SDC India 2021 Speakers

Kiat Wee Ang 

Technical Expert for Data Management & Protection, Hitachi Vantara

Kiat Wee Joined Hitachi Vantara in Sept 2018. APAC Technical Expert responsible for:

Murali Brahmadesam 

Director of Engineering, Aurora Databases, Amazon

Murali Brahmadesam is the Director of Engineering that leads Amazon Aurora database and storage development teams. He and his team pioneered the development of cloud native relational database service by reimagining the traditional database stack for the cloud era. He is passionate about large scale distributed systems and has played a key role in delivering several such products for Amazon and Microsoft.

Tom Coughlin 

President, Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant.  He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and senior management positions at several companies.  Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports (including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report), and puts on digital storage-oriented events.  He is a regular storage and memory contributor for forbes.com and M&E organization websites.  He is an IEEE Fellow, Candidate for IEEE President Elect this year, Past-President of IEEE-USA, Past Director of IEEE Region 6 and Past Chair of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Section, board member of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley and is also active with SNIA and SMPTE. For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications and activities go to www.tomcoughlin.com

Cheryl George 

Technical Marketing Engineer, NetApp

Cheryl George has over 18 years of experience in the IT industry. As a passionate technical leader, she extends her industry experience to build state-of-the-art products and solutions that solve business problems in the Data Protection space.  Direct engagements with customers and partners enables her share real-world perspective in technical blogs and magazines.

PK Gupta 

Global CTO, Global Alliances Presales, Dell Technologies

Pushpendra Kumar “PK” Gupta has 36+ years of experience in the IT Industry.  PK received a B. E. in Computer Science in 1985 from MNREC, PGDM from AIMA.  Currently, PK is Global CTO & Global Architects Lead for Global Alliances for DellEMC based out of Silicon Valley, USA.  PK has been with DellEMC since May 1997, earlier roles being Global Presales Lead for Data Protection Solutions, Sr Director Specialty Presales, Director Product Marketing, Product Management and Director of Engineering.

PK was a visiting professor in India for many years in various institutions such as Amity Business School, AIMA, IMT, IEC and JIMS.  Also, PK has been on international advisory boards in a few Indian, Singapore and Malaysian universities.   PK has written technical and management articles in various international magazines; and he is an international speaker on storage management, cloud, big data, disaster recovery, IoT, Data protection & Privacy regulations and cyber security.  He is also founder and Chairman Emeritus for SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) India and SNIA South Asia.  Nominated to join SNIA Global Board of Directors to represent DellEMC for 2018/2019/2020. Also, co-chair for Data Protection & Privacy Committee (DPPC) for SNIA Global.  

PK was awarded the 2012 SNIA Industry Impact Award by SNIA International, 2013 APJ EMC President Leadership Award and has been nominated for President Club 10 times in last 14 years. He was induced into DellEMC DPS Hall of Fame in May 2015 and awarded Global Elite Leadership Golden Jacket in Dec 2019. Recently received mighty mentor award in Mar 2021.

Jim Handy 

General Director, Objective Analysis

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon. A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his technical depth, accurate forecasts,widespread industry presence and volume of publication. He has written hundreds of market reports, articles for trade journals, and white papers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media.  He posts blogs at www.TheMemoryGuy.com, www.TheSSDguy.com, and www.Smartkarma.com.

Joji John 

Senior Principal Engineer, Dell Technologies

Post an internment with LRDE (DRDO), I jumped straight into the IT field starting 2004. From 2004 to 2008, I supported storage customer in field in the roles of support, architecture, pre-sales, user training and implementation of integrated storage solutions with NetApp, HDS and EMC platforms integrating with Veritas Cluster Services, NetBackup solutions with variety of tape and modern tertiary storage classes. 2004 marks the beginning of my journey with DELL EMC. Grew through various roles of Support SME for Clariion, VNX and Celerra, Unity lines of storage. Worked with core engineering teams to improve serviceability. 2012 onwards, I transitioned to core engineering concentrating on integration engineering aspects helping integrate NAS features in multiple platforms and portfolios. Example being NAS features in PowerStore. Working interests revolve around system application integration, systems programming and security.

