SDC India 2019 Speakers

Burzin N. Engineer

Chief Reliability Officer and Co-Founder, Phonepe

Burzin N. Engineer is co-founder of Phonepe. Burzin has more than 25 years of experience in the IT industry. During his stints he has built web scale infrastructure and led multiple engineering teams including running and building Phonepe's web serving layer, cloud systems, network, storage and CDN.  He is passionate about building software that makes it easier for people to do their job. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

MT Karunakaran

Head of Products and Technology, Qunu Labs

IIT Madras BTech 1981. 1981-1984 Scientist at Tata Institute of  Fundamental Research: member of the team that developed the Switch for Tactical Communication System for Indian Army 1984 to 1992 Founding team of CDOT. Leadership role in developing  a Digital Switching System and in delivering a network which catered to 35 million wireline subscribers  1993 to 2003 Cofounder of Deccanet Designs which delivered a series of products. Many thousands of these products were deployed in Indian Telecom network. Company was sold to Flextronics 2004 to 2006 Cofounder of Telsima communications which deployed WiMax technology in 10 cities for Reliance communication .Raised 100 million. Sold to Harris Ispat. 2007 onwards : Founder of Anveshan Telecom: delivered interception products for in security agencies 2018 onwards: Head of Technology and Products at QuNu labs pvt ltd 2014 onwards: Mentoring many startups and personally focusing on Neural Economics

Kalyan C Gunda

Distinguished Engineer, DELL EMC

Kalyan C Gunda is an architect, and drives solutions for Data Protection involving Cloud and long term retention. He loves to solve challenges across various industry domains. An expert at  cluster filesystems and distributed filesystems like GPFS, he has helped architect large systems at scale in various research centers, universities, National Labs across Europe & USA. He believes in doing something that hasn’t been explored before both technically and personally.  He is passionate about going back to basics like alternate healing, ancient history & teaching yoga, pranayama and is also an avid believer in giving back to the society in any form possible.

Vipin Shankar

AVP Engineering, Calsoft

Vipin Shankar is currently working as AVP-Engineering at Calsoft, and drives engineering groups from business advancement and new technologies R&D perspective. Vipin has more than two decades of experience in delivering products in multiple domains such as Storage, Network Management, Mobile device management, Cloud based EDA, Disaster Recovery to name a few. He has spearheaded engineering teams by being in the leadership position for companies like Veritas, Symantec, Motorola, Saba, SiCAD and Globant.

Nitin Singhvi

Associate Director, Engineering, Calsoft

Nitin Singhvi is currently working as Director Engineering at Calsoft Pvt.Ltd. and drives Networking and Telco engineering groups at Calsoft from a technology and business advancement perspective. Nitin focuses on technological advancements in Networking, Telco, Containers and Cloud Computing domains and its related impacts and effects. Current areas of R&D range from Kubernetes, Edge Computing, 5G, Security, Infrastructure Automation, Containerization and SaaSification of Datacenter products. With over 15 years of experience in the Datacenter & Telco technologies space, Nitin has worked on multiple products from Cisco, Dell EMC, VMware and Riverbed among others. He has represented Calsoft and various forums across the world and has been a speaker at SNIA India and other technology conferences.

Manoj Vaddineni

APAC Business Development Manager, Viavi Solutions

Manoj is the APAC Business Development Manager 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.

Sahina Bose

Manager, Software Engineering, Red Hat

Sahina Bose is an engineering manager working on Red Hat's Hyperconvergence product integrating storage and virtualization technologies. She is an active contributor on multiple opensource projects including oVirt www.ovirt.org and GlusterFS www.gluster.org. She is an engineering graduate from NIT, Surathkal and has 20+ years of experience building software in various domains.

Girish Chandrashekhar

Senior Engineer, NetApp

Girish Chandrashekar is currently working as Senior Engineer at Advanced Technology Group, NetApp Bengaluru. He has overall 20+ years of experience in Enterprise Storage technologies. He holds a M.Tech degree from NIT, Surathkal.

David Joseph

Solutions Architect, Mindteck

Over 18 years experience in the IT industry with a core focus on Software Development, Application Lifecycle Management, Process Automation, Solution Architecture and Technology Innovation. Has worked across domains like Life Sciences, Avionics, Networking and LMS; with clients like Agilent, United Technologies Group, Moog FCS, Perkin Elmer and UL Pure Learning. Currently he is the working with Mindteck as a Solution Architect and Leads the ‘Innovation and Tools’ group.

