Speaker directory

Curtis Ballard is a Distinguished Technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the HPE Storage organization where he works on storage architecture, intellectual property, and storage technology strategy with a focus on enabling new storage technologies. Curtis has 30 years of experience in storage and storage interfaces technologies where he has worked in product design teams for storage arrays, storage enclosures, tape drives, tape libraries, and magneto optical drives. He has developed hardware designs for storage interfaces and storage controllers as well as firmware for motion control, storage interfaces, user interface, and embedded operating systems. In addition to Storage Platform development for HPE, Curtis also represents HPE in several industry organizations. Curtis is a treasurer for the NVM Express Board of Directors, is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, and is the vice-chair of the INCITS/SCSI (T10) Storage Interfaces Technical Committee where he has been the editor for several SCSI standards. He is an inventor on over 40 US patents in the storage industry across electrical, software, and mechanical disciplines.

Curtis Ballard is a Distinguished Technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the HPE Storage organization where he works on storage architecture, intellectual property, and storage technology strategy with a focus on enabling new storage technologies. Curtis has 30 years of experience in storage and storage interfaces technologies where he has worked in product design teams for storage arrays, storage enclosures, tape drives, tape libraries, and magneto optical drives. He has developed hardware designs for storage interfaces and storage controllers as well as firmware for motion control, storage interfaces, user interface, and embedded operating systems. In addition to Storage Platform development for HPE, Curtis also represents HPE in several industry organizations. Curtis is a treasurer for the NVM Express Board of Directors, is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, and is the vice-chair of the INCITS/SCSI (T10) Storage Interfaces Technical Committee where he has been the editor for several SCSI standards. He is an inventor on over 40 US patents in the storage industry across electrical, software, and mechanical disciplines.

Curtis Ballard is a Distinguished Technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the HPE Storage organization where he works on storage architecture, intellectual property, and storage technology strategy with a focus on enabling new storage technologies. Curtis has 30 years of experience in storage and storage interfaces technologies where he has worked in product design teams for storage arrays, storage enclosures, tape drives, tape libraries, and magneto optical drives. He has developed hardware designs for storage interfaces and storage controllers as well as firmware for motion control, storage interfaces, user interface, and embedded operating systems. In addition to Storage Platform development for HPE, Curtis also represents HPE in several industry organizations. Curtis is a treasurer for the NVM Express Board of Directors, is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, and is the vice-chair of the INCITS/SCSI (T10) Storage Interfaces Technical Committee where he has been the editor for several SCSI standards. He is an inventor on over 40 US patents in the storage industry across electrical, software, and mechanical disciplines.

Curtis Ballard is a Distinguished Technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the HPE Storage organization where he works on storage architecture, intellectual property, and storage technology strategy with a focus on enabling new storage technologies. Curtis has 30 years of experience in storage and storage interfaces technologies where he has worked in product design teams for storage arrays, storage enclosures, tape drives, tape libraries, and magneto optical drives. He has developed hardware designs for storage interfaces and storage controllers as well as firmware for motion control, storage interfaces, user interface, and embedded operating systems. In addition to Storage Platform development for HPE, Curtis also represents HPE in several industry organizations. Curtis is a treasurer for the NVM Express Board of Directors, is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, and is the vice-chair of the INCITS/SCSI (T10) Storage Interfaces Technical Committee where he has been the editor for several SCSI standards. He is an inventor on over 40 US patents in the storage industry across electrical, software, and mechanical disciplines.

Curtis Ballard is a Distinguished Technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the HPE Storage organization where he works on storage architecture, intellectual property, and storage technology strategy with a focus on enabling new storage technologies. Curtis has 30 years of experience in storage and storage interfaces technologies where he has worked in product design teams for storage arrays, storage enclosures, tape drives, tape libraries, and magneto optical drives. He has developed hardware designs for storage interfaces and storage controllers as well as firmware for motion control, storage interfaces, user interface, and embedded operating systems. In addition to Storage Platform development for HPE, Curtis also represents HPE in several industry organizations. Curtis is a treasurer for the NVM Express Board of Directors, is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, and is the vice-chair of the INCITS/SCSI (T10) Storage Interfaces Technical Committee where he has been the editor for several SCSI standards. He is an inventor on over 40 US patents in the storage industry across electrical, software, and mechanical disciplines.