Ankit Mathur 

Chief Architect, NAS Storage, Huawei

Ankit Mathur has over 17 years of experience in storage, and is Chief Architect for NAS Storage with Huawei , working out of the Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd. He holds multiple patents for his work in the storage domain. He is responsible for innovation and development of features and products around NAS and Unstructured Data Protocols and Eco-system. His research interests are around storage eco-system for High Performance Computing, Application Integration and Computation Storage to get more performance out of the systems at hand. Before Huawei, Ankit was a Senior Engineer with NetApp where he worked for close to 13 years. There he was responsible for architecting and developing many NAS protocol and eco-system features.

Sridhar Sabesan 

Director, Platform Engineering, Western Digital®

Sridhar Sabesan is the Director of Platform Engineering, leading the development and qualification of Western Digital platform products – Ultrastar Data60/102 - JBODs, Hybrid JBODs, Ultrastar Serv60+8 - Dense Storage Servers, Ultrastar Edge & Edge-MR : Portable Edge Servers, OpenFlex E3000-F3200/Data24 - NVMeoF JBOFs and WD Resource Manager - Management software. He is also responsible for global proof of concepts, ecosystem development and customer engagements. He has led and delivered multiple industry first products in Western Digital, Broadcom (LSI) and Intel. He has a wide experience across multiple generations of servers & storage and is a noted speaker in multiple industry forums like OCP, CIO Klub, others and has done tens of product evangelisation in boot camps.

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. 

Vasu Yadlapalli 

Senior Principal Engineer, Dell Technologies

Vasu Yadlapalli has 15+ years of experience in the IT Industry.  Vasu received a B.Tech. in Electrical and Electronics from JNTU, Hyderabad.  Currently, Vasu is Senior Principle Engineer for DellEMC Next Generation Midrange Products based out of Bangalore, India.  Vasu has been with DellEMC since July 2015, earlier roles being Chief Engineer at Samsung India, Sr Dev Specialist at EMC India, Tech lead at Aricent India.

Akhtar Ali 

Vice President, IBM

Akhtar Ali is a Vice President in IBM Systems with a dual role of managing the India Software Development Lab (ISDL) and the HPC, AI & Cloud Software Development team in Cognitive Systems. In the ISDL role he is responsible for overseeing development activities across a broad hardware & software portfolio spanning our Z, Power and Storage products. He also drives the strategy and execution of the Spectrum Computing Suite of offerings including Symphony, LSF, Conductor and ICP products and the IBM HPC software stack. Prior to this role he was responsible for all software and firmware development related to IBM Systems and Technology (STG) group’s Blades and Modular (x86) and PureFlex Program offerings. 

Before joining STG in 2008, Akhtar was the Director of Development for the Financial Services Solutions organization in Software Group. In that role he oversaw the development of solution offerings from a worldwide team in the areas of retail banking, financial markets and electronic payments. 

Akhtar started his IBM career more than 30 years ago in Mid Hudson Valley working on Logic Synthesis and Design Automation for the S390 platform. He subsequently joined Software group and has been active in the solutions area, especially for Finance sector, before moving to STG. He holds a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) and a PhD in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University (New York).

Arup Banerjee 

Senior Vice President, Global Delivery and Practices, Mindteck

Arup is responsible for ensuring delivery excellence, building services and solutions capabilities across the organization, and expanding managed services business with existing and past clients. Prior to this role, Arup led sales for Europe, APAC and the IMEA regions. He has over 32 years of extensive experience in sales and delivery for R&D, engineering and IT services in the telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, storage and semiconductor industries. Before joining Mindteck in July 2011, Arup spent the bulk of his career at Wipro Technologies where he served on the company’s Leadership Team and was responsible for business development for European telecommunication clients. He also headed up the company’s Enterprise Security, Business Intelligence and Telecommunication delivery group. Arup holds a master’s degree in Computer Technologies from Jadavpur University, India, and a BE degree in Electronic and Communication Engineering from BIT Mesra, India. He is a Black Belt in Six Sigma methodologies, and his current technical work areas are in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Anand Kekre 

Head of Technology Innovations, Veritas Technologies

Anand is Head of Technical Innovations at Veritas. He holds 60 US patents in the field of software-defined-storage, data protection, data loss prevention and information security. He has over 25 years of entrepreneurial, technology leadership and executive management experience working for high-growth technology companies like Veritas, McAfee and IBM, and startups (with two successful exits - Vaultize and Reconnex). He was one of the founding engineers of Veritas India when it started in 1995.