Shanthala Parampalli

Practice Head, Mindteck 

Over 24 years experience in the IT industry with a core focus on Software Testing, Digital Transformation, RPA, Solution Architecture, Program Management and CoE Setup; with technology companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Accenture, ArisGlobal and Epsilon; playing leadership roles of QA Director, Sr. Program Manager and Sr. QA Manager. Today she is the Practice Head for Testing, RPA and AI with Mindteck working with Storage, Lifesciences, Healthcare, Embedded, LMS and Insurance domains.

Pawan Ratwani

Solutions Architect, Tata Consultancy Services 

Pawan is Solution Architect in TCS' Hi-Tech business unit. He has 15 years of experience in Storage, Telecom and Automobile domain. His current responsibilities include solution development in the area of Hyperconvergence, and Software Defined Storage.

Sandeep Kumar Ananthapalli

Senior Staff Engineer, Samsung 

Sandeep Kumar Ananthapalli is a Senior Staff Engineer at Samsung with over 8 years of storage industry experience. His recent work focuses on the design and development of native NVMe-oF Ethernet SSD. Earlier to that he worked inSoC system software development for Android based mobile devices. He holds a patent on NVMeoF based RAID controller design. He has presented his work in International Advance Computing Conference ( IACC ) conference on efficient scheduler design for heterogeneous multiprocessing. He earned a Master's degree in in the field of Visual Information processing and Embedded Systems from IIT Kharagpur.

Jacob John Andathethu

TME, NetApp 

Technical Marketing Engineer for NetApp Open Eco-System products (NetApp plugins for OpenShift, Kubernetes and Docker) with more than 14 years of experience on different storage product lines.

Manu Awasthi

Associate Professor, Ashoka University

Manu Awasthi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Ashoka University. Prof. Awasthi earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Utah and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi. 
Before joining Ashoka, Prof. Awasthi was with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar. Prior to that, he spent two years with Micron's Architecture Definition Group (ADG) in Boise, ID and three years with Samsung's Memory Solution Lab in San Jose, CA, where he was involved in R&D, evaluation and prototyping of next generation memory and storage systems. He has served on program committees of many conferences, was awarded the Early Career Research Award (ECRA) by Science and Education Research Board (SERB), a Research Fellowship by IIT Gandhinagar and a Teaching Fellowship by the University of Utah. He is the co-author of two best paper award winning publications.

GirishKumar BK

Senior Engineer, NetApp & SNIA India Technical Council

Girish Kumar B K is currently working as senior engineer at NetApp India Pvt. Ltd.  He is part of Advanced Technology Group under CSO office and is focused on evaluating technological disruptions in storage industry involving low latency storage and impact on storage applications, in-memory database, storage class memory programming models, scalable computing in SaaS, edge computing in IoT and resource optimization in containerized hosting. Girish comes with 20+ years of storage software development experience, holds 6 patents in storage domain and has published several technology evaluation papers.  He is an active technical mentor for startups under NetApp Excellerator program.

Anupama BN

Technical Staff Member, NetApp 

Anupama, working on 100G RoCEv2  testing for the storage controllers  for both Linux and Unix platforms. 100G R-NIC is used for  data protection and data replication technologies using NVMeOF for HA and DR solutions .
Having 15+ years of work experience in NIC device drivers with various protocols like NFS,CIFS ,ISCSI and NVMeoF.

Geetkumar Chauhan

Firmware Engineer, Microchip

Geet Chauhan is a ROC firmware expert working with Microsemi in the SAS-3 generation products. His areas of expertise are in online firmware activation, drive sanitization technologies used in the Microchip RAID controllers. He has good knowledge of IoT, I2C, SPI and BLE stack.

Swati Chawdhary

Senior Manager, Samsung

Swati Chawdhary is a Senior Manager at Samsung with over 15 years of storage industry experience. Her recent work focuses on the 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 has participated in conferences like IEEE Wintechcon and NVMe developer Days. Her area of interest includes and Object Drive and Computational Storage. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from AIT Pune.

Mohit Mahendra Chitlange

Software Engineer, IBM India

Mohit has 4 years of experience in storage industry. He is working as Software Engineer with IBM.

Anupam Jagdish Chomal

Principal Software Engineer, Dell EMC

Anupam Jagdish Chomal works as a Principal Software Engineer in DellEMC Elastic Cloud Storage - ECS's Security Team. Prior to this, he was the Tech lead for DellEMC Isilon’s Security team. He has over 15+ 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.