Curtis Ballard is a Distinguished Technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the HPE Storage organization where he works on storage architecture, intellectual property, and storage technology strategy with a focus on enabling new storage technologies. Curtis has 30 years of experience in storage and storage interfaces technologies where he has worked in product design teams for storage arrays, storage enclosures, tape drives, tape libraries, and magneto optical drives. He has developed hardware designs for storage interfaces and storage controllers as well as firmware for motion control, storage interfaces, user interface, and embedded operating systems. In addition to Storage Platform development for HPE, Curtis also represents HPE in several industry organizations. Curtis is a treasurer for the NVM Express Board of Directors, is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, and is the vice-chair of the INCITS/SCSI (T10) Storage Interfaces Technical Committee where he has been the editor for several SCSI standards. He is an inventor on over 40 US patents in the storage industry across electrical, software, and mechanical disciplines.

Stephen is an expert in performance storage, persistent and non-volatile memory, computer networking, signal processing and error correction coding and has worked on some of the most complicated communication and storage solutions in the industry. He has a PhD from Edinburgh University.

Lianjie Cao is a senior research scientist at the Networking and Distributed Systems Lab (NDSL) of Hewlett Packard Labs, HPE. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. His research interests include system performance optimization and resource allocation for network functions virtualization (NFV), container systems, 5G systems, machine learning systems, and storage 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.

Vikas Choudhary joined MaxLinear in 2024, responsible for the business strategy and product development for the company’s Connectivity & Storage business. In this role, he will be driving business and product strategies that enable next generation of ethernet (copper) and storage products in data centers, cloud networks, and enterprise storage. Vikas has over 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, starting as an analog/mixed-signal design engineer at STMicroelectronics. He advanced through leadership roles at Silicon Systems/Texas Instruments, PMC-Sierra/Microsemi, and Analog Devices (ADI). Most recently, he was Vice President of Marketing, Sales, and Systems at Murata-pSemi, driving growth in consumer mobile, connectivity, wireless infrastructure, and high-performance components. Vikas holds an MBA in Marketing & Strategy from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA, and a B.S. from BITS Ranchi, India. He is the author of five patents, multiple publications, and editor of a foundational MEMS technology book.
 

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.

Jungmin Choi is Director of Memory Systems Research at SK hynix, where he leads AI memory solution research. His current research interests focus on next-generation memory system architecture, which include Processing-in-Memory, Custom HBM, CXL memory expansion, memory disaggregation, and computational memory. He joined SK hynix in 2018 as a memory system architect, working on system-level architecture design for emerging memory solutions. He has a diverse background spanning memory devices to controllers with expertise in the area of CPU, GPU, DSP, FPGAs, fabric interconnect, and memory systems.
 

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.

Anthony Constantine is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff responsible for Storage Standards at Micron. He is very active in SNIA as co-chair of the SFF TWG, an author for several EDSFF specifications, and author or contributor to several other SFF TWG specifications. He is also a past member of the SNIA Technical Council. In addition, Anthony contributes to PCI-SIG, JEDEC, NVMe, and Open Compute Platform (OCP). Anthony has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry with an expertise in memory, storage, physical interfaces, low power technologies, and form factors. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from UC Davis.

Anthony Constantine is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff responsible for Storage Standards at Micron. He is very active in SNIA as co-chair of the SFF TWG, an author for several EDSFF specifications, and author or contributor to several other SFF TWG specifications. He is also a past member of the SNIA Technical Council. In addition, Anthony contributes to PCI-SIG, JEDEC, NVMe, and Open Compute Platform (OCP). Anthony has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry with an expertise in memory, storage, physical interfaces, low power technologies, and form factors. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from UC Davis.

