SDC India 2020 Speakers

Dr. J Metz 

Chair, SNIA

J Metz serves as Chair of the SNIA Board of Directors. J is Field CTO for Rockport Networks where he drives cutting-edge technology strategy and decisions. Recognized as a leading storage networking expert, J is an evangelist for all storage-related technology and has a unique ability to dissect and explain complex concepts and strategies. He is passionate about the innerworkings and application of emerging technologies. J was previously an R&D Engineer for advanced storage and storage networking at Cisco. He has been a leader in several key industry standards groups, sitting on the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). A popular blogger and active on Twitter, his areas of expertise include NVMe, SANs, Fibre Channel, and storage security. J is an entertaining presenter and prolific writer. He has won multiple awards as a speaker and author, writing over 300 articles and giving presentations and webinars attended by over 10,000 people. He earned his PhD from the University of Georgia.

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.

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.

Sanil Kumar D 

Chief Architect, TOC, ArchWG Lead, Head SODA India, SODA Foundation / Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd

Sanil has over 20 years of Industry experience in Linux, Open Source, ARM Ecosystem, Cloud 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, collaborates with IEEE(Roof Computing), CCICI, blockchain groups, Organizer of CNCF and SODA Foundation meetup groups. Currently focusing on Ecosystem, Technology Roadmap for SODA Foundation on Data Management Domain. He does blog/creative writing at skdwriting.wordpress.com. Keen to work with developers and enable their careers through open source.

Ashit Kumar 

Lead Architect, Maintainer, SODA Foundation / Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd 

Ashit Kumar is working as an architect with Huawei Technologies and is responsible for technically leading the projects in SODA Foundation (a project under Linux Foundation). He has nearly 14 years of experience in developing Storage and Server Management, DRaaS, Orchestration, and multi-cloud solutions. Currently, he is one maintainer of the SODA Foundation project. He also represents the outreach committee of SODA India ecosystem. He holds a Masters degree from the University of Pune, Computer Science Department.

Roopesh Chuggani 

Senior Engineer, NetApp

Roopesh is a senior engineer in the WAFL file system development group at NetApp. He has 10+ years of experience working in storage domain in the areas including file systems, RAID, data mobility, performance.

Rohit Srivastava 

Technical Director, Calsoft

Rohit is a dynamic and resourceful software engineer with 19 years of rich experience in Software Development and Performance Engineering in cross-functional storage domains with prestigious organizations. He has expertise in leading complete Software Development Lifecycle entailing analysis, design, development, maintenance, testing, and quality assurance. Prior to managing Storage engineering group at Calsoft, Rohit has led engineering teams at Protegrity, Symantec, EMC, KPIT Cummins, and HCL. With in-depth knowledge of Microprocessors, Embedded systems, Linux, UNIX, RT operating systems and internals, Rohit also is an avid reader and a technology evangelist.

Manoj Vaddineni 

Director of Business Development, Viavi Solutions

Manoj is the APAC Business Development Director for the storage area and has been involved in different storage technologies for the last 15 years. Active participant and contributor in multiple consortiums addressing the storage market involving PCIe, Ethernet, SAS and Fibre Channel technologies.

Prakash Venkat 

Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC

Prakash Venkat is a Distinguished Engineer at Dell Technologies with an experience of over 25 years in the areas related to system and storage software. Prakash is one of the lead architects of the Midrange Storage BU within DellEMC and has been with Dell/DellEMC family for about 17 years. He has been in multiple roles in the entire software lifecycle development, from ideation to design to delivery, including a stint in management. He has over 15 USPO patents and his early career was shaped working in USA for almost a decade, before returning to Bangalore, where he had started his career with Wipro Global R&D. 

Prakash is currently focused on various aspects of Data Mobility and ease of customer adoption to newer technologies and here are a couple of highlights: 

·       Lead architect for delivering the import feature to the next-gen Midrange product, which is an industry unique, patent awarded solution to seamlessly migrate users from legacy systems. 

·       Designing a set of innovative solutions to help users with NVMe adoption.

Ankit Mathur 

Chief Architect, NAS Storage, Huawei

Ankit Mathur https://in.linkedin.com/in/ankit-mathur-1246676 has over 16 years of experience in storage, and is Chief Architect for NAS Storage with Huawei working out of the Bangalore Research Center. 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.