Najmudheen CT

Senior System Architect, Huawei Technologies

Najmudheen is currently working as Senior System Architect at Huawei. He has 11+ years of industry experience. He has done his Masters from BITS Pilani. He currently works on Linux Foundation project, OpenSDS. Prior to Huawei he has worked with DELL EMC for around 9 years on SRM products.

Rob Davis

Vice President, Storage Technology, Mellanox

Rob Davis is the Vice President of Storage Technology at Mellanox where he focuses on ways to apply high-speed interface technology to storage systems. As technology leader and visionary for more than 35 years, he has been a key evaluator and decision maker for the development of storage networking products.  He is currently leading the development and marketing of products based on NVMe over fabrics, which will allow for the high-speed networking of PCIe-based storage. Davis was previously Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic, where for 15 years he drove development and marketing of Fibre Channel, Ethernet and InfiniBand technology into new markets such as blade servers. Prior to QLogic, Davis spent 20 years at Ancor Communications, which QLogic acquired in 2000. At Ancor, Davis served as Vice President of Advanced Development, Director of Technical Marketing, and Director of Engineering. He drove development and marketing of their Fibre Channel products in the early 90s and their InfiniBand products in the late 90s. Davis’ in-depth expertise spans Virtualization, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand, RoCE, SAS, PCI, PM, SATA, and Flash Storage.

Anil Degwekar

Technical Staff, Software Enginering, Dell EMC

Anil Degwekar is a software architect working with Dell EMC. He has more than 30 years experience, with most of it in the storage domain. He has architected several products -- the latest one being ViPR Controller and its open source variant CoprHD. Prior to Dell EMC, he has worked with C-DAC, Tata Elxsi, Intel and NetApp. Anil has done his B.Tech. and M. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay. He has 6 patents on his name.

Dileep Dixith

Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

Dileep is a Advisory Software Engineer with 14+ years of experience in IBM ISDL working for Software Defined Storage. He has been working on System Management for Servers and Storage. He has experience working Spectrum Scale features like Transparent Cloud Tiering. He is currently working in IBM Storage and IBM Storage Insights. He is a security expert and has authored numerous articles and patents in the field of computer science with subjects over security.

Prof. K Gopinath

Professor at Indian Institute of Science

Prof. K. Gopinath graduated from IIT-Madras with a B.Tech. degree from University of Wisconsin, Madison with an MS in Computer Science. After working at Advanced Micro Devices as a Product Planning Engineer, he joined Stanford University for a Ph.D.(completed '88). After a brief stint as a PostDoc at Stanford and then at Sun Microsystems Labs, he joined IISc in 1990 where he is now a Professor.  His research interests are primarily in the computer systems area (Operating Systems, Storage Systems, Computer Systems, Security, Software Verification).

Kishor Jadhav

Firmware Engineer, Microchip

Kishor is a ROC firmware expert working with Microsemi in the SAS-3 generation products. His areas of expertise are in RAID expansion and IO backup technology used during a power failure used in the Microchip RAID controllers. He has good knowledge of I2C, SPI and IoT.

Abhishek Jain

Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Abhishek Jain is Storage Practitioner, currently working with IBM Spectrum Scale and has over 6 years of experience in storage virtualization & cloud technologies. Abhishek has 20+ filed US patent application in the field of storage, security, mobile network ,internet of things, smarter planet etc.

Venkata Ravi Shankar Jonnalagadda

Software Developer, Xilinx India 

Software Developer with 11+ years of experience in system programming and device driver development with proficiency in writing PCIe based DMA drivers. I have been with Xilinx for more than 7 years and have been involved with developing different DMA drivers and tuning them for extracting maximum performance from hardware. Developed software to demonstrate CCIX at various trade shows such as SC17, ISC18 and SC18.

Yugal Joshi

Vice President, Everest Group 

Yugal Joshi leads Everest Group’s digital, cloud, and application services research practices. In this role, he leads a team of analysts developing research on technology and the services industry, delivering client-specific engagements, and driving adoption of membership-based research. Yugal has helped leading buyers and providers of technology solutions and services in technology adoption strategy, assessment of key market trends, go-to-market strategy, competitive insights, market positioning, and expected future roadmap. He regularly interacts with industry leaders and drives thought leadership on core technology and technology services. Yugal’s articles are regularly published in business magazines and technology journals, and he is a regular contributor to Everest Group’s blog, Sherpas in Blue Shirts, on topics related to technology.

