Full Agenda

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

8:30 AM - 9:20 AM

HDD Innovation for Hyperscale: CDLs, SMR, Depop and SCSI Advancements in Linux

Damien Le Moal, Distinguished Engineer, Western Digital

Rick Kutcipal, At-Large Director, Board of Directors, SNIA SCSI Trade Association (STA)

Sustainability & Green

8:30 AM - 9:20 AM

Advancing the AI Factory Sustainability

Chih-Tsung Huang, Senior Director, Cisco

Wei-Jen Huang, Distinguished Engineer, Cisco

Solid State Storage Solutions

8:30 AM - 9:20 AM

Host Management of NVM Express™ Exported NVM Subsystems in PCIe™ SSDs

Mike Allison, Senior Director - NAND Product Planning - Standards, Samsung

Lee Prewitt, Director of Cloud Hardware Storage Microsoft

AI / ML

8:30 AM - 9:20 AM

Storage for AI 102, A Further Perspective on Storage use in AI Workflows

Curtis Ballard, Technical Council, SNIA; Strategist, Technology Enablement, HPE

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM

SMR and HAMR Advancing HDD Areal Density

Babar Khan, AI Engineer and PhD Candidate, Independent

Sustainability & Green

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM

SNIA Emerald Update for V1.0 Device and V5.0 System Specifications

Wayne Adams, SNIA Chairman Emeritus, Industry Advisor

Solid State Storage Solutions

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM

Sprandom - A Fast Method to Reduce the Random Preconditioning Time of SSDs from Days to Hours

Steven Sprouse, Distinguished Engineer, SanDisk

AI / ML

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM

Why does NVMe Need to Evolve for Efficient Storage Access from GPUs?

Chandra Guda, SSD Systems Architect - SMTS, Micron Technology

Suresh Rajgopal, SSD Systems Architect - DMTS, Micron Technology

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

10:35 AM - 11:25 AM

Command Duration Limits - Improving IOPS per TB in HDDs

David Landsman, Distinguished Engineer, Western Digital

Damien Le Moal, Distinguished Engineer, Western Digital

Sustainability & Green

10:35 AM - 11:25 AM

Panel: Driving Sustainability in Datacenters – Standardizing Carbon Assessment Methodologies

Shruti Sethi, Senior PM, Microsoft

Ines Sousa, Senior Sustainability Industry Advisor, Microsoft

Bahar Riazi, Technical Program Manager - Net Zero, Google

Alan Deng, Senior Supply Engagement Manager - Net Zero, Google

Lisa Rivalin, Staff System Engineer, AI Fleet - Sustainability Meta

Solid State Storage Solutions

10:35 AM - 11:25 AM

Navigating NVMe-oF Authentication: Best Practices for Key Management in Pre-AVE and Post-AVE Deployments

Swati Chawdhary, Senior Manager, Samsung

AI / ML

10:35 AM - 11:25 AM

Disaggregated KV Storage: A New Tier for Efficient Scalable LLM Inference

Eshcar Hillel, Principal Research Scientist, Pliops

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

11:35 AM - 12:25 PM

Drive Regeneration in Action: Enhancing Fault Tolerance in Datacenters

Curtis Stevens, Strategist, Seagate Technology

Dave Craton, Principal Product Manager, Seagate Techology

Magic Memory

11:35 AM - 12:25 PM

Disrupting the GPU Hegemony: Can Smart Memory and Storage Redefine AI Infrastructure

Nilesh Shah, VP Business Development, ZeroPoint Technologies

Jungmin Choi, Director of Memory Systems Sk Hynix

Vikas Chaudhary, VP & GM, MaxLinear

Nilesh Gharia, Founder & CTO, Numem

Stephen Bates, Fellow, AMD

Jonmichael Hands, CEO FarmGPU

Modeling & Simulation

11:35 AM - 12:25 PM

Total Cost and Performance Analysis of SSDs in AI Data Centers

Andy Banta, Storage Janitor, Magnition IO

Scott Shadley, Director of Leadership Narrative and Evangelist, Solidigm

AI / ML

11:35 AM - 12:25 PM

Rethinking Storage for the AI/ML Era: Disaggregation Powered with FDP

Sathish Kumar M, Associate Technical Director, Samsung Semiconductor India Research

Magic Memory

1:30 PM - 2:20 PM

Radical Reduction in Computing Costs with AI-powered Predictive Memory Technology