Anthony Constantine is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff responsible for Storage Standards at Micron. He is very active in SNIA as co-chair of the SFF TWG, an author for several EDSFF specifications, and author or contributor to several other SFF TWG specifications. He is also a past member of the SNIA Technical Council. In addition, Anthony contributes to PCI-SIG, JEDEC, NVMe, and Open Compute Platform (OCP). Anthony has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry with an expertise in memory, storage, physical interfaces, low power technologies, and form factors. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from UC Davis.

Anthony Constantine is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff responsible for Storage Standards at Micron. He is very active in SNIA as co-chair of the SFF TWG, an author for several EDSFF specifications, and author or contributor to several other SFF TWG specifications. He is also a past member of the SNIA Technical Council. In addition, Anthony contributes to PCI-SIG, JEDEC, NVMe, and Open Compute Platform (OCP). Anthony has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry with an expertise in memory, storage, physical interfaces, low power technologies, and form factors. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from UC Davis.

Alan Deng is with Google's Technical Infrastructure Net Zero team, focusing on decarbonizing the datacenter hardware supply chain. Alan leads the development of supply chain Carbon Reduction Initiatives and engages key hard drive disk (HDD) suppliers to drive net zero goals. Working closely with Google's Carbon Footprinting team and as a liaison with HDD suppliers, Alan collects supplier primary activity data, such as electricity consumption and production output data, and product LCA data to help quantify GHG emissions that are attributed to Google's scope 3 emissions, identifies emission hotspots, and drives carbon reductions in partnerships with the suppliers.

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.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohamad-el-batal-3055151/

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.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohamad-el-batal-3055151/

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.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohamad-el-batal-3055151/

John Geldman is a Director of SSD Industry Standards at KIOXIA. John is currently an active contributor to NVM Express, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, JEDEC, OCP, PCI-SIG, SATA IO, SNIA, and IEEE SISWG. John has had corporate leadership responsibility for standards for multi-billion dollar storage vendors since 2011. He has been involved in storage standards since 1992, with an early introduction to standards that included the transition from X3T9 to T13 (ATA) and T10 (SCSI), as well as the transition from PCMCIA to CardBus. John has been an active FMS CAB member for at least 10 years.

John Geldman is a Director of SSD Industry Standards at KIOXIA. John is currently an active contributor to NVM Express, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, JEDEC, OCP, PCI-SIG, SATA IO, SNIA, and IEEE SISWG. John has had corporate leadership responsibility for standards for multi-billion dollar storage vendors since 2011. He has been involved in storage standards since 1992, with an early introduction to standards that included the transition from X3T9 to T13 (ATA) and T10 (SCSI), as well as the transition from PCMCIA to CardBus. John has been an active FMS CAB member for at least 10 years.

John Geldman is a Director of SSD Industry Standards at KIOXIA. John is currently an active contributor to NVM Express, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, JEDEC, OCP, PCI-SIG, SATA IO, SNIA, and IEEE SISWG. John has had corporate leadership responsibility for standards for multi-billion dollar storage vendors since 2011. He has been involved in storage standards since 1992, with an early introduction to standards that included the transition from X3T9 to T13 (ATA) and T10 (SCSI), as well as the transition from PCMCIA to CardBus. John has been an active FMS CAB member for at least 10 years.

Nilesh is Founder/ CTO, Numem, with successful exit at Netlogic. He is an expert in productizing Emerging Memory Technologies and computational memories with previous experience at Broadcom and other leading technology companies.

Jason is a Distinguished Engineer 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. Jason also serves as Chair of the SNIA Accelerated Object I/O Technical Working Group. 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.