Sanjeev Kumar 

Lead, Storage Centre of Excellence, Tata Consultancy Services

Sanjeev Kumar is Storage domain consultant and leading Storage CoE within the Hightech business unit at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). He has 16+ years of experience in Product development, Quality Assurance, Sustenance and solution development in Storage Industry. He has extensive experience across storage stack and his key area of focus are embedded system technologies, Solid State Storage (NVMe/NVMeOF), Hyperconvergence, Data Protection Technologies, Containers and Storage Integration solutions. Sanjeev has presented in SNIA SDC India thrice for FY16,17 and 18 and files multiple patents in storage technologies.

Steven Tan 

VP & CTO Cloud Solution, Storage at Futurewei / Board Chairman at SODA Foundation

Steven Tan is VP & CTO Cloud Solution, Storage at Futurewei where he is responsible for open source strategy and collaboration. Steven brought together leaders across industries, and founded the SODA Foundation which he currently serves as chair. SODA Foundation is a transformation of the Linux Foundation OpenSDS project which he initiated previously. Steven's career brought him across Singapore, US, China and Taiwan, and includes roles as founder and CTO at Cloudena, VP Engineering at ProphetStor, and VP Engineering and Technology at CipherMax. Steven is an alumnus of Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore.
 

Niranjan R Nilugal 

Product Test Architect, Mindteck

With 15 years of strong experience in Storage and NAS technology,  Niranjan has worked many years on FCIP/iSCSI Qlogic Routers  on multiple OS. He possesses a strong experience in NAS, RAID, SCSI, FC, iSCSI, FCIP, SAS, SATA, NVMe area for Test Verification & Automation. He is an experienced architect with activities like Test Strategy, Planning etc. He has extensively worked on protocol testing using jammer/analyzer in both SAN and NAS setup’s. Apart from this he also has experience inFC(16G/32G) and SAS(3G/6G/12G) HBA’s and SSD FW Quals. Also, he has good handholding in the area of WBT(White Box Testing) and Code Coverage report generation/analysis. Niranjan has also published a white paper on BDD (Behavior Driven Development)
 

Pawan Ratwani 

Solution Architect, Tata Consultancy Services

Pawan Ratwani is a solutions architect with TCS' HiTech business unit. With over 17 years of experience he has played several key roles in product engineering primarily in Storage, Telecom domains. Ratwani specializes in data protection and Hyperconvergence technologies and is responsible for cloud storage product engineering. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology Engineering from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, UP, India

Gollu Appalanaidu

Software Engineer, Samsung

Gollu Appalanaidu is a Software Engineer with background in Academia. He has worked in the area of IoT wireless protocols Zigbee and Z-Wave, completed Masters (M.Tech.) in Embedded Systems. Now he works on test coverage development for NVMe SSD at Samsung Electronics(SSIR). He has vast experience in the design and addition of features in QEMU-NVMe Simulator

Karthik Balan

Associate Director, Samsung

Karthik is an Associate Director at Samsung Electronics(SSIR), he has experience of 15 years in Embedded System Testing and last 8 years in Memory Solutions Tests for eMMC, NVMe, etc. He is currently works on architecting the test coverage for NVMe SSDs and driving towards shift-left approach for test development & qualification of SSD

Apurv Barve

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Veritas

Apurv is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Veritas with 14 years of experience in areas related to system and storage software. He has worked on Software defined storage solutions. His experience is mainly in storage virtualization, dynamic multipathing, storage clustering and storage for containerized applications.

Jayanta Basak

Consultant and Chief Architect, Huawei

Jayanta Basak is presently a consultant and chief architect in Huawei. He has over 20 years of industry experience.

Prashant Bhople

Senior Software Engineer, Veritas

Prashant is currently working in Veritas as Senior Software Engineer. He has 8+ years of experience in Storage and Security. He has primarily worked on storage provisioning, security and scaling of microservice based applications.