Gary Smerdon, Founder and CEO, MEXT

AI / ML

1:30 PM - 2:20 PM

KV-Cache Storage Offloading for Efficient Inference in LLMs

Ugur Kaynar, Technical Staff, Dell Technologies

Modeling & Simulation

1:30 PM - 2:20 PM

CXL Ecosystem Innovation Leveraging QEMU-based Emulation

Anisa Su, Associate Engineer, Samsung

Adam Manzanares, Director, Samsung

Cloud Storage

1:30 PM - 2:20 PM

Accelerating Object Storage for AI/ML with S3 RDMA

Jason Goldschmidt, Member of Technical Staff, Dell Technologies

Magic Memory

2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

Towards Memory Efficient RAG Pipelines with CXL Technology

Arun George, Associate Technical Director, Samsung Semiconductor India Research

Roshan Nair, Staff Engineer Samsung Semiconductor India Research, Bangalore

AI / ML

2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

Scaling RAG with NVME: DISKANN's Hybrid Approach to Vector Databases Indexing

Alessandro Goncalves, Solutions Architect, Solidigm

Modeling & Simulation

2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

Simulating CXL.mem for Fun and Profit

Diman Zad Tootaghaj, Senior Researcher HPE

File Systems & Protocols

2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

Scalable Metadata in Distributed File Systems: Revisiting the GoogleFS Design for Exabyte-Scale Namespaces

Piotr Modrzyk, Principal Architect, Leil Storage

Magic Memory

3:35 PM - 4:25 PM

Compute Express Link (CXL) as a Scalable and Highly Cost-Effective Memory Architecture for Modern Computing Workloads

Pramod Peethambaran, Director of Engineering, Samsung

AI / ML

3:35 PM - 4:25 PM

448G/lane? PCIe™ 7.0? E2 form factor? Suffer the egos of the opinionated experts working to meet the bandwidth, interconnect, and capacity for these AI capable interconnects and form factors.

Anthony Constantine, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Micron Technology

Mike Allison, Senior Director - NAND Product Planning - Standards, Samsung

John Geldman, Director of SSD Industry Standards, KIOXIA

Modeling & Simulation

3:35 PM - 4:25 PM

Smarter Cloud Storage—Optimizing Costs with Tiering and Automation

Shruti Sethi, Senior PM, Microsoft

Vignesh Shanbhag, PM, Microsoft

File Systems & Protocols

3:35 PM - 4:25 PM

Zoned XFS: Transparent and Efficient Zoned Storage Support For Scalable Storage Systems

Christoph Hellwig, Kernel Hacker, [N/A]

Damien Le Moal, Distinguished Engineer, Western Digital

Magic Memory

4:35 PM - 5:00 PM

Advantages of CXL Memory Pooling and Tiering

Anil Godbole, MWG Co-Chair, CXL Consortium

Magic Memory

5:00 PM - 5:25 PM

Host Addressing of NVMe Subsystem Local Memory

Jason Molgaard, Principal Storage Solutions Architect, Solidigm

AI / ML

4:35 PM - 5:25 PM

Small Granularity Graph Neural Network Training and the Future of Storage

John Mazzie, MTS, Systems Performance Engineer, Micron Technology

Modeling & Simulation

4:35 PM - 5:25 PM

Design Specification and AI-Driven Digital Twin Architecture for Storage Devices

Hemant Gaikwad, Technical Staff, Dell Technologies

Rahul Vishwakarma, CTO WorkOnward

File Systems & Protocols

4:35 PM - 5:25 PM

Open Flash Platform: An Initiative for Open, Highly Efficient AI Storage

David Flynn, CEO, Co-Founder, Hammerspace

Birds-of-a-Feather

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

S3 Interoperability - Adoption Proliferation and Strategic Testing

Michael Hoard, Chair for Cloud Storage Technologies (CST) community SNIA

Adam Gray, Principal Software Engineer, IBM; Cloud Object Storage (COS) Test Tools Provisional TWG Chair, SNIA

Birds-of-a-Feather

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Power Metric Extensions for Performance IO Tools

Wayne Adams, SNIA Chairman Emeritus, Industry Advisor

David Slik, Scientist, Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd.

