SDC EMEA 2021 Speakers

Sebastien Le Duc 

Software Engineering Director, Kalray

Sebastien started his professional career in 1998 at STMicroelectronics where he worked on compilers for a proprietary VLIW DSP targeted at multimedia applications. He then joined ST-Ericsson in 2006 where he spent 8 years managing Multimedia Software development teams. He continued his career back at STMicroelectronics as Lead Software Architect on set-top box products. Together with his technical background that ranges from low-level software development to middleware integration, his team management and product development experience, Sebastien brings outstanding Software Engineering leadership to Kalray.

Dr. Debendra Das Sharma 

Intel Fellow, Intel Corporation

Dr. Debendra Das Sharma is an Intel Fellow in the Data Platforms Group and director of the I/O Technology and Standards Group at Intel Corporation. He is a leading expert on I/O subsystem and interface architecture. Dr. Das Sharma’s team delivers Intel-wide critical interconnect technologies in Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe), Compute Express Link (CXL), Intel’s Coherency interconnect, and multichip package interconnect. He is a key driver of external standards for PCIe and CXL, and internal proprietary interfaces, as well as implementation. 

Dr. Das Sharma joined Intel in 2001 as a technical lead in the Advanced Components Division, designing server chipsets. He previously worked with Hewlett-Packard, where he led development of their server chipsets. He holds 137 US patents and is a frequent keynote speaker, distinguished lecturer, invited speaker, and panelist at the PCI-SIG Developers Conference, CXL consortium events, Open Server Summit, Open Fabrics Alliance, Flash Memory Summit, SNIA SDC, and Intel Developer Forum. 

Dr. Das Sharma is a member of the Board of Directors for the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) and a lead contributor to PCIe specifications since its inception. He is a co-inventor and founding member of the CXL consortium and co-leads the CXL Technical Task Force. 

Dr. Das Sharma has a bachelor’s in technology (with honors) degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.​ He has been awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. 

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 

SNIA SMI Co-Chair and Board Advisor & Storage Technology Enablement Architect, Intel Corporation

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.

Irfan Ahmad

Founder, Magnition

Irfan is a tech entrepreneur and a successful early-stage investor with a passion is helping startup founders achieve traction earlier than most think possible. Irfan was the co-founder and CTO of CloudPhysics, and also worked for Transmeta, Autodesk, Toronto Stock Exchange, Canada Trust (now TD) and the Museum of Steam and Technology. 

Irfan received his pink tie from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Mathematics & Computer Science. He holds 40+ patents and has authored several award-winning research papers. Irfan routinely serves as referee in peer-reviewed academic conferences and journals.

Glyn Bowden 

CTO, A&PS AI & Data Practice, HPE

Glyn is CTO for the AI & Data Practice for HPE Pointnext & GreenLake Advisory & Professional Services group. His technical experience has spanned many industries from global finance, national security and high technology. With a background in high performance compute & storage, cloud native computing and emerging technologies such as blockchain and machine learning, Glyn’s goal is to make high technology solutions accessible to all.

AJ Casamento

Solutions Engineer, Brocade Communications

AJ Casamento is a 40+ year IT industry veteran with experience working in a wide variety of market segments, IT leading companies, and engineering and product development roles.  In more than 23 years as a Solutions Architect at Brocade, a Broadcom Inc. Company, AJ spends his time helping enterprises understand various technologies and architectural decisions, and the impact to their business. AJ started his career with Digital Equipment Corporation, and worked in various engineering and product development roles at Hewlett Packard, SUN Microsystems, IBM, and Avnet, before joining Brocade.

Dr Huamin Chen

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Dr. Huamin Chen is a passionate developer at Red Hat' CTO office. He is one of the founding members of Kubernetes SIG Storage, member of Ceph, Knative, and Rook. He previously spoke at KubeCon, OpenStack Summits, and other technical conferences.

Veera Deenadhayalan

Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Veera Deenadhayalan of the IBM Research Division of IBM Almaden Research Center has been working on storage systems research since 2003 in the areas of advanced RAID algorithms, scalable storage systems, and undetected disk errors. He's working along with Red Hat team on a Disaster Recovery project for the OpenShift Container Platform. He was the project lead of the GPFS Native RAID feature of the IBM Elastic Storage Server and he also worked on its follow up IBM Erasure Code Edition. Prior to his efforts in storage research, he worked in the IBM Mylex Subsystems product development group, where he was a lead firmware engineer of Mylex RAID adapters and was responsible for, among other things, the design and development of its second-generation disk metadata management. He holds many patents and has published papers in the storage systems area. IBM presented him with several Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards for his contribution to IBM's flagship enterprise storage system, DS8000 and to IBM Elastic Storage Server and IBM Erasure Code Edition.

Obaid Farooqi

Escalation Engineer, Microsoft

Obaid has been supporting implementors of SMB and other open specifications for 12+ years and regularly presents at events on topic such as SMB, Authentication and RDP.

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.