Jason is a Distinguished Engineer 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. Jason also serves as Chair of the SNIA Accelerated Object I/O Technical Working Group. 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.

Jason is a Distinguished Engineer 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. Jason also serves as Chair of the SNIA Accelerated Object I/O Technical Working Group. 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.

Jason is a Distinguished Engineer 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. Jason also serves as Chair of the SNIA Accelerated Object I/O Technical Working Group. 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.

Alessandro Goncalves is a seasoned Storage Solutions Architect with deep expertise at the intersection of high-performance storage and AI/ML workloads. Currently at Solidigm, he architects and benchmarks SSD-based solutions tailored for emerging AI/ML pipelines, collaborating with industry consortia like MLCommons to drive next-generation storage standards. His background includes designing persistent memory solutions at Intel for Optane and accelerating performance tracing and debugging across hyperscaler environments. Alessandro’s recent work focuses on AI/ML storage integration, including workload-aware benchmarking, storage telemetry tooling, and scalable pipelines for data-centric AI systems.

Jonmichael Hands is the Chief Executive Officer for FarmGPU, a data center provider of sustainable GPU hosting and AI infrastructure, catering to the increasing global demand for cost-effective, high-performance compute and storage resources. Before this, he advised Chia Network in storage and sustainability. JM spent the prior ten years at Intel in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group working on product line management, strategic planning, and technical marketing for the Intel data center SSDs. In addition, he served as the chair for NVM Express (NVMe), SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) SSD special interest group, and Open Compute Project for open storage hardware innovation. JM started his storage career at Sun Microsystems designing storage arrays (JBODs) and holds an electrical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines.

Jonmichael Hands is the Chief Executive Officer for FarmGPU, a data center provider of sustainable GPU hosting and AI infrastructure, catering to the increasing global demand for cost-effective, high-performance compute and storage resources. Before this, he advised Chia Network in storage and sustainability. JM spent the prior ten years at Intel in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group working on product line management, strategic planning, and technical marketing for the Intel data center SSDs. In addition, he served as the chair for NVM Express (NVMe), SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) SSD special interest group, and Open Compute Project for open storage hardware innovation. JM started his storage career at Sun Microsystems designing storage arrays (JBODs) and holds an electrical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines.

Jonmichael Hands is the Chief Executive Officer for FarmGPU, a data center provider of sustainable GPU hosting and AI infrastructure, catering to the increasing global demand for cost-effective, high-performance compute and storage resources. Before this, he advised Chia Network in storage and sustainability. JM spent the prior ten years at Intel in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group working on product line management, strategic planning, and technical marketing for the Intel data center SSDs. In addition, he served as the chair for NVM Express (NVMe), SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) SSD special interest group, and Open Compute Project for open storage hardware innovation. JM started his storage career at Sun Microsystems designing storage arrays (JBODs) and holds an electrical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines.

Erich Haratsch is the Senior Director of Architecture at Marvell, where he leads the architecture definition of SSD and storage controllers.

Before joining Marvell, he worked at Seagate and LSI, focusing on SSD controllers.

Earlier in his career, he contributed to multiple generations of HDD controllers at LSI and Agere Systems.

Erich began his career at AT&T and Lucent Bell Labs, working on Gigabit Ethernet over copper, optical communications, and the MPEG-4 video standard.

He is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and holds more than 200 U.S. patents.

A Senior Member of IEEE, Erich earned his MS and PhD degrees from the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

Steffen Hellmold is the President of Cerabyte, Inc. He is responsible for driving business development efforts, scaling up the customer and partner ecosystem, leading industry and marketing engagements, and providing industry thought leadership. Steffen has more than 25 years of industry experience in product, technology, business & corporate development as well as strategy roles. He served as Senior Vice President, Business Development, Data Storage at Twist Bioscience and held executive management positions at Western Digital, Everspin, SandForce, Seagate Technology, Lexar Media/Micron, Samsung Semiconductor, SMART Modular and Fujitsu. He has been deeply engaged in various industry trade associations and standards organizations, including co-founding the DNA Data Storage Alliance in 2020 and the USB Flash Drive Alliance, where he served as president from 2003 to 2007. He holds an Economic Electrical Engineering degree (EEE) from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

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.

