
SNIA Chairman Emeritus,
Industry Advisor

Senior Software Engineer,
Rubrik

Principal Product Manager
Microsoft

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

Senior Director - NAND Product Planning - Standards
Samsung

Technical Council, SNIA; Strategist, Technology Enablement
HPE

Storage Janitor
Magnition IO

Principal Engineer - Storage Software Architect
Solidigm

Software Engineer,
SerNet Samba Team

Principal
Syncopated Systems
John Carlsen is an electronic multimedia pioneer who contributed to the development of the first television tuner card for personal computers, early PC sound cards, and CD-ROM interfaces, and supervised the first pressing of Microsoft Windows on CD-ROM. After working for video game legends Atari, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, and Activision, Mr. Carlsen co-founded game developer Iguana Entertainment, which created the Batman Forever arcade game, NFL Quarterback Club series games, home versions of NBA Jam, and some of the first Nintendo 64 games, including Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and the first South Park game. Afterward, he created the reference design used for most flash-based MP3 players, including the first Apple iPod Shuffle, and led hardware development for a Sony PlayStation. Mr. Carlsen has earned degrees in management and computer science from Saint Edward’s University (Austin, TX), and has taught computer game development. Mr. Carlsen is an IEEE Senior Member, is on the IEEE Silicon Valley Technology History Committee, is a recent chair of IEEE’s largest consultants’ network, and provides consulting and development services as Syncopated Systems.

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 has participated in conferences like IEEE Wintechcon, FMS, SDC US/India and NVMe developer Days. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Pune University.

VP Product Marketing
Hammerspace
Christofferson brings more than 25 years of content creation, content management and storage expertise focused on the methods and technologies needed to use and manage massive volumes of data. Most recently, he was CEO of StrongBox Data Solutions, an autonomous data management and data archiving provider. Previously, Christofferson served as CMO at Arcitecta IP Pty Ltd, a comprehensive data management platform company, and as Director, Storage Product Marketing at SGI for its InfiniteStorage products.

Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Micron Technology

Principal Engineer,
HPE

CTO,
Datadobi

Senior Researcher
HPE

Principal Software Engineer,
Microsoft

Office of the CTO Chief Technologist,
Seagate Technology
Mohamad El-Batal is a Seagate’s Office of the CTO Chief Technologist focusing on Storage Systems and Emerging Memory. In his role at Seagate, Mohamad is given the opportunity to help shape the systems strategy and its future foundational technology roadmap.
Mohamad holds a BS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and did Graduate work on Digital Signal Processing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In his career, since 1990, Mohamad charted new grounds in various fields of enterprise and modern datacenter storage architectures that spanned various innovative engineering disciplines.
Mohamad is on the Board of Directors of the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), Future Memory and Storage (FMS), and on the Open Compute Project (OCP) Advisory Board. Mohamad is currently the chairing multiple OCP data storage, memory and data connectivity/composability workstreams. Mohamad participated technically and influenced various industry standard groups including FC, SAS, NVMe, CXL and DMTF consortiums.
In his career, Mohamad worked at leading enterprise storage technology and cloud provider companies, including Tandem, EMC, Mylex, IBM, LSI, Engenio, NetApp, Avago, and now Seagate. Mohamad has 30+ year history of enterprise and cloud storage architecture knowledge, experience, and innovation. Mohamad holds 50+ issued and 20+ pending patents, covering: High-Availability/Resiliency Storage and Memory solutions, SSD controller and Composable Systems architecture focus areas.

CEO, Co-Founder
Hammerspace

Principal Engineer
Pure Storage

Principal Software Engineer,
Microsoft

Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft

Technical Staff
Dell Technologies

Associate Technical Director
Samsung Semiconductor India Research

Principal Memory Solutions Architect
MPS

Product Manager,
Microsoft

MWG Co-Chair
CXL Consortium

Member of Technical Staff,
Dell Technologies
Jason is a Storage Architect at Dell Technologies, working in the Storage Chief Technology Office. His role involves leading the development of next-generation storage and network protocols for both Public and Private Clouds. Throughout his career, Jason has focused on enterprise storage and meeting the needs of customers who want to expand beyond the traditional on-premises data center. He enjoys collaborating with customers and partners to understand their requirements when transforming their business. In his personal life, Jason is passionate about running marathons and baking artisan bread. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife and their three children.

Solutions Architect
Solidigm

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

Technical Director,
Micron Technology

SSD Systems Architect - SMTS,
Micron Technology

General Director,
Objective Analysis

Computer Scientist,
Livermore Computing Division, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Senior Director,
Marvell

VP Strategic Initiatives
Western Digital
Steffen Hellmold is Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Western Digital. He is responsible for identifying & leading incubated disruptive innovation projects in support of storage adjacent growth opportunities. His current area of focus is Archive Storage with an emphasis on driving tape and DNA Data Storage innovation to address the growing demand for cloud-scale accessible and deep archive solutions providing improved density and longevity as well as lower product acquisition and operating costs. Before joining Western Digital in 2013, Hellmold was Vice President of Marketing at Everspin Technologies. Prior positions include executive management at SandForce, Seagate Technology, Lexar Media (a subsidiary of Micron), Samsung Semiconductor, Fujitsu and SMART Modular Technologies. Hellmold has been deeply engaged in various industry trade associations as well as industry standards organizations such as JEDEC, IEEE, USB-IF, CFA, SDA, and MMCA. He co-founded the USB Flash Drive Alliance and served as their president from 2003 to 2007. Hellmold holds an Economic Electrical Engineering degree (EEE) from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Kernel Hacker,
[N/A]

Principal Architect
Samsung

President / SPDM WG Co-chair; Distinguished Technologist,
HPE
This session will cover an update on DMTF's SPDM (Security Protocol & Data Model), including their strategy to support PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography). DMTF is adding bindings for storage (NVMe, SAS & SATA) as well as TCP and those will be covered as well for encryption of data in flight. Also covered will be updates to SPDM as well as the current roadmap of future releases.