Remy Gauguey

Senior Software Architect, Kalray

Rémy Gauguey is a Senior Software Architect at Kalray, for the Data Center Business Unit. He develops advanced architectures for composable infrastructure, leveraging the MPPA manycore technology from Kalray. Rémy has been previously developing his expertise at Connexant, Mindspeed Technologies and the CEA labs. He holds several patents in the fields of software architecture and packet processing.

Turguy Goker

Director of Advanced Development LTO

Turguy represents Quantum with LTO organizations as the technology leader while leading the Advanced Development Team focused on current and future LTO technology. Turguy is also the current Chairperson for INSIC, Information Storage Industry Consortium representing Quantum. Turguy is a servo and signal processing technology expert, with more than 30 years of experience in researching and designing tape drives. Turguy was a key member of an R&D team who was responsible for the original LTO project collaborating with HP and IBM helping the formation of today’s LTO organization and tape technology. Turguy has more than 50 patents in the tape technology field specifically in servo control, logical and physical tape formats, data detection, and Erasure Coding. He was selected as Technology Hall of Fame with both Seagate and Certance.

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.

Christopher Hertel

Perfunctory Maniac, SAMBA Team

Christopher R. Hertel is a long-haul member of the Samba Team, founder of the jCIFS project, and an all-around Precocious Protocol Practitioner. Chris first fell into the SMB sinkhole in the late 1980's while deploying an SMB-based storage network at a major bank in Chicago, and has since made his career trying to scramble back out. He is the author of a book on CIFS (SMB1) implementation, and was also lead author (under contract) of Microsoft's official SMB1 protocol specification (all of which became moot when SMB1 was deprecated). For much of his career in Storage Networking, he has worked to integrate SMB with Clustered and Distributed filesystems. Chris is currently working on an SMB2/3 Offload Engine for SmartNICs. 

Lokesh Jain

Senior Software Engineer, Cloudera

Lokesh Jain is a Senior Software Engineer at Cloudera. He is an early developer of Apache Ozone(Object Store) and Apache Ratis project(Raft Consensus Protocol implementation) and has been contributing for the past 4 years. He holds committer and PMC privileges for Apache Hadoop, Apache Ozone and Apache Ratis. He has pursued M.Sc.(Hons.) Mathematics and B.E.(Hons.) Computer Science from BITS Pilani. Lokesh has experience with distributed computing, data replication, data pipeline and storage systems.

Namjae Jeon

Software Engineer, Samsung

- Linux Kernel Developer.

- ksmbd(cifsd) maintainer.

- exfat/exfatprogs maintainer.

- Senior SW engineer, Samsung Electronics.

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.

Umang Kumar

Expert Engineer, HPE

Umang is currently an Expert Engineer with the Storage Group of HPE and is responsible for various system aspects of storage. He has 5 plus years of experience and has worked extensively on Block and File Storage QA and deployments and is well versed with the technology. Umang has multiple issued patents and has presented in SNIA SDC on many occasions.

Sweta Kumari

Research Scientist, Huawei R&D

I joined as a Research Scientist at Storage Protocol Team in Cloud&AI BL, Huawei R&D Bangalore, India. My current areas of research are 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 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 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.

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.

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.

Yuval Lifshitz

Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Yuval Lifshitz works as a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. His current focus is enriching the Ceph ecosystem by adding connectivity between the Rados Object Gateway and external message brokers (Kafka, Knative, RabbitMQ, etc.). Yuval did public speaking in: Cephalocon, OSS Japan, FOSDEM and local events.

Mengyan (Helen) Lu

Senior Software Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Helen Lu leads the Microsoft Interoperability Test team responsible for developing Protocol Test Suites, essential tools for validating interoperability solutions against the Windows Open Specifications.

Jean-Francois Marie

Chief Solution Architect, Kalray

Jean-François has more than 30 years of experience in the high tech industry. He started his career dealing with real time systems, before joining Sun Microsystems as a data center architect, then EMC² and finally NetApp in 2006, where he had various roles in a 13-year career. He held various roles, from Chief Technologist and Product Marketing Director for EMEA, to French Expert team manager to handle new technology introduction. He also managed global and regional accounts, alliances and partners.Jean-François was also an active SNIA member for 10 years and French SNIA President for 2 years.He has a Masters degree in Electronics, specialized in microprocessor design and embedded systems.On a personal note, he has been a Basket Ball player, a coach and head coach for 25 years

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.

John Meneghini

SAN Target Architect, NetApp

John Meneghini has over 35 years of computer industry experience developing I/O subsystems and protocol stacks with NVMe, SCSI and Fibre channel. Working for NetApp as a SAN Target Architect he fulfills a number of roles including: Technical Project Leader, NVMexpress.org representative, open source community liaison and core maintainer for the Data ONTAP NVMe Target protocol stack.