Before joining Everest Group, Yugal worked as an equity research lead driving software and services research, leading a 12-member cross-industry analyst team. He was responsible for creating, managing, and delivering the research agenda, selling research to institutional investor clients, and guiding corporate strategy and sales teams. Earlier in his career, he worked with leading software and services companies such as Adobe Systems and Tata Consultancy Services. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and an engineering degree from Delhi College of Engineering, New Delhi, India.

Santosh Kalekar

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Veritas Technologies 

Santosh P. Kalekar is currently working as a Sr. Principle Software Engineer at Veritas, Pune with overall 18+ years of experience with Enterprise Storage, High Availability & backup products.

Supriya Kannery

Senior Principal Engineer, Dell EMC 

Supriya Kannery has been working in Systems Software for 20+ years. She holds a B.Tech degree from NIT, Calicut.  She has been leading teams handling  development, customer support and quality assurance in IBM. Currently working at DELL EMC as the technical lead for India Systems Management team for deduplication based backup storage. Passionate about using Machine Learning in storage domain, she has been working on leveraging ML for capacity projection.

Rishika Kedia

Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

I am Technical Leader for IBM Storage Insights from Software Defined Storage in IBM India Systems and Development Labs. In my 12+ years of experience, I have worked designing and developing System Management across different technologies such as Servers, Storage System, Cloud Storage, and Storage Management domain both for servers and storage. From 2014, I have been associated with IBM Storage and Storage Management.

Ashit Kumar 

Senior System Architect, Huawei Technologies 

Ashit Kumar is Senior System Architect at Huawei with over 12 years of experience. He has done his Post Graduation from Computer Science Department, Pune University. He currently works on Linux Foundation project, OpenSDS. Over the years he has worked on developing products in multiple domains such as SRM, DRaaS and Replication.

Nidhi Malhotra

Staff Design Engineer, Microchip 

Nidhi Malhotra works as a staff design engineer at Microsemi, with 15 + years of experience in software design and development. She has extensive experience in storage management and is a member SNIA SSM TWG as well as DMTF CPPS WG.

Dinakar Medavaram

Staff Engineer, Xilinx India 

Dinakar has 16+ experience in software industry working on different technology domains mostly on Low level system programming. Started career as Scientist in DAE (Dept. Of Atomic Energy)  & served as IT Analyst for TCS. Gained adapt knowledge in networking and storage domain working for Motorola & NetApp earlier. Presently working for Xilinx in CCIX interface based FPGA accelerator design and development for various use cases.

Nalini Kumari Nallamalli

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Veritas Technologies

Nalini Kumari Nallamalli is currently working as a Sr. Principle Software Engineer at Veritas, Pune with overall 13+ years of experience with Enterprise Storage, High Availability & backup products, holds Masters Degree from IIT Guwahati

Shyjumon Nankandiyil

Software Engineering Lead, Intel Corporation

He is presently working with Intel India as a Storage Domain Lead for Android OS. Prior to Intel he was working with Samsung and Toshiba in the Linux kernel and device drivers with focus on storage technologies. He has around 16 years of experience in embedded systems industry and having vast experience in Mobile Operating Systems. He also worked on boot-loaders. Presently focusing on the NVMe & Intel® Optane™ technologies.

Parmeshwr Prasad

Senior Engineer, Dell EMC

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.

Karthik Rangamani 

Associate Vice President, Blockchain Practice, Indium Software

Karthik has 21 years of experience in the field of IT, 15 yrs of which has been in Backup/Restore, Disaster Recovery domain. Worked for companies like EMC, HP, Commvault and has contributed to product roadmap. Managed and led teams for Product and Engineering service organisations. Holds certification from SNIA and PMI.

Maneesh Rapelly

Software Engineer, IBM

Maneesh Rapelly is from IBM India Systems Development Lab working as Software Engineer in Software Defined Storage. He has completed M.Tech(Computer Science) from IIT Bombay. He is currently working as a developer in Storage Insights project.