Anupam Chomal

Security Expert, CARIAD

Anupam Jagdish Chomal works as a Software Security Expert in CARIAD, Volkswagen’s automotive software and technology company. Prior to this, he worked as the Security lead for many DellEMC products. He has over 18+ yrs of experience in Storage, Networking, and Security domain. His area of interest includes Network, Application and Cloud Security. He has a Masters in computer science from IIT Bombay.

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, OTF; 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.
Active in social initiatives and founder of 123Life; Currently leading 123Covid support along with two other closely associated citizen volunteer groups.

Amit Deshmukh

Solutions Lead, Content and Data Intelligence, Hitachi Vantara

Amit is APAC Solutions Lead for Content & Data Intelligence business for Hitachi Vantara. Amit is responsible for providing deep technical expertise on Hitachi Content portfolio, solving customer’s unstructured data challenges, guiding the tech teams on complex solutions, and driving favourable positioning for Hitachi Vantara in competitive engagements.  Amit has more than 17 years of strong techno-commercial experience across Presales, Sales, Channel, Partner and Distribution Management, Enablement and Business Development. Amit has been with Hitachi Vantara for more than 5 years and is leading the Content and Data Intelligence business in India and APAC. 

Anil Dhaneshwar

Principal Software Engineer, Veritas

I work for Veritas as a Principal software engineer. I have 10 years of experience in software industry. I am filesystem developer. My primary job is to provide our proprietary filesystem support on new Linux flavors of RedHat and SUSE.

Swapnil Dombale

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Veritas

Swapnil has over 15 Years of experience in IT industry and currently working as Senior Principal Software Engineer in Veritas. 
He holds bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune University. 
In the Data protection field, he mainly worked in areas like Hardware independent Restore, Hyper-V backup/restore, Driver Mining, Recovery Disk, Capacity Licensing & Smart Meter, BigData workloads such as MongoDB and various Artificial Intelligence / Machine learning initiatives.
He also has completed his Post Graduation Diploma in Data Analytics/ Machine learning in year 2018.

Dr. Shobha G

Professor, RV College of Engineering

Dr. Shobha G, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering Department, RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru, India have teaching and Research experience of 27 years, her specialization includes Data mining, Machine Learning and Image processing. She has published more than 150 papers in reputed Journals / Conferences. She has also executed sponsored projects worth INR 200 lakhs funded from various National and International agencies. She is a recipient of various awards such as Career Award for young teachers 2007-08, constituted by All India Council of Technical Education, Best Researcher award from Cognizant 2017, GHC Faculty Scholar for Women in Computing in 2018, IBM Shared University Research Award in 2019, and HPCC Systems community recognition award 2020 by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Atlanta, USA.

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.

Rohit Ghivdonde 

Member of Technical Staff, Nutanix

Rohit is a Member of Technical Staff at Nutanix and works as a part of the Medusa team that manages the metadata storage layer for the Nutanix distributed filesystem aka NDFS. Rohit is currently involved in improving the NDFS unified data and metadata cache performance and scalability by developing various dynamic algorithms, leveraging PMEM, and many more enhancements. Rohitcompleted his Bachelors in Computer Science from BITS-Pilani, Pilani, India.

Ravi Kiran Gummaluri 

Engineering Leader, Micron

Ravi is an engineering leader in storage and memory solutions. He has presented in various conference about storage acceleration with CXL. Ravi is an engineering leader with strong technical background on interconnects and acceleration solutions .He has good experience on PCIe , CCIX and CXL solutions .

Abhijit Halder 

Lead Architect, Huawei

Abhijit Halder is a lead architect in Huawei India Pvt. Ltd. He has around 15 years of industry experience. He worked with many industry leading storage companies in past and contributed significantly in cutting edge storage technologies. He has done his masters in System Science and Automation from Indian Institute of Science in the year of 2007.

Sajal Jindal  

Member of Technical Staff, Nutanix

Sajal Jindal is a Member of Technical Staff at Nutanix, Bangalore and has been with Nutanix for the last 2 years. Sajal has been a part of the Object Storage product for Nutanix called Objects from its first release and has been working on features related to concurrent multi-protocol access to Object Storage System.