Niranjan R Nilugal 

Product Test Architect, Mindteck

Niranjan is currently working as a Product Test Architect and having more than 14 years of experience. He is working in storage industry over a decade in both India & US. He has a wide range of experience in SAS, SATA & NVMe. Niranjan is having huge experience in Testing & Test design in SAN, NAS & RAID areas. He also has experience in Data Migration and HCI product. He also has a great knowledge on Storage methodology to create the configuration and set up of Data centre technology.

Richelle Ahlvers 

Storage Management Architect, Intel Corporation & SNIA Board Advisor

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. 

Gollu Appalanaidu 

Software Engineer, Samsung Semiconductor Research

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 Semiconductor Research

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 artitecting the test coverage for NVMe SSDs and driving towards shift-left approach for test development & qualification of SSD

Anindya Banerjee 

Technical Director, Veritas Technologies

Anindya joined Veritas almost 18 years back immediately after completing his masters’ degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Since then he has been involved with various storage products, including file systems, backup and archival solutions, storage management solutions, storage virtualization, and hyperconverged storage. As part of Symantec, he was also exposed to security and data loss prevention solutions. He is currently working as a Technical Director and Architect for scale out purpose build storage solutions for backup and long term retention. He is also interested in complexities of distributed system and control plane to manage such distributed systems. Anindya has more than 30 patents issued by USPTO in his name.

Amol Bhoite 

Senior Technical Lead, Xoriant Software Solutions

Solution Architect, Technical Leader in developing, designing and delivering customers solutions with Storage, Data Protection, Databases, Cloud, Virtualization, Performance, Data Analytics, Networking, Converged and Hyper-Converged platforms. Technical experience in Storage SAN, NAS, DAS, FC, RAID, Snapshot, Replication, Public and Private Cloud, All-Flash and Hybrid Arrays, Data Center environment, Servers, OS, RDBMS and NoSQL databases, DBA, Developer, Storage and Network Switches, System Administration, Storage Managers, Data Analytics, Product Integration, Automation, High performance database solutions. Extensive IT expertise as a Technical Leader, Solution Architect, Team Leader, Individual Contributor, Developer, DBA, QA, Onsite Coordinator, Support to onsite team.

Sahina Bose 

Manager, Software Engineering, Red Hat

Sahina is an Engineering Manager at Red Hat, working on containers, virtualization and storage. She has more than 20 years experience in the software industry working on various domains. Over the past 7 years, she has been an active contributor to open source projects

Swati Chawdhary 

Senior Manager, Samsung

Swati Chawdhary is a Senior Manager at Samsung. She has diverse experience in Storage domain. Her recent work focuses on the test and development of NVMe-oF/NVMe controllers and All Flash Array reference designs. Before joining Samsung, she worked at Chelsio Communications, where she contributed to the development of their Unified Wire Adapters. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Savitribai Phule Pune University designs. Before joining Samsung, she worked at Chelsio Communications, where she contributed to the development of their Unified Wire Adapters. She has participated in conferences like IEEE Wintechcon and NVMe developer Days. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from AIT Pune.

Anupam Jagdish Chomal 

Principal Software Security Engineer, Dell EMC

Anupam Chomal works as a Principal Software Security Engineer for DellEMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS). Prior to this, he was the Tech lead for DellEMC Isilon’s Security team. He has over 16+ yrs of experience in the Storage, Networking, and Security domain. He is passionate about designing secure products and his area of interest includes Network, Application and Cloud Security. He has been a speaker at SDC for last three consecutive years delivering security related topics. He has a Masters in computer science from IIT Bombay.

Amit Devgan

Associate Staff Engineer, Samsung R&D

Amit is working with Samsung RnD as Associate Staff Engineer. His expertise is in Quality Engineering for New Generation Drives and NVMe Drives. He had worked with multiple storage products and technologies such as NAS, SAN, Hyper Converged , Predictive Analytics, Backup and Recovery , cloud technologies and virtualization stack. 