Birds-of-a-Feather

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Object Storage for Structured Storage

HimaBindu Tummala, Distinguished Engineer Dell Technologies

Birds-of-a-Feather

8:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Toward an ISO Standard for an Open Long-Term Storage Framework

Steffen Hellmold, President, Cerabyte

Birds-of-a-Feather

8:00 PM - 9:00 PM

AI and Performance Expansion - Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model 2.0

Jonmichael Hands, CEO FarmGPU

Nader Salessi, Advisor, MaxLinear

Birds-of-a-Feather

8:00 PM - 9:00 PM

S3 over RDMA

Jason Goldschmidt, Member of Technical Staff, Dell Technologies

Keynote

8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

Welcome Remarks and Keynote Introduction

Scott Shadley, Director of Leadership Narrative and Evangelist, Solidigm

Keynote

8:45 AM - 9:25 AM

State of the HPC-AI Market ― Highlights from End-User Research on Technology Gaps for HPC and AI

Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research

Keynote

9:25 AM - 10:10 AM

Storage Blending: The Evolving Role of HDD and SSD in Data Systems for an AI and Analytics Era

Steven Wells, Fellow Emeritus, Industry Veteran

Curtis Ballard, Technical Council, SNIA; Strategist, Technology Enablement, HPE

Mohamad EL-Batal, Office of the CTO Chief Technologist, Seagate Technology

Madhavan Ravi, Hardware Systems Engineer, Meta

Currie Munce, Senior Storage Strategist & Advisor Micron Technology

Keynote

10:20 AM - 11:00 AM

Maximizing the Benefits of QLC Flash with Pure's Hyperscale Architecture for Applications Ranging from AI/ML to HDD Displacement

Riley Thomasson, Member of Technical Staff, Pure Storage

Keynote

11:00 AM - 11:30 AM

SNIA and OCP - Driving Open Storage and Networking

James Kelly, VP Market Intelligence and Innovation, OCP Foundation

Keynote

11:30 AM - 12:10 PM

Storage.AI™ from SNIA - Industry Leaders and Partners Join Forces

J Metz, Chair of SNIA’s Board of Directors; Technical Director for Systems Design, AMD

Lunch

12:10 PM - 1:00 PM

Lunch

Magic Memory

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM

CXL Memory in Windows

Chet Douglas, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Scott Lee, Principal Software Engineer Lead, Microsoft

File Systems & Protocols

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM

Taming the Multi-Protocol Jungle: Unifying File and Object Access in Modern Data Workflows

Erez Zilber, SW Architect, VAST Data

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM

SSD Virtualization: Enabling New Possibilities for SSD-Based Ecosystems

Daniel Helmick, Principal Architect, Samsung

AI / ML

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM

Storage Devices for the AI Data Center

Erich Haratsch, Senior Director, Marvell

Magic Memory

2:00 PM - 2:25 PM

SNIA SDXI v1.1 Data Movement Accelerator Interface Update

William Moyes, Fellow AMD

Shyam Iyer, Distinguished Engineer -- Technical Council, SDXI TWG Chair Dell Technologies -- SNIA

Magic Memory

2:25 PM - 2:50 PM

Can SDXI work with NVMe?

Jason Molgaard, Principal Storage Solutions Architect, Solidigm

Shyam Iyer, Distinguished Engineer -- Technical Council, SDXI TWG Chair Dell Technologies -- SNIA

File Systems & Protocols

2:00 PM - 2:50 PM

Choosing Your AI Storage Protocol: A Deep Dive into SMB and NFS Performance, Tuning, and Overhead

Sergei Platonov, VP of Strategy, Xinnor

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

2:00 PM - 2:50 PM

Storage Multi-Queue on Windows - A New Stack for High Performance Storage Hardware

Scott Lee, Principal Software Engineer Lead, Microsoft

AI / ML

2:00 PM - 2:50 PM

Storage for AI in Public Clouds: Case Study of Vela in IBM Cloud

Vasily Tarasov, Principal Research Scientist, IBM

Cloud Storage

3:05 PM - 3:55 PM

War Stories from the Storage Trenches: Moving Data Across NFS, SMB, and S3

Carl D'Halluin, CTO, Datadobi

File Systems & Protocols

3:05 PM - 3:55 PM

Eliminating NTLM in Storage: Modernizing SMB Authentication on Windows

Mariam Gewida, Product Manager, Microsoft

Tanmay Pydisetti, Software Engineer, Microsoft

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

3:05 PM - 3:55 PM

Why should we have yet another Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor for SSDs?

Anthony Constantine, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Micron Technology

AI / ML

3:05 PM - 3:55 PM

Storage Implications for the New Generation of AI Applications

CJ Newburn, Distinguished Engineer, NVIDIA

Wen-Mei Hwu, Senior Distinguished Research Scientist and Senior Research Director, NVIDIA

Emerging Technologies

4:05 PM - 4:55 PM

The Information Bank: A Proposal for the Next Class of Storage Solving 50 Year Old Problems Managing Unstructured Data

Bruce Thompson, CEO, In2Bank

File Systems & Protocols

4:05 PM - 4:55 PM

Activating Untapped Tier 0 Storage Within Your GPU- and CPU-based Compute Clusters