Mythri K 

Senior Staff Engineer, Samsung

Around 10 years of experience in Qualifying Storage Products, involved in debugging failure occurred during testing Phase of Product Qualification, also involved in performance benchmarking, Compliance testing of storage products

Reena Kabra 

Principal Software Engineer, Veritas

Reena is a Principal Software Engineer at Veritas with experience of 9+ years in areas related to system and storage software. She has worked on developing various storage solutions/products for Veritas File system like SSD caching, storage tiering in Cloud, Ransomware detection and prevention, replication, containers.

Pulkit Kapoor 

Member of Technical Staff, Nutanix

I am a member of the metadata subsystem for Nutanix distributed file system. Prior to Nutanix, I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Anand Kayande 

Senior Principal Engineer, Veritas

Anand Kayande is a technology leader, innovator and collaborator with around 20+ years of extensive experience in product architecture, design, development and delivery of solutions. Anand is AI, ML evangelist and is involved in driving technology powered products and services, influencing product strategy and productizing ideas. Anand is involved in various universities program mentoring upcoming engineers. Anand is currently located in Pune, India and accompanied by wife and son. On personal front he is health and lifestyle enthusiast

Yasaswi Kishore 

Senior Member of Technical Staff, Nutanix

I work in the metadata subsystem team for the Nutanix distributed file system and Nutanix Objects which primarily involves building distributed databases. Prior to Nutanix, I graduated from PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore

Soumya Koduri 

Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Soumya Koduri is a Software developer, currently working on Ceph Object Storage at Red Hat. She worked on GlusterFS distributed file system and NFS-Ganesha projects. Prior to that she worked on NFS file system at NetApp.

Sheetal Kulkarni 

Senior Staff Engineer, Samsung

Around 10 years of experience in qualifying storage products ranging from SD card to SSDs that can store huge amount of data, involved in designing and developing Test cases for Firmware, Drivers of storage products. Taken care of Performance Benchmarking and Compliance Test of various products.

Ashit Kumar 

Lead Architect, Huawei & SODA Foundation

Ashit Kumar is a technologist and Open Source evangelist with 15 years of experience and has worked for companies like Symantec, Veritas, and Huawei. Currently, he is working with Huawei Technologies as a Lead architect and is one of the Maintainers of SODA Foundation Projects. He is also SODA Foundation India Outreach Committee member.
Over the years, he has developed and designed several solutions and products for Server and Storage Resource Management, DRaaS, Host-Based replication, Orchestration, multicloud, Container Storage, Backup and Archival etc..
He has presented papers and has been speaking on different international platforms. He has also got US patent on his name. He is the India Outreach Committee Member of SODA Foundation.
Apart from this, he loves to write technical blogs and share knowledge. He has been teaching for the last 12 years and is one of the Visiting Faculty at Pune University Computer science department.

Nitin Kumar 

Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

Nitin Kumar is a Senior Engineer at IBM working on storage and kernel software for the last 15 years. He has multiple patents and papers on the optimization of storage systems. Currently leading design and development of NVMeOF virtualization effort for AIX operating system.

Sweta Kumari 

Research Scientist, Huawei Technologies

I joined as a Research Scientist at Storage Protocol Team in Cloud & AI BL, 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.

Chris Lionetti 

Vice-Chair, SNIA & Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, HPE

Chris Lionetti is a veteran of the storage industry who has been building complex systems and SANs for over 25 years. Chris has long been actively involved with the Storage Network Industry Association, SNIA. He is currently a reference architect on the HPE Nimble Storage team. Earlier in his career, he worked as an engineer for HP, Dell, Microsoft, and NetApp. Chris holds 9 patents on topics related to data centers, networking, and storage.

Sandeep Madanala 

Senior Technical Manager, Nutanix

Sandeep is a Senior technical manager in the metadata subsystem for Nutanix distributed filesystem. He leads and manages the ChakrDB team, a scale out KV Store built on top of RocksDB. Prior to Nutanix, Sandeep worked at VMWare and graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Sainath Mathur 

Storage and Peripherals Practice Head, Wipro Technologies & SODA Foundation

Sainath Mathur has an overall experience of about 25 years in the IT industry primarily working on servers and storage. ISRO, Wipro, and Capgemini are the companies where he has worked in the past. Currently responsible for Storage and Peripherals practice of ER&D at Wipro working on the development of solutions and differentiated service offerings for Storage and Peripherals customers.
He is the India Outreach Committee Lead of SODA Foundation.