Sumit Dighe

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Veritas

Sumit works as a Senior Principal Software Engineer in Veritas. Sumit joined Veritas 13 years back immediately after his gradutaion and working in Storage management and Virtualization domain. His interests are clustering, distributed systems, low latency storage, network storage,  Hyperconverge Linux kernel. Sumit has 5 patents issued by USPTO.

Susanta Dutta

Master Technologist, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) qualified with total 22 years of work experience with several storage products in SAN, UNIX and virtualization environments at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Storage R&D division. Authored a book titled “Storage System Fundamentals” by one of the well-known publishers, BPB Publication.

Subin Francis

Senior Performance Engineer, Nutanix

Subin Francis is a Senior Performance Engineer at Nutanix, Bangalore. He is focussing on Nutanix Objects performance and has worked on Nutanix HCI features related to metadata cache, nearline erasure coding, and Hadoop related optimizations. Previously, Subin worked on the performance of the DataDomain file system at EMC and the performance of the Veritas storage foundation stack at Symantec.

Steven French

Principal Software Engineer, Azure Storage, Microsoft

Steve French is a Principal Software Engineer for Microsoft Azure Storage, and the original author and maintainer of the Linux cifs/smb3 client, and a member of the Samba team, and former chair of the SNIA CIFS Working Group, and is a frequent speaker at Linux and Storage events.

Shoba G

Professor, RV College of Engineering

Shobha G, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering Department, RV College of Engineering has teaching experience of 25 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 from various agencies Nationally and Internationally.  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 and IBM Shared University Research Award in 2019.

Hemant Gaikwad 

Test Architect, Dell EMC

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.

Akhil Gokhale 

Managing Consultant – Scalable Platforms and Software Products, Wipro Technologies

Akhil has around 18 years of experience in product and software development. He is currently part of the Cloud and Software Products Practice.

Ravi Kiran Gummaluri 

Engineering Leader, Micron Technology

Ravi is an engineering leader with 16+ years of experience in driving solutions around  PCIe , CCIX and CXL technologies  . He has vast experience in providing system solutions with new generation interconnects. He has participated and presented in various international conferences(FMS,SDC) on storage acceleration solutions . He has demonstrated various use cases in international conferences (Super Computing ,ISC, XDF ,ArmTechcon, FMS) around  Database, Storage , PMEM and network accelerations with CCIX interconnect. Ravi is  active participant and contributor in multiple consortiums addressing the storage market involving PCIe , CCIX and CXL. He has a Masters Degree and is pursuing his Phd in Computational storage.

Pekon Gupta 

Solutions Architect, SMART Modular Technology

Pekon Gupta is working as Solutions Architect at SMART Modular Technologies. His current role involves defining memory and storage products in emerging technologies like CCIX, Gen-Z and CXL, for various data-center and IOT markets. Before joining SMART Modular Pekon was working with Intel, Esencia, Sandisk, Texas Instruments, Freescale and nSys.

Eric Hibbard 

Managing Director, PrivSec Consulting

Eric A. Hibbard is the Managing Director of PrivSec Consulting LLC and a cybersecurity and privacy leader with extensive experience in industry (Hitachi, Raytheon, Hughes, OAO Corp), U.S. Government (NASA, DoE, DoD), and academia (University of California). In addition to consulting, he architects and audits information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures and solutions involving a wide range of technologies (IoT, cloud, storage, big data, AI, smart cities, blockchain) in organizations throughout the world. Mr. Hibbard holds leadership positions in standards development organization and industry associations, including ISO/IEC, the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), the IEEE Computer Society, the American Bar Association (ABA), the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). Hibbard is or has served in an editorship role on the following international standards projects:  ISO/IEC 22123 (Cloud computing – Vocabulary/Concepts), ISO/IEC 27031 (ICT readiness for business continuity), ISO/IEC 27050 (Electronic discovery), ISO/IEC 27040 (Storage security), ISO/IEC PAS 20648 (TLS for storage systems), Rec. ITU-T 3500 | ISO/IEC 17788 (Cloud computing -- Overview and vocabulary), and IEEE 1619-2018 (XTS-AES). Mr. Hibbard possesses a unique set of professional credentials that include the (ISC)2 CISSP-ISSAP, ISSMP, and ISSEP certifications as well as the ISACA CISA, IAPP CIPT, and CSA CCSK certifications. He has a BS in Computer Science.