Floyd Christofferson, VP Product Marketing, Hammerspace

Emerging Technologies

4:05 PM - 4:30 PM

OCP Storage Project Update

Ross Stenfort, Hardware Systems Engineer, Meta

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

4:30 PM - 4:55 PM

Fibre Channel Update - What you need to know about the Dawn of 256GFC (Gen 9)

Howard Johnson, Technology Architect, Broadcom; Chair, INCITS/Fibre Channel Technical Committee

Mark Jones, Director of Technical Marketing -- Chair Broadcom -- Fibre Channel Industry Association

AI / ML

4:05 PM - 4:55 PM

Towards Building Flexible, Efficient and Resilient Training with Adaptive Checkpointing on AMD GPU Platforms

Pratik Mishra, Senior Staff - Research, AMD

Birds-of-a-Feather

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Cruising with Automotive Storage

Jason Molgaard, Principal Storage Solutions Architect, Solidigm

Birds-of-a-Feather

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

SMB3 Posix/Linux Extensions

Steven French, Principal Software Engineer Microsoft

Birds-of-a-Feather

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Storage.AI - The Evolution of Data with SNIA

J Metz, Chair of SNIA’s Board of Directors; Technical Director for Systems Design, AMD

Birds-of-a-Feather

8:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Challenges and Solutions to Testing AI at Scale

Venkat Pullela, Chief Technologist, Networking, Keysight Technologies

Birds-of-a-Feather

8:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Directing the Future of our Industry: Can we develop the next class of storage?

Bruce Thompson, CEO, In2Bank

Birds-of-a-Feather

8:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Storage Blending: The Evolving Role of HDD and SSD in Data Systems for an AI and Analytics Era

Steven Wells, Fellow Emeritus, Industry Veteran

File Systems & Protocols

8:30 AM - 9:20 AM

Famfs: Get Ready for Big Pools of Disaggregated Shared Memory

John Groves, Technical Director, Micron Technology; Co-Chair, CXL Consortium Software and Systems Working Group

Cloud Storage

8:30 AM - 9:20 AM

Cloud Storage Considerations for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in AI Applications

Scott Hoag, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft

File Systems & Protocols

8:30 AM - 9:20 AM

Highly Scalable, Masterless, Distributed Filesystem at Rubrik

Abhinav Agarwal, Senior Software Engineer, Rubrik

Avishek Ganguli, Senior Software Engineer, Rubrik

AI / ML

8:30 AM - 9:20 AM

Discussion and Analysis of the MLPerf Storage Benchmark Suite and AI Storage Workloads

Wesley Vaske, SMTS, Storage Solutions Architect, Micron Technology

File Systems & Protocols

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM

Scaling Secure File Access - what's New in Linux SMB3.1.1: Performance, Security, and Beyond

Steven French, Principal Software Engineer Microsoft

Cloud Storage

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM

Blending Objects and Files in Google Cloud Storage

Jeff Terrace, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google

Hsiu-Fan Wang, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google

Emerging Technologies

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM

Chiplets, UCIe, Persistent Memory, and Heterogeneous Integration: The Processor Chip of the Future!

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

AI / ML

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM

Assessing AI Storage Communication Performance At Scale

Cliff Tavares, Senior Director Engineering, Keysight Technologies

Venkat Pullela, Chief Technologist, Networking, Keysight Technologies

File Systems & Protocols

10:35 AM - 11:25 AM

Always-On Diagnostics: eBPF-Powered Insights for Linux SMB and NFS Clients

Meetakshi Setiya, Software Engineer, Microsoft

Cloud Storage

10:35 AM - 11:25 AM

CSAL with Core Scaling for RAID5F: Revolutionizing Cloud Storage Performance and Reliability

Mariusz Barczak, Principal Engineer - Storage Software Architect, Solidigm

Sarika Mehta, Senior Storage Solutions Architect, Solidigm

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

10:35 AM - 11:25 AM

Towards Unified Knowledge Platforms: Evolving Storage Systems for Generative and Agentic AI

Annmary Justine Koomthanam, Senior Research Engineer, HPE

Srikant Varadan, Distinguished Technologist, HPE

AI / ML

10:35 AM - 11:25 AM

Beyond Throughput: Benchmarking Storage for the Complex I/O Patterns of AI with MLPerf Storage and DLIO

Huihuo Zheng, Computer Scientist, Argonne National Laboratory

File Systems & Protocols

11:35 AM - 12:25 PM

New Transports in Samba: QUIC and SMB-Direct Support

Stefan Metzmacher, Software Architect, SerNet

Cloud Storage

11:35 AM - 12:25 PM

Enabling Standard Block Protocols on a Distributed Cloud-Native Platform - Azure Storage

Emily Kilian, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Yuemin Lu, Principal Product Manager/Architect, Microsoft

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

11:35 AM - 12:25 PM

Global Distributed Client-side Caching for HPC/AI Storage Systems

Clarete Crasta, Principal Engineer, HPE

David Emberson, Senior Distinguished Technologist, HPE

AI / ML

11:35 AM - 12:25 PM

Gen6 is coming, but what is Needed from NV Storage?