Dheer Moghe 

Principal Engineer, Nutanix

Dheer Moghe is a Principal Engineer at Nutanix, Bangalore and has been with Nutanix for the last seven years. Dheer has worked on the core data path and has been one of the founding engineers who built the Object Storage product for Nutanix called Objects. Dheer has 25 years of experience in building storage products including deduplicating storage systems and clustered file systems. Dheer has 14 approved patents from the USPTO.

Noufal Muhammed 

Member of Technical Staff, Nutanix

Noufal is a software engineer at Nutanix HCI storage group and currently working on leveraging PMEM technology to improve cache performance. Previously Noufal was part of Dell-EMC PowerMax microcode team and worked on NVMe over FC protocol layer. Noufal is interested in distributed computing, kernel internals and storage technologies. Noufal holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIIT Delhi, India.

Kannadasan Palani

Senior Test Manager, MSys Technologies

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

Tej Parkash

Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

Tej Parkash currently working with IBM has storage expertise specifically related to iSCSI initiator and target. His other fields of interest are RDMA, TCP/IP and server virtualization.

Arth Patel

Senior Member of Technical Staff, Nutanix

Arth Patel is Senior Member of Technical Staff at Nutanix, Bangalore and has been with Nutanix for the last six years. Arth has worked on the core data path and has been involved in the design and development of the Object Storage product for Nutanix called Objects.Previously, Arth has worked with Nutanix Core Systems Group on distributed storage substrate for various performance oriented projects and features.

Anay Pathak 

Advisory Consultant, Dell Technologies

Anay Pathak has 15+ years of experience and has worked with some of the large enterprise organizations & customers as Trusted Advisor providing consulting around IT and creating mindshare around next-gen technology trends. He has good industry experience in DC virtualization, public cloud, data management (which includes protection & business continuity), Cyber Recovery & AI.
Anay is B. Tech (Honors) in Electrical & Electronics (2006 batch) from Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow. He is a Merit holder in class 10th and 12th.
Currently, Anay is an Advisory Pre-sales Consultant with DellEMC Data Protection. In this role, Anay is responsible for pre-sales, Architecture, and Design discussion with Alliance Partners. Prior to Dell, Anay has worked with some of the large enterprise organization which includes – HP, DXC, Orange, & HCL. 
He has got a couple of IEEE papers in his name & has taken part in various Technical conferences across the world. Anay has also written Technology blogs & is a passionate SPEAKER talking about trends on Technology in multiple Industry events and Universities. He has multiple Industry certifications including – Cloud, Virtualization, Storage & Data Protection.

Rakesh Radhakrishnan 

Staff Software Engineer, Cloudera

Rakesh Radhakrishnan is a committer and a PMC in Apache Hadoop, Apache ZooKeeper, Apache BookKeeper projects and primarily focusing on open source big data technologies. Rakesh is currently working at Cloudera and actively contributing on the Apache Ozone project. He has more than 14 years of experience in large scale Distributed Software Platforms design and development. Prior to joining Cloudera, he worked as a Big Data Software Engineer in Intel Corporation.

Sandeep Ramesh Patil 

STSM, Master Inventor, IBM

Sandeep Ramesh Patil works as an architect with IBM Storage CTO office and has over 20 years of extensive product architecture and design experience. Sandeep is an IBM STSM , IBM Master Inventor and SNIA TEC member with over 300+ World Wide patents issue in the field of storage cloud, security, filesystem, etc. Sandeep has been recognized in world Prolific Inventor list by wikipedia. He is won industry awards like Zinnov Leadership awards and has presented his work on various WW conference.

Parmeshwr Prasad 

Software Principal Engineer, Dell Technologies

Parmeshwr Prasad is associated with DellEMC server division from past six years. He has more than 10 years of 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. He is an active contributor in different communities such as Gen-Z, NVST, SNIA, HMST etc. He is also involved in designing some of the latest technology specs.