Shilpa Jagannath 

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Shilpa Jagannath is a senior software engineer focusing on distributed storage. Currently she is working with Red Hat on Ceph RadosGateway. Prior to that Shilpa worked in EMC2 on block and file storage. 

Alok Kataria 

Staff Engineer, Nutanix

Alok is a Staff Engineer in the Core Data Path Group at Nutanix. He has close to 15 years experience in the area of virtualization and OS internals, more recently he has also started looking at how the hardware advancements in the storage space can be leveraged for the new age HCI stack.

Eden Kim 

CEO, Calypso Systems, Inc. & Chair, SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Working Group

Eden is the Chair of the SNIA SSS TWG and is the primary author of several SNIA technical positions (Real World Storage Workload IO Capture & Test Specification for Datacenter Storage, under development Persistent Memory PTS) and author of several white papers (Persistent Memory Performance Test Specification White Paper v0.7.3How To Be a Part of the Real World Workload RevolutionData Center Real World Storage WorkloadsSSD Performance - A PrimerSolid State Storage Performance Test Specification (SSS PTS) White PaperUnderstanding SSD PerformanceUsing the SSS Performance Test Specification. Calypso hosts the TestMyWorkload.com website where SNIA CMSI reference real-world workloads can be viewed and where free IO Capture tools and analytics can be found. Eden also presents leading storage and workload topics at US and International trade shows including the PM Summit, Flash Memory Summit, SDC Santa Clara, SDC India, DOIT Data Storage Summit series in Beijing, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Xian and other regions, as well as online webcasts such as the Brighttalk series SNIA/Brighttalk Webcast “Optimizing NVMe-oF Performance with different Transports: Host Factors” broadcast on September 15, 2020

Mythri Krishnamurthy 

Senior Manager, Samsung Semiconductor Research

Mythri Krishnamurthy is a Senior Manager with Samsung semiconductor India Research (memory division), She has 9+ years of experience in storage and embedded Product testing , her experience include Compatibility Testing of SD/uSD & UFD Products, she has vast knowledge about SD specification and failure debugging, she also contributed in end to end product qualification.

Sheetal Kulkarni 

Senior Manager, Samsung Semiconductor Research

Sheetal Kulkarni is a Senior Manager with Samsung semiconductor India Research (memory division). He has 9+ years of experience in storage and embedded products testing, his experience include SD , SAS and NVMe based Product Qualification, his area of interest includes protocol testing , end to end product qualification and debugging failures during product qualification.

Nishant Lodha 

Director of Technologies, Marvell

Nishant Lodha is a Director of Technologies focused on emerging I/O for Marvell’s 10/25/50/100GbE Ethernet NICs and 16/32G Fibre Channel HBAs. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Nishant is responsible for Enterprise and Cloud Storage markets, trend analysis and analytics, technology integrations and use cases for flash accelerated applications. As an author of various papers and speaker at technology events – including a recently published NVMe-oF and 25GbE paper, speaker at several Flash Memory Summits, DPDK Summit, SDC and a various BrightTalk webinars. Over the last decade, Nishant has evangelized Ethernet and Fibre Channel based fabrics, AI/ML and Storage use cases and Telco/Cloud technologies. Prior of joining Marvell in 2010, Nishant has worked at various storage and networking industry majors including Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems and Intel. Nishant served on the Board of Directors for the Ethernet Alliance in 2016 and is on the board of the IBTA Steering committee.

Alex McDonald 

Chair, SNIA EMEA and SNIA Technical Council

Alex was with NetApp for 15 years, 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, he is currently chair of 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.

Dheer Moghe 

Principal Engineer, Nutanix

Dheer Moghe is a Principal Engineer at Nutanix, Bangalore and has been with Nutanix for the last six years. Dheer has worked on the core data path and has been one of the four founding engineers who built the Object Storage product for Nutanix called Objects. Dheer has 25 years of experience in developing storage products and in the past has worked on Data Domain File System (EMC/Dell) and  Veritas Cluster File System. Dheer has 14 approved patents from the USPTO.