Vishnu Murty

Senior Principal Engineer, Dell Technologies 

Automation Technologist at DellEMC, is a Masters in Software Systems with 15+ years’ experience in Automation Development efforts. The domains I have worked on include Server, Storage and System Management Software. Responsible of Delivering Zeno - Continues Test Automation framework, JAAS(JMeter As A Service), ICEMAN Tools. 9 Patents Granted by USPTO and 128 Disclosures recognized by Dell.

Effi Ofer

Researcher, IBM 

Effi is a Senior Developer and Researcher at IBM for over twenty years with expertise in the area of data analytics and storage.

Obaro Ogbo

Software Engineer II, Microsoft 

Obaro is a software engineer at Microsoft, where he currently works on developing Windows Protocol Tests Suites for File Sharing, SMB2/3 and RDP Protocols. He has been in the software industry for about 8 years and remains fascinated with building software solutions.

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.

Shyam Prasad

Software Engineer, Microsoft

I'm a part of Microsoft Azure storage team. Working as a Senior software engineer on Azure Files, my main focus has been to enable customers to move their Linux workloads to Azure. As a part of this, I've made several key contributions to the Linux SMB client open source community over the last couple of years.

Simona Rabinovici-Cohen

Researcher and Architect, IBM Research

Simona Rabinovici-Cohen is a researcher and architect at the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, Israel. She holds M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in computer science, both from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Simona leads the breast cancer pilot in the BigMedilytics European Union H2020 project. In SNIA, she was the co-chair of Long Term Retention technical working group that authored the Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) ISO standard.

Vianney Rancurel

Head of Research, Scality

Software architect and head of research at Scality. Previously member of R&D staff at Incubaid. Graduate of EPITA: Ecole d'Ingénieurs en Informatique.

Shyam Ranganathan

Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Shyam is a principal engineer at Red Hat with more than 20+ years of experience in software development. Over the course of his career Shyam has worked across various aspects of the storage stack, from access protocols to distributed storage systems. Lately his interests are around storage management automation in cloud native environments, specifically with Kubernetes.

Andy Rudoff

Member, CXL Consortium & Persistent Memory SW Architect, Intel Corporation

Andy Rudoff is a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, focusing on Non-Volatile Memory programming. He is a contributor to the SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group. His more than 30 years industry experience includes design and development work in operating systems, file systems, networking, and fault management at companies large and small, including Sun Microsystems and VMware. Andy has taught various Operating Systems classes over the years and is a co-author of the popular UNIX Network Programming text book.

Dhishankar Sengupta

Master Engineer, HPE

Dhishankar is currently a Master Engineer with the Storage Group of HPE and is responsible for various system aspects of storage. He has 5 plus years of experience and has worked extensively on Block and File Storage QA and deployments and is well versed with the technology. 

Archit Somani

Research Scientist, Huawei R&D

Currently, I am a Research Scientist at Storage Space Team, Huawei R&D Bangalore, India. I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. There I worked with Prof. Hagit Attiya. My research interests lie in Persistent Memory, Efficient Data Structure for Indexed File Systems, Composable Concurrent Data Structures, Transactional Memory systems, and Dynamic Distributed Algorithms. I have completed my Ph.D. from IIT Hyderabad, India. I have received a “Best Student Paper Awards” 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 journals. I have earned Masters from MANIT Bhopal, India and Bachelors from ITM, Bhilwara, India and received honors.

Dmitrii Smirnov

Software Architect, AOSTO

Dmitrii Smirnov is a Software Architect at AOSTO, storage software development company. He has been working in the storage industry since 2012 as a Linux kernel developer, tech lead, and storage architect. Main responsibilities include design and development of software-defined storage systems, leading the software development life cycle from requirement analysis and planning to testing and maintenance. He is currently working on a composable software-defined all-flash storage cluster. Previously, he developed fast software RAID for NVMe, was involved in the development of mid-range hybrid storage, scale-out distributed storage and Active-Active NVMe storage. He focuses on storage architecture for High Performance Computing and breaking performance limits.

Eli Tiomkin

VP Business Development, NGD Systems

Eli has spent his career developing and driving business and sales for over 24 years. He has experience with storage companies like M-Systems, STEC, StorOne, and Western Digital. He has been in Sales or Business Development at many companies that were at ground level and helped them all to successfully growth.

Nicolas Trangez

Principal Architect, Scality

Principal Architect at Scality, focusing on next-generation technologies. Previously architect at Amplidata and Incubaid. Programming polyglot, occasional conference speaker, start-up aficionado. From Ghent, Belgium often found strolling around Paris. Lives on traveling, music and great food, in no particular order.

Jack Zhang

Storage Architect, Intel Corporation

Jack Zhang is a principle storage architect in Intel NVM (non-volatile memory) solution group (NSG). He manages and leads SSD solutions/optimizations and next generation storage solutions for Cloud and Enterprise. He also leads SSD solutions/optimizations for open source storage solutions for software-defined storage, OpenStack, Ceph, and big data. He has many years design experience in firmware/hardware, software/kernel/driver, system architectures, new technology ecosystem enabling, and market development.