Sourin Sarkar

Senior Principal Engineer, Microchip & SNIA India Technical Council 

Sourin is an industry veteran with 21 years of experience in various technology areas spanning storage controller firmware, expander firmware, SoC, IOC, ROC, Embedded OS, Device Drivers (Windows NT/Windows Server and Linux), Kernel (Linux, FreeBSD), complete USB 2.x/3.x stack implementation for OHCI, EHCI OTG controller, Enterprise Data Protection (Backup, Recovery, Disaster Management, Snapshots Management), Telecom GPRS and MMS stack, Mobile Network Simulation. He has 8 patents filed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), 1 patent filed under WIPO PCT 

Sharath Thalya Shankarananda

Senior Software Design Engineer, Microchip

An Engineer by chance, Innovator by choice and an Explorer by heart. Born and bought up in Bangalore. Hold a bachelor's degree in Engineering (I mean who doesn't?!). 5+ years of work experience as a software engineer in a Semiconductor company.

Divyank Shukla

Technical Architect, MSys Technologies

Divyank holds more than 17 years of experience in System and Storage Technologies. Has contributed to 4 patents mostly in Storage Domains. His key areas of interest constitute Deep learning and Statistical Data Modelling.

Saurabh Singh

Software Engineer, IBM India

Saurabh has more than 10 years of experience in storage industry. He is working as Senior Staff Software Engineer with IBM. He has worked as a developer for enabling various features like FCoE, FC, NVMeFC and cloud backup solutions.

Dr Dinkar Sitaram

Professor, PES University

Dr. Dinkar Sitaram is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at PES University. He heads the Center for Cloud Computing and Big Data at PES University, and is driving research in these areas. He is also chairing the Cloud Computing Innovation Council of India working group that is working with TSDSI on developing cloud standards for India, He is the author of two books - a recent book on Cloud Computing, called “Moving to the Cloud – Developing Apps in the New World of Cloud Computing” published by American Elsevier in December 2011. His earlier book “Multimedia Servers” was published by Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco. He is the author of over 20 patents and 32 publications, and has over 3000 citations to his work. Dr. Sitaram received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur. He joined as a Research Staff Member in IBM’s Research Division at the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, NY. At IBM, Dr. Sitaram received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award (an IBM Corporate Award) as well as IBM Research Division Award and several IBM Invention Achievement Awards for his patents and research, received outstanding paper awards at ACM Multimedia for his work. He also served on the editorial board of the Journal of High-Speed Networking. Subsequently, he returned to India as Director of the Technology Group at Novell Corp., Bangalore. The group developed many innovative products in addition to filing for many patents and standards proposals. Dr. Sitaram received Novell’s Employee of the Year award. Subsequently, Dr. Sitaram was CTO at Andiamo Systems India (a storage networking startup), responsible for architecture and technical direction of an advanced storage management solution. Andiamo Systems was acquired by Cisco Systems. Most recently, Dr. Sitaram was CTO at HP Systems Technology and Software Division, the product R&D organization of HP in India. He focused on driving cloud and storage technologies as part of the HP Storage Division. He also worked on file system strategies, and high reliability for the HP Unix server division. He was also responsible for Patents and University Relations at STSD. 

Jiffin Tony Thottan

Software Engineer, Red Hat

I completed my graduation in 2014 and started my career in Red Hat as an intern, currently part of Red Hat Gluster Storage Team. Right now I am actively participating, contributing to communities such as Gluster and NFS-Ganesha. My area of interest includes software defined storage, protocols such as NFS and authentication mechanism like kerberos. I have given presentations in different conferences like FOSDEM'17, LinuxCon Europe'17, Vault'16.

Ramakrishna Vadla

Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

Ramakrishna Vadla is from IBM, ISDL working as Advisory Software Engineer and Technical Lead for Storage Insights project from Software Defined Storage systems. He has completed M.Tech from IIIT Hyderabad and B.Tech from Osmania University, Hyderabad. He has 14+ years of experience in developing and designing large scale systems across different technologies such Storage Management, Data Science, Cloud Services and Middleware systems.

Rahul Vishwakarma

Senior Software Quality Engineer, Dell EMC

Rahul Vishwakarma has almost 9 years of industry experience in Storage Domain and currently at DELL EMC he is part of Application Interoperability for Data Domain (DPD Appliance - Enterprise Backup and Recovery Solutions). Prior to DELL EMC, he worked at HPE on Converged System for SAP HANA; where he designed Linux OS images customized for SAP HANA and wrote Reference Architectures for solutions. He has filed 3 US patents and delivered technical talks at conferences.

Yadavendra Yadav

Software Architect, IBM 

Yadavendra Yadav is an Software Architect for IBM Systems Development Labs. He has 14 years of industry experience in Linux Kernel, FileSystem, Device Drivers, Containers (Docker/Kubernetes), OpenStack Swift. In the past 2 years in IBM, he has  worked on how to provide persistent storage within container.