Rekha MS 

Senior Engineer, Dell EMC

Rekha MS, Senior Software Senior Engineer at Dell EMC having 10 years of experience in development of web and enterprise applications using Core Java, J2EE, technologies such as JDBC, Servlets etc. automation using python. Research-oriented, motivated, proactive, self-starter with strong technical, analytical and interpersonal skills.

Pradip Mukhopadhyay 

Senior Engineer, NetApp

Having 10 years of experience working in the data manageability of the storage arrays. Have working experience across the storage manageability stack from provision, protection, performance, networking.

Srinivas Nagarajan 

Technical Staff Member, NetApp

Having 5 years of experience working in the data manageability of the storage arrays. Have working experience across the storage manageability stack from provision, protection, performance, networking.

Ajinkya Nakave 

Senior Software Engineer, Veritas 

Ajinkya is currently working in Veritas as Senior Software Engineer. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Telecom. He has 9+ years of experience in Storage and Linux kernel development. He is enthusiastic learner of upcoming technologies, interested in upcoming storage trends and virtualization advancements.

Nalini Nallamalli 

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Veritas Technologies

Nalini has 14+ years of industry experience in Storage domain. She has worked on various storage products, including Volume Manager, Distributed Systems, Clustering, Virtualization, Replication, Disaster Recovery, Backup and archival solutions to Cloud and Containers. She is currently working as a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Veritas Software LLC, Pune. She holds a master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

Shiva Pahwa 

Associate Director, Samsung 

Shiva Pahwa is an architect. He has diverse experience working on various storage products like RAID controllers, SAS, NVMe and underlying protocols. He has good understanding of Flash Memories, SSD Firmware & Architecture and System Architecture. He holds 2 patents in FTL design.

Kannadasan Palani 

Senior Test Manager, MSys Technologies  

Kannadasan is a Senior test manager with 12+ yrs of Testing experience in Storage, Telcom and networking domain. He carries good experience in testing multiple storage vendor products and qualifying it by testing with 3rd party software. He is a certified Scrum Master with good experience in multiple projects.

Suhrud Patankar 

Staff Engineer, Nutanix

Storage system developer with 18 years of experience with different technologies like - File systems, Data de-duplication, Object store, NFS

Arth Patel 

Senior Member, Technical Staff, Nutanix

Arth Patel is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Nutanix, Bangalore. He has been part of Objects team since the early design phase of the product and is most recently focusing on features related to performance optimizations and improvements. Previously, Arth has worked with Nutanix Core Systems Group on distributed storage substrate for various performance oriented projects and features.

Sandeep Ramesh Patil 

STSM, IBM 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 and IBM Master Inventor with over 300+ World Wide patents issue in the field of storage cloud, security, filesystem, etc. Sandeep has been recognized in the World Prolific Inventor list by Wikipedia. He is won industry awards like the Zinnov Leadership awards and has presented his work on various WW conferences.

Niranjan Pendharkar 

Senior Staff Engineer, Nutanix

Niranjan works as a Sr Staff Software Engineer at Nutanix, Pune. He has a total of 22 years of industry experience. Previously Niranjan was at Veritas as Distinguished engineer. His areas of interest include storage virtualisation, distributed systems, cloud, Hyperconverged Systems (HCI). He is an avid innovator with several patents on his name. He has presented in past couple of SNIA conferences.

Parmeshwr Prasad 

Software Principal Engineer, Dell EMC

Parmeshwr Prasad is associated with DellEMC server division from past seven years. He has more than 10 years of experience in embedded system, servers, storage, 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. He owns several patents (currently 35) across diverse areas covering UEFI, ESRT, NVDIMM, Apache-Pass, neural-network, blockchain, ML and PCIe. He is active contributor in different communities such as PCIe, Gen-Z, NVST, SNIA, HMST etc. He is also involved in designing some of the latest technology specs, blockchain being one of them.

Shyam Prasad 

Senior Software Engineer, Azure Storage, Microsoft

As a part of the Azure Files team, my responsibilities involve development of new features and fixing bugs in the Azure storage solution, but more recently development of new features and fixing bugs in the Linux smb3 client software, including improving kerberos integration and security features.