Aravind Ramesh 

Principal Engineer, Western Digital

I am currently principal engineer at WDC Research. Working on zoned namespaces from last 3 years and OCSSD for a while before that. I have worked on distributed systems, high availability systems, replication technologies and storage controller software and caching solutions. I have around 15 years of experience in storage domain and have worked across the stack from storage controller software development, kernel, filesystems, user space applications including databases and distributed systems and other replication software.

Smita Raut 

Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Smita is working as a Senior Software Engineer at IBM. She has been working with IBM for the last ten years in distributed filesystem area. She has worked on enterprise class NAS features, Object protocol, cloud enablement of a clustered filesystem on AWS and other public clouds and enablement in containers world via persistent storage plugins. Her current focus is on hyper-converged infrastructure. Smita has presented in various conferences such as Openstack Summit, Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Gracehopper (GHCI) and Storage Developer Conference, India (SNIA-SDC). 

Anand Reddy 

Senior Performance Engineer, Komprise

Anand Reddy is a Lead Performance engineer for Storage, data protection and data mangement software offerings. He is currently working with Komprise Inc , an Intelligent data management firm. His work predominantly aligns towards Performance engineering for Storage and data protection offerings. He is keen to learn and share the emerging Data management trends and associated learnings from Performance and scale validations. Overall he has over 12 years of industry experience spanning Databases and storage vendors.

Shashikiran Revankar 

Associate Technical Director, Samsung

Shashi is working as a Associate Technical Director at Samsung Semiconductor. He has around two decades of experience in storage, networking, virtualization, cloud computing. He had worked with almost all the storage vendors in the past. Shashi has technical expertise in NVMe, high performance computing, NVMe-oF, solution workloads, clustered system, NAS, SAN, object storage.

Ajitha Robert 

Cloud Stack Engineer, MSys Technologies

Ajitha is a Dynamic Cloud Stack Engineer with 8 Years of progressive IT Experience in Cloud Service Development. She has worked on assignments involving implementation and testing with Technical expertise for clients in Delivering Optimal Results across multiple domains like Security Auditing, Cloud Technologies, DevOps and Storage. At Msys, She has been working on Openstack Cinder driver and CI maintenance. She has good exposure in Openstack cloud, Ceph storage, java development and DevOps tools.

Amit Kumar Roushan 

System Architect, SODA Foundation

Amit is System Architect at Huawei Technology. He spent 9+ years in developing Cache technology, Cloud Native and Blockchain technology. Experience working with different open source communities. Currently focusing on Open Source ecosystem and SODA foundation projects for heterogeneous storage monitoring and container storage data management. He did public speaking in Mesoscon, SODACON and meetups.

Subhojit Roy 

STSM, IBM

Subhojit Roy is STSM and lead architect for ISTL Storwize development team. He drove end-end architecture and development for iSCSI/iSER and FCoE protocol stack for Storwize product line.

Praveen Sathyanarayan Murthy  

Expert Engineer, HPE

I work with HPE as a Senior Engineer in HPE Storage division. With experience in System Software Validation and Test Automation for Enterprise Products in Storage Solutions, Virtualization and Cloud Management Solutions.

Scott Shadley 

Chair, Computational Storage Technical Working Group, SNIA

Scott Shadley is VP Marketing at NGD Systems where he leads marketing, product management, and product development for the company’s industry-leading computational storage. He has been a key figure in promoting computational storage, being co-chair of the SNIA Technical Working Group on the subject which he helped found, and speaking on the subject at Open Compute Summit, Flash Memory Summit, NVMe Developer Days, and many other events, press interviews, blogs, and webinars. Before joining NGD Systems, Scott managed the Product Marketing team at Micron, was the Business Line Manager for the SATA SSD portfolio, and was the Principal Technologist for the SSD and emerging memory portfolio. He launched four successful innovative SSDs for Micron and two for STEC, all of which were multimillion dollar sellers. Scott earned a BSEE in Device Physics from Boise State University and an MBA in marketing from University of Phoenix.

Vijay Kumar Shankarappa 

Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

Vijay Kumar is an AIX developer currently working with IBM PowerVM Virtual IO Server development team from IBM India. He is responsible for Analysis, design, development, testing and implementation of Power system software (AIX) virtual IO server components. He has around 11 years of experience at IBM in different areas of AIX development such as Virtualization, Workload partitions, RAS (Reliability, Availability & Serviceability).

