system team until NT 3.51 shipped in 1995, leaving to form a consulting company, Balder Technology Group, to help a wide variety of companies (including Microsoft) write robust kernel mode storage and file system drivers for NT. In 2008 David rejoined Microsoft and in 2011 moved to the Azure team and, for the first time, user mode. While primarily working with the team building the Azure File Service, the many facets and challenges of maintaining a massive and exponentially growing public cloud service steals quite a few cycles dealing with wildly varied storage related issues.
	Or Lapid Storage Field Applications Engineer, Micron Europe Ltd 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 specialised in Micron’s SSD and NVDIMM products and collaborating with Global Storage/Enterprise OEM’s, Start-ups, and Eco-System partners on SSD architecture, technology and workloads. Or holds Electronics Engineering Degree and has been working in the Semiconductor industry for 12 years.
	Volker Lendecke Developer, Sernet/Samba Team 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 Santa Clara and has given a few talks on the AD topic.
	Mikhail Malygin Principal Software Engineer, Yadro Principal Software Engineer at YADRO, with 10 years’ storage systems design and architecture. Technology expertise in storage, distributed systems, scale-out solutions, operation systems, networks, performance and reliability. Open source contributor. Conference speaker. Leading engineer for YADRO Tatlin (unified storage). Key contributor to Dell EMC ECS (scale-out geo distributed object storage), Dell EMC Centera (purpose-built archive solution), Centera Virtual Archive. Architected Yadro Tatlin storage data protection layer. Yadro Tatlin achieved 100+ petabytes deployment in 2018. Author of 10+ patents and patent application in storage area.
	Effi Ofer Researcher, IBM Senior developer and researcher at IBM for over twenty years with expertise in the area of high availability, recovery, transaction management, data analytics, and storage.
	Philipp Reisner CEO, LINBIT Philipp Reisner is the founder, CEO of LINBIT and author of DRBD. LINBIT grew out of a local Linux service provider into an international support provider for open source HA cluster software (focusing particularly on Pacemaker & DRBD). DRBD was started in 2000 and became part of the Linux kernel in 2.6.33. Philipp has guided LINBIT’s upstream contributions to a number of open source infrastructure and clustering projects, including Kubernetes and OpenStack Cinder.
	Shachar Sharon Senior Member, Technical Staff, NetApp Shachar Sharon is a senior member of technical staff with NetApp. Prior to NetApp he has been developing Storage software at Elastifile, PrimaryData, and Infinidat.
	Parmeshwr Prasad Vishwakarma Senior Software Engineer, Dell EMC Parmeshwr Prasad is associated with DellEMC server division from past six years. He is having varied experience in embedded system, servers, cloud, ML, blockchain and Open Source. He has been always passionate about new technologies. Keen passion for continuous learning, innovation and adoption of new ideas from lateral technology domains. He owns Patents (Currently 21) across diverse areas covering UEFI, ESRT, NVDIMM, Apache-Pass, neural-network, blockchain and PCIe.
	Neil Werdmuller Director, Storage Solutions, Arm Ltd Neil Werdmuller is the Director of Storage Solutions at Arm, one of the world’s leading semiconductor technology companies, with over 125 billion Arm-based chips shipped to date. Arm is a Founder Member of the SNIA Computational Storage TWG. Arm processor and SoC technologies power not only 98% of today’s smartphones, but also the vast majority of storage controllers worldwide. He is responsible for driving the Arm processor and SoC technologies that powers these many billions of storage controllers worldwide, including SSDs, hard drives, eMMC/UFS embedded memory, and in-memory controllers for HBM and emerging memory technologies. Neil works closely with the industry’s top storage suppliers globally to develop cutting-edge processing solutions for pushing the frontiers of speed, cost and area for the storage market. Most notably, he specified and launched the Cortex-R8 processor, which now invisibly powers many of today's market-leading eSSD storage products. Before joining Arm, he was responsible for strategic sourcing in TI’s Wireless Connectivity Business Unit bringing in-house critical technologies to support the business. He has over 28 years experience in embedded markets and earned a BSc in Computer Science from Portsmouth University (UK).