Principal Research Scientist,
Pliops

Principal Product Manager
Microsoft

Chair for Cloud Storage Technologies (CST) community
SNIA

Senior Director,
Cisco

Technology Architect
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Chair
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Chair
Broadcom
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INCITS/Fibre Channel Technical Committee
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INCITS/Fibre Channel Technical Committee

Technical Staff,
Dell Technologies
My role involves leading the development of next-generation storage access protocols and connectors, and optimizing storage data path for AI & emerging workloads. I am a PhD in object storage and my research interests lie in object storage, caching, storage systems and protocols, and storage optimizations for AI.

VP Market Intelligence and Innovation
OCP Foundation

AI Engineer and PhD Candidate
Independent

Principal Software Engineer,
Microsoft
Emily Kilian is a seasoned software engineer at Microsoft, specializing in cloud storage systems. With a focus on integrating industry-standard protocols like iSCSI and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) into Azure's distributed storage platform, she plays a pivotal role in enhancing Azure Storage's capabilities to support enterprise-grade workloads. Her contributions are instrumental in delivering high-performance, scalable, and reliable storage solutions within Azure.

Product Management
Self Employed

Senior Research Engineer,
HPE

Distinguished Engineer,
Western Digital

Distinguished Engineer,
Western Digital
Damien Le Moal manages the open-source system software group in Western Digital Research. He is a regular contributor to Linux kernel block, scsi and device-mapper subsystems and the author of zonefs.

Principal Software Engineer Lead,
Microsoft

Fellow,
AMD

Associate Technical Director
Samsung Semiconductor India Research

MTS, Systems Performance Engineer
Micron Technology

Chair of SNIA’s Board of Directors; Technical Director for Systems Design
AMD
J is the Chair of SNIA’s Board of Directors and Technical Director for Systems Design for AMD where he works to coordinate and lead strategy on various industry initiatives related to systems architecture. 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 has previously held roles in both startup and Fortune 100 companies as a Field CTO, R&D Engineer, Solutions Architect, and Systems Engineer. 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 computational storage.
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.

Software Architect,
SerNet

Senior Staff - Research,
AMD

Principal Architect
Leil Storage

Principal Storage Solutions Architect,
Solidigm

Fellow
AMD

Distinguished Engineer,
NVIDIA

Director of Engineering
Samsung
Pramod Peethambaran is a visionary technology leader with 20+ years of experience building multi-functional teams and world class products catering to cloud infrastructure focused on Storage/memory, System Software, AI/ML platform & Networking. As Director of Engineering in Samsung Semiconductors, he has led memory software platform, Samsung Cognos. His vast experience spans building software products for Semiconductor, Multimedia, Automotive, telecom and networking industry. He has IEEE publication on Cyber Security (computational storage-based deep learning inference functionality to combat ransomware) and patents granted in the AI/ML processor architecture optimizations (transaction-based instruction set architecture) and patents pending in the field of offloading based performant storage solutions and VoIP/networking. He has also served as a webinar presenter on optimizing data architecture for scale and performance.

VP of Strategy,
Xinnor

Expert
HPE

SSD Systems Architect - DMTS
Micron Technology

Senior PM,
Microsoft

Software Engineer,
Microsoft

Director of Leadership Narrative and Evangelist
Solidigm

VP Business Development
ZeroPoint Technologies

Scientist,
Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd.

Founder and CEO,
MEXT

CEO,
Intersect360 Research

Distinguished Engineer
SanDisk

Hardware Systems Engineer
Meta

Strategist,
Seagate Technology

Director of Market Development,
Solidigm

Co-Founder,
Juicedata
Rui Su is the co-founder of Juicedata, creator of JuiceFS, an open-source distributed file system built on object storage. Over the past seven years, he has led its evolution from a proprietary system to a globally adopted open-source project under the Apache 2.0 License. Rui is active in the distributed storage community.

Associate Engineer,
Samsung

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

Principal Research Scientist,
IBM

Senior Director Engineering
Keysight Technologies

Senior Staff Software Engineer,
Google

Member of Technical Staff,
Pure Storage

CEO,
In2Bank
With nearly 30 years in nearly every aspect of storage, Bruce is the CEO of in2Bank, a company which has created a new type of consumer device called an Information Bank, which allows novice users to save forever, important files, documents, and collections of digital information safely with automatic safeguards, security, and recoverability. All the backup, restore, cloud storage, replication, etc., are automatic and hidden from the user. This is based upon the Expedite software platform from AIS.

SMTS, Storage Solutions Architect,
Micron Technology

Retired,
Self

Computer Scientist,
Argonne National Laboratory

SW Architect,
VAST Data