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.

Wen-Mei Hwu is a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist and Senior Research Director at NVIDIA. As an experienced professor, Dr. Hwu has a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. He is skilled in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Architecture, AI Computing Systems, Parallel Computing Systems, GPU Computing, Parallel Algorithms and Parallel Programming. Dr. Hwu is an author, and entrepreneur with a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) focused in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley. 

Snehal is a Staff Engineer at Nutanix, Inc for past 9 years and contributes to Core Data Path for Acropolis Operating Systems (AOS) for Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure platform. Snehal has been leading efforts for architecture and development for Erasure Coding technology on Nutanix stack. Prior to Nutanix, she worked at Netapp focussing on projects related to minimizing filesystem fragmentation on WAFL (Write anywhere file layout) filesystem on traditional 3-tier storage arrays.

Staff Engineer in Nutanix Objects R&D. Over 8 years experience working in distributed systems. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sadhanakannan/

Ugur is a Distinguished Engineer in Dell’s Storage CTO organization, where she focuses on advancing storage technologies for modern AI workloads and building a robust, open AI ecosystem through strategic partnerships and active community engagement. She leads efforts to accelerate AI inference within the Dell AI Data Platform, driving innovations in storage connectors, protocols, data paths, and end‑to‑end I/O pipelines to meet the performance demands of large‑scale AI systems. Her work spans deep storage–compute integration and open‑source collaboration, ensuring that next‑generation storage platforms deliver highly scalable, low‑latency data access required for emerging AI workloads.

Ugur is a Distinguished Engineer in Dell’s Storage CTO organization, where she focuses on advancing storage technologies for modern AI workloads and building a robust, open AI ecosystem through strategic partnerships and active community engagement. She leads efforts to accelerate AI inference within the Dell AI Data Platform, driving innovations in storage connectors, protocols, data paths, and end‑to‑end I/O pipelines to meet the performance demands of large‑scale AI systems. Her work spans deep storage–compute integration and open‑source collaboration, ensuring that next‑generation storage platforms deliver highly scalable, low‑latency data access required for emerging AI workloads.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yuemin Lu is a core member of the Azure Disks team, drove the product innovation of the Disk portfolio, architectural reviews of 3rd party storage onboarding to Azure, and performance optimization of data intensive workloads. Before joining Azure Storage, Yuemin was part of Azure Compute Core OS team, led the productization of Azure Block Cache technology.

Bill Lynn is an engineering Fellow at AMD.  Bill has over 40 years’ experience architecting and developing storage subsystems.  Bill started out as a disk drive designer with Digital Equipment Corporation designing 9”, 5.25”, 3.5” and 2.5” disk drives. Later he moved to Adaptec working in sales, marketing, and eventually the Office of the CTO as a RAID architect. During his tenure at Adaptec Bill helped form the SNIA IP Storage Forum and served as the forum chair for 2 years. Bill ran the early iSCSI interoperability events before transitioning the iSCSI interoperability effort to UNH. Bill was also one of the authors of the Infiniband specification. In 2006 Bill moved to Dell where he was responsible for server storage architecture. Bill was the original author of the SFF-8639 U.2 connector specification, one of the current editors of the SFF-TA-1008 EDSFF E3 device specification and served as Dell’s representative to the NVMe Board of Directors.  Bill moved to AMD in 2023 as part of AMD’s Data Center Architecture and Strategy group.

J. Mazzie received an M.S. in electrical engineering from West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV) in 2008. He is currently a Member of Technical Staff, Systems Performance Engineer, at Micron Technology, Inc. (2016-Present: TX, USA) and member of the SNIA Technical Council (Oct 2025-Present). John previously held roles at Dell, Inc. (Senior Storage Engineer) and WVHTC Foundation (Staff Engineer). He is currently focused on application performance analysis and tracing for AI workloads, as well as tool development.