Shilpa PV 

Senior Software Engineer, Dell EMC

Shilpa PV, Software Senior Engineer at Dell EMC having 6 years of experience in web and enterprise applications using AngularJS, Java, hibernate etc., Currently working in Dell Change management.

Arunagiri Rajasekaran 

Senior Staff Software Engineer, IBM

Arunagiri Rajasekaran is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at IBM India Pvt Ltd, He has over 14 years of industry experience in developing systems management, storage management applications and distributed systems. He is currently involved in the development of IBM SaaS offering named Storage Insights. IBM Storage Insights handles both IBM/Non-IBM Storage devices of type Block, File and Object. It provides a unified, more comprehensive view of the performance metrics, capacity, health, with diagnostic event information and an integrated support experience of  storage resources. It also helps you reduce storage costs and optimize your data center by providing features like intelligent capacity planning, storage reclamation, storage tiering, and advanced performance metrics.

Aravind Ramesh 

Principal Engineer, Western Digital

I have worked on design and development of storage technologies from the past 15 years. Have worked on distributed systems, high availability, backup and recovery, Zoned name space devices and storage controllers. Currently working on enabling the linux eco-system for ZNS drives.

Smita Raut

Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Smita is a senior software engineer at IBM working on a distributed filesystem development. She has experience with enabling object protocol support over the filesystem, enablement in public cloud. Her current focus is on developing a CSI driver for persistent storage for containers. Smita has created blogs and videos on these topics and also presented at various conferences.

Anand Reddy

Principal QA Engineer, Dell EMC

I am working with the DELL EMC data protection division for the Last 5+ years. My overall experience spans 12 years across DELL, Oracle, and Accenture. My job role involves benchmarking the performance of Data protection software and appliances at DELL EMC. My role includes the responsibility to deliver improvements in system-level and application designs spanning microservices and standalone architectures. I enjoy deriving complex performance statistics and presenting in easy to consume models for design enhancements. Leading the non-functional (performance, reliability, scalability) engineering for physical and virtual data protection suite.

Shashikiran Revankar 

Associate Director, Samsung R&D

Shashi is working in Samsung R&D as Associate Director and he contributes towards Architecting Quality Engineering for New Generation Drives and NVMe. He has around two decades of experience in the storage Industry where he worked on multiple storage platforms including primary storage, secondary storage, networking and virtualization stack. 

Subhojit Roy 

STSM Storage Development, 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.

Arthur Sainio 

Director of Product Marketing, SMART Modular Technologies

As a Director of Product Marketing at SMART Modular Technologies. Arthur has been driving new product launch and business development activities at SMART since 1998. Prior to Smart, Arthur worked as a product manager at Hitachi Semiconductor America. While there, his focus was on DRAM, SRAM and Flash technologies. Arthur holds a MBA from San Francisco State University and a MS from Arizona State University.

Ashish Sangwan 

Staff Engineer, Nutanix

Working as Staff Engineer at Nutanix's Files team from last 2 years building scale out NAS solution over Nutanix's distributed data platform.

Scott Schweitzer 

Systems Architect, Xilinx

Since his baptism on the altar of the TRS-80, Scott has been a lifelong technology. He's written profitable software products for Apple's App Store, built hardware, and formally managed programs for IBM, NEC, Myricom, Solarflare, and now Xilinx. After two decades plugging along with single socket computing platforms, in 2003, Scott joined NEC to manage their new Intel Itanium multi-core 64-bit Super Computing Server. In 2005 Scott shifted his focus to clustering for Super Computing and extreme performance networking. As 10GbE adoption ramped up, in 2009, he launched his wildly popular 10GbE.net blog. With market changes in 2017, Scott rolled this property into the TechnologyEvangelist.co. This blog now sees thousands of monthly page views, and the accompanying podcast is growing in success. Daily as a System Architect at Xilinx focused on acceleration, Scott works with customers and partners to recognize new opportunities and define innovative solutions.

Scott Shadley 

VP Marketing, NGD Systems

Scott Shadley is a member of the SNIA Board of Directors and 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, multiple SDCs, 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.

Shubham Sharma 

Technical Staff Member, Nutanix

Shubham works as a Member of Technical Staff at Nutanix Pune. He has completed his Dual-Degree (M.Tech-B.Tech) from IIT Kanpur. His research is primarily on Distributed Systems, Constraint Satisfaction and Knowledge Compilation. He has presented several papers in high tier conferences.