Mukul Kumar Singh 

Engineering Manager, Cloudera

Mukul is currently working with Cloudera where he is leading the Storage team working on both Apache Ozone and Apache HDFS. He has also been working on Storage Systems and File Systems for 12 years and has played various roles as open source contributor, PMC member, researcher and a software developer. He also has worked with Nimble Storage and NetApp and worked on WAFL and CASL file systems respectively. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, where his thesis was on a file system for Shingled Magnetic recording disks.

Udayan Singh 

Chair, SNIA India

Udayan serves as the Chair of the SNIA India Board of Directors and is a Sr. Manager, Development, Veritas Technologies. He has 18+ yrs of experience in Product Development, Quality Assurance, Sustenance and Solution Development in the Storage industry. His key areas of focus are Solid State Storage (including NVMe), Clustering Systems, Replication technologies, Containers, Open Source Storage Technologies and Storage Solution Integration. Previously at TCS he was head of Software Product Engineering – Storage and Platform, Manageability, HiTech where he focused on latest trends that are impacting Storage, Platform & Manageability Software Product Companies, conceptualizing and leading development of Innovative Solutions that provide value to Storage and Platform companies. He has also led Cloud Data Management Interface Testing Solution in TCS in collaboration with SNIA US. He was also leading the Innovation Management Group of the HiTech ISU, where he focused on developing and implementation of new levers on Innovation. Also, he has held technical lead roles with Customers in the Telecom domain. Udayan has presented and published papers at the Storage Developer Conference / Storage Conferences and has filed multiple patents on various areas of Storage Technologies. He is also a member Computer Society of India.

Archit Somani 

Research Scientist, Huawei Technologies

Currently, I am a Research Scientist at Storage Space Team, 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.

Bharti Soni 

Senior System Staff Engineer, IBM

Bharti Soni has 8+ years of experience in Ethernet storage domain, currently working with IBM. She has worked on various storage protocols like iSCSI, iSER, iSNS, Native IP replication, NVME-TCP, NVME-RDMA. She is the author of IBM Red Book and various white papers. She has been speaker in SWE conference 2018. She has been a speaker in SDC conference 2020.

Shifali Sood 

System Software Engineer, HPE

I am working as a System Software Engineer with HPE. With work experience in System software validation and Automation of system tests.

Krishnan Srinath 

Director, Engineering, Cisco Systems

Krishnan is Director Engineering at Cisco Systems (India) Pvt Ltd. He has 2 decades of experience in product development, building & leading engineering organizations, solving customer problems in the enterprise & service provider market segment. His focus area includes Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Distributed Systems, Storage Management & Workflow Automation, Data Protection, System Security. His work experience is spilt between HP, NetApp, and Cisco.

Raghav Tulshibagwale 

Staff Engineer, Nutanix

Raghav is a Staff engineer and technical lead in the metadata subsystem for Nutanix distributed filesystem. Prior to Nutanix, Raghav worked on Database Kernels and filesystems. Raghav completed his Masters in Computer Science from University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Ganesh Babu Vasudevan

Senior Staff Engineer, Samsung

Professional with ~10 years of experience in:
- SATA & eMMC product qualification

Mohan Raj Veerasamy

Associate Director, Samsung

Professional with ~14 year experience in leading teams 
Technically leading SATA Team.
- Experience in eMMC product qualification
- Expertise UFS protocol and test suite development
- Exposure to NVMe driver validation

Rahul Vishwakarma 

Software Quality Senior Engineer, Dell Technologies

Rahul Vishwakarma is a Software Engineer at Dell Technologies, where he drives solutions for Data Protection and helps customers protect their data with Data Domain (de-duplication based backup storage). Prior to this, he 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 in the area of data storage, DNA-Based memory, blockchain and machine learning.

Sandeep Yadav 

Senior Staff Engineer, Samsung

Sandeep is working as a senior staff engineer at Samsung Semiconductor. He has more than 11 years of experience in storage system, cloud computing, systems and database administration. He has technical expertise in storage arrays in production environments, cloud computing deployment, clustered systems, NVMe-oF, SAN ,NAS, Software-defined-storages and performance engineering.