Suresh Rajgopal, SSD Systems Architect - DMTS, Micron Technology

File Systems & Protocols

1:30 PM - 2:20 PM

Samba 2025: Enterprise-Ready, Cloud-Optimized

Ralph Böhme, Software Engineer, SerNet Samba Team

Cloud Storage

1:30 PM - 2:20 PM

Modern Data Management at Exabyte Scale — With Visibility, Efficiency, and Control

Akshay Agrawal, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft

Preethi Thippeswamy, Product Manager, Microsoft

Emerging Technologies

1:30 PM - 2:20 PM

Data-Intensive Inference Done Better: Scaling Models and RAG in Limited Memory with SSD Offload

Ace Stryker, Director of Market Development, Solidigm

AI / ML

1:30 PM - 2:20 PM

Demystifying Data Flows During LLM Training

William Lynn, Fellow, AMD

File Systems & Protocols

2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

Why S3FS Fails in AI/ML — and How to Achieve Scalable POSIX Access Anyway

Rui Su, Co-Founder, Juicedata

Cloud Storage

2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

CDMI 3.0: Standardized Management of any URI-accessible Resource

David Slik, Scientist, Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd.

Data Security

2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

SPDM PQC & Authorization

Jeff Hilland, President / SPDM WG Co-Chair; Distinguished Technologist, HPE

Brett Henning, Security Architect, Broadcom; President / SPDM WG Co-Chair, DMTF

AI / ML

2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

Optimizing Hyperscale Flash Storage Innovations in Large-Capacity QLC, Host-Based FTL, Configurable Indirection Unit and Application-Optimizing Data Placement

Joshua Freilich, Principal Engineer, Pure Storage

Management

3:35 PM - 4:25 PM

What’s New with SNIA Swordfish®: Standards-Based Storage Management for Enterprise and Data Center

Richelle Ahlvers, SM Chair, SNIA Vice Chair, and Swordfish TWG Chair; Director of Ecosystem Enabling, and Technology Initiatives Intel

Cloud Storage

3:35 PM - 4:00 PM

Report from September ‘25 Cloud Object Storage Plugfest (community driven S3 compatibility testing)

Jeff Terrace, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google

Frank Borich, Principal Software Engineer, IBM

Cloud Storage

4:00 PM - 4:25 PM

SNIA Cloud Object Storage Test Tools - Foundation for Heterogeneous Multi-Vendor Interoperability

Adam Gray, Principal Software Engineer, IBM; Cloud Object Storage (COS) Test Tools Provisional TWG Chair, SNIA

Michael Hoard, Chair for Cloud Storage Technologies (CST) community SNIA

Data Security

3:35 PM - 4:25 PM

New Developments in Data Security Algorithms

Paul Suhler, Principal Engineer, SSD Standards, KIOXIA; Security in Storage Working Group Chair, IEEE

AI / ML

3:35 PM - 4:25 PM

AI Driven Mass-Storage Evolution

Mohamad EL-Batal, Office of the CTO Chief Technologist, Seagate Technology

Thomas Prohofsky, Principal Engineer, CTO Office, Seagate Technology

Management

4:35 PM - 5:00 PM

The Latest Features in DMTF Redfish® for Storage Management

Jeff Hilland, President / SPDM WG Co-Chair; Distinguished Technologist, HPE

Management

5:00 PM - 5:25 PM

OFA Sunfish: New Applications for Distributed Storage with SNIA Swordfish®

Nathan Hanford, Computer Scientist, Livermore Computing Division, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Emerging Technologies

4:35 PM - 5:25 PM

Media Objectives for Next-Generation Video Games

John Carlsen, Principal, Syncopated Systems

Data Security

4:35 PM - 5:25 PM

Emerging Trends in Automotive Fabrics and Data Security

Bill Gervasi, Principal Memory Solutions Architect, MPS

Junjian Zhao, Technical Marketing & Apps Engineering, MPS

AI / ML

4:35 PM - 5:25 PM

Enhancing Defect Triaging in Storage Systems Using Generative AI from Integration Test-Based Knowledge Graphs

Nuthan Prasad B N, Expert, HPE

Dhishankar Sengupta, Distinguished Technologist, USA HPE