Amarjit Singh 

Director, DevOps Solutions, KIOXIA Corporation

Amarjit Singh is the director of solutions engineering within the KumoScale™ Shared and Accelerated Storage Software team at KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.). He is a hands-on private and public cloud enthusiast who leads DevOps and cloud solutions engineering within the team. He is currently working on expanding the capabilities of KumoScale software while also enabling NVMe flash ‘as a service’ in modern cloud infrastructures. Amarjit has managed large and massive infrastructures in both public clouds and data centers, and has spent the past 20 years helping to evolve cloud infrastructures. Mr Singh earned Bachelors’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Thapar University, India.

Mukul Kumar Singh 

Engineering Manager, Cloudera

Mukul is currently associated with Cloudera as an Engineering Manager, where he is leading the HDFS team.  He has also been working on Storage Systems and File systems for 11 years and has played various roles as open source contributer PMC member, researcher and Software developer.

Radha Krishna Singuru 

Distinguished Member, Technical Staff, Wipro Technologies

Radhakrishna has more than 24 years of industrial experience in product and system software development ranging from Cloud and virtualization technologies, scalable platforms, SDN, L2/L3 switching and stacking software spanning across multiple industry domains. He is a DMTS - Senior Member and Chief Architect Product POD

Bharti Soni 

Senior System Staff Engineer, IBM

Bharti Soni has 8+ years of experience in storage domain, currently working with IBM. She has worked on various storage protocols like iSCSI, iSER, iSNS. She is the author of IBM Red Book and various white papers.

Pritha Srivastava 

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Pritha Srivastava is a Senior Software Engineer with Red Hat and has been working on Ceph RGW for the last 4+ years. Prior to that she worked with HP for StoreVirtual (Lefthand Networks). She has completed her MS from University of Colorado at Boulder.

Kiran Tatipathi 

Technical Director, Nutanix

Kiran is a technical director in the core data path team at Nutanix. He has about 14 years of experience with networking and storage systems. He leads the data path team for the disaster recovery products at Nutanix and his interests include distributed systems and replication technologies.

Ramakrishna Vadla 

Senior Software Engineer and Architect, IBM

Ramakrishna Vadla is a Senior Software Engineer and Architect in IBM's Software Defined Storage Systems group. He is responsible for developing and designing IBM Storage Insights product that monitors storage systems. He has 16+ years of experience in developing and designing large scale distributed systems across different technologies such as Microservice architecture, Storage Management, Data Science, Cloud Native Services and Middleware systems.  He has spoken at various technical forums including SNIA Storage Developer Conference and IBM global conferences and contributed to opensource community in cloud auditing.  He completed M.Tech in computer science from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.

Mandar J Vaidya 

Storage Solutions Architect, IBM

Mandar Vaidya works as a storage solution architect with IBM Storage labs. Mandar has over 18 years of experience in storage and industry solutions. He has presented his work in several international conferences. He works closely with customers and partners towards building storage ecosystem.

Hema Venkataramani 

Staff Engineer, Nutanix

Hema is a Staff Engineer in the Core Data Path Group at Nutanix. She has close to ten years experience in the area of distributed file systems and networking stacks. She played the key role in the design and development of RDMA related features for the Nutanix Data path.

Rahul Vishwakarma 

Software Quality Senior Engineer, Dell EMC

Rahul Vishwakarma is a Software Quality Senior Engineer at Dell Technologies (Data Protection Division: de-duplication based storage). He has 35+ patents pending at USPTO in the fields of data protection, de-duplication, hardware reliability, time-series analysis, DNA based storage and blockchain. He has also been a frequent speaker at SNIA SDC and member of SNIA Blockchain Storage TWG.

Prajakta Zagade 

Principal Software Engineer, Veritas

Prajakta works as Principal Software Engineer in Veritas. She has over 13+ years experience, most of it in Storage and clustering domain and embedded systems. She is focussed performance, scalability of clustering solution, distributed systems. She hold Batchelor Degree in Computer Science and has patent pending in USPTO around storage optimization techniques.