Sarika Mehta is a Senior Storage Solutions Architect at Solidigm, bringing over 16 years of experience from her tenure at Intel’s storage division and Solidigm. Her focus is to work closely with Solidigm customers and partners to optimize their storage solutions for cost and performance. She is responsible for tuning and optimizing Solidigm’s SSDs for various storage use cases in a variety of storage deployments that range from direct-attached storage to tiered and non-tiered disaggregated storage solutions. She has diverse storage background in validation, performance benchmarking, pathfinding, technical marketing, and solutions architecture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sarthak is a member of technical staff and has been working at nutanix for close to 2 years. Sarthak has worked as part of data protection team and has developed infrastructure for version management and replication feature where was involved in multipart object replication.

Currie Munce has over 40 years' experience in storage technology. He began at IBM's Research Lab in Almaden Valley, tackling mechanical challenges on 14-inch HDDs. For over a decade Dr. Munce led the research and advanced technology teams at IBM and then Hitachi GST, driving many innovations still used in enterprise HDDs today. At HGST, while heading the Enterprise business unit, he launched a partnership in 2008 with Intel to develop HGST’s first enterprise SSD SAS product. Currie began focusing more on SSD’s, initially at HGST/WD, and then fully when he joined Micron to lead the SSD engineering and then the future storage architecture teams. Dr Munce holds an MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Chris J. Newburn, who goes by CJ, is a Distinguished Engineer who drives HPC strategy and the technical IO roadmap in NVIDIA GPU Cloud, focused on pushing the envelope for storage and networking programming models at scale, data center architecture and security, and scaled systems. He is a community builder with a passion for building an ecosystem that extends the core capabilities of hardware and software platforms from HPC into AI, data science, and visualization. He co-leads the Storage-Next effort to optimize products for IOPs/TCO. He tinkers with and leverages NVIDIA and vendor products in a lab packed with scaled compute, storage and networking gear to apply and extend new tech. He's delighted to have worked on volume products that his Mom used and that help researchers do their life's work in science that previously wasn't possible.

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.

Lee Prewitt is a Director of Cloud Hardware Storage at Microsoft with 30+ years of storage industry experience ranging from Magneto-Optical to spinning rust to Flash. His former work at Microsoft has included working in the Windows and Devices Group where he was responsible for many of the components in the storage stack including File Systems, Spaces, Storport and Microsoft’s inbox miniport drivers (SD, UFS, NVMe, etc.). He currently works in the Azure Hardware group where he is responsible for future Data Center storage initiatives, specifications (OPC, NVMe, EDSFF), and evangelization.

Tom Prohofsky is a storage architect and researcher at Seagate Technology's CTO office, focusing on scalable storage solutions using open-source projects and Kubernetes. His career began with optical networks at Unisys, then moved to Tricord Systems, where he led test teams for a distributed file system. He later directed Infiniband ASIC development at Qlogic.

Madhavan Ravi is a Hardware Systems Engineer responsible for designing and deploying Storage Hardware gear for Exabyte scale Distributed Systems at Meta. His interests include hardware architecture, storage system efficiency and performance, storage for AI application, storage media, and file systems. Prior to Storage, his experiences include PCB design for Network Switches, post-silicon SerDes and analog front-end validation. He earned his Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

Bahar Riazi is with Google's Technical Infrastructure (TI) Carbon Footprint team, where she performs life cycle assessments (LCAs) for key components, including hard disk drives (HDDs). She uses primary data collected from suppliers by Google's supplier engagement team to calculate the carbon footprint at both the supplier and capacity-specific levels. Bahar identifies emission hotspots and quantifies carbon reductions in HDDs resulting from various reduction levers, such as clean energy.

Lisa Rivalin is a Production System Engineer on the Hardware Design team at Meta. Her current focus is on building the data foundation and models to reduce Meta's IT hardware inventory's carbon footprint. For the past few years at Meta, she has been leveraging physics-based models and machine learning to optimize data center designs and operations, contributing to Meta's sustainability goals.

Before joining Meta, Lisa was a lead research scientist and project manager at Engie, where she developed new energy performance contracts and implemented smart building technologies. She also served as an affiliate research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Lisa holds a PhD in Applied Statistics and Energy from Mines ParisTech, a Master of Science in Engineering from the University of Poitiers, and a Master of Arts in History and Philosophy of Science from Paris Diderot University.

Senior Staff Engineer in Nutanix Objects R&D. Over 10 years of experience working in distributed systems. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayur-sadavarte-35794915/

Nader has spent his career leading technology teams and driving company success for over 30 years. He led the STEC Engineering department and launched the Enterprise SSD Market. More recently Nader led a team at Western Digital in its Enterprise SSD product platform. In 2013, he co-founded NGD Systems to develop an emerging solution to the SSD market, creating the world’s first Computational Storage device. 

Ines Sousa is a Senior Sustainability Industry Advisor at Microsoft. Her work focuses on advancing industry-wide harmonization of actionable and scalable environmental impact assessment methodologies for Cloud IT hardware supply chain and driving strategic partnerships to accelerate decarbonization in the semiconductor industry. Prior to Microsoft, Ines led supply chain carbon footprinting, product life cycle assessment (LCA), supplier engagement and circularity initiatives at Google that were foundational for the company’s Net Zero supply chain strategy. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT in LCA for Product Design and a Master of Engineering in Environmental and Water Quality Engineering, also from MIT. She is an Environmental Engineer with a deep commitment to driving sustainability through data-driven, system-level innovation and collaboration.

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.

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.

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.

Himabindu Tummala has been with Dell for 25 years. She is an innovator, founding member of WomenTech Network, and founding member of Worcester Women For Good.

Wes Vaske is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Micron Technology. As a Storage Solutions Architect with over 15 years of experience in data center storage systems, he is currently focused on developing high-performance NVMe solutions for AI workloads. He is a lead contributor to the MLPerf Storage Working Group, where he helps define industry benchmarks for AI storage performance. Wes is a frequent presenter at Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) and SNIA Developer Conference (SDC). Prior to his current role, Wes was a Systems Performance Engineer with the Data Center Workloads Engineering team for more than a decade, where he pioneered system observation, tracing, and analysis tools as well as developing automation frameworks enabling reproducible and insightful performance analysis across diverse environments that have become foundational to Micron’s workload-first product development strategy. His earlier career includes performance engineering for Oracle RAC database systems at Dell Technologies. Wes holds a B.S. in Physics from Iowa State University and continues to drive innovation at the intersection of storage, AI, and systems performance.

Wes Vaske is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Micron Technology. As a Storage Solutions Architect with over 15 years of experience in data center storage systems, he is currently focused on developing high-performance NVMe solutions for AI workloads. He is a lead contributor to the MLPerf Storage Working Group, where he helps define industry benchmarks for AI storage performance. Wes is a frequent presenter at Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) and SNIA Developer Conference (SDC). Prior to his current role, Wes was a Systems Performance Engineer with the Data Center Workloads Engineering team for more than a decade, where he pioneered system observation, tracing, and analysis tools as well as developing automation frameworks enabling reproducible and insightful performance analysis across diverse environments that have become foundational to Micron’s workload-first product development strategy. His earlier career includes performance engineering for Oracle RAC database systems at Dell Technologies. Wes holds a B.S. in Physics from Iowa State University and continues to drive innovation at the intersection of storage, AI, and systems performance.

Hsiu-Fan Wang is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he was worked on Cloud Databases and Cloud Storage for the last 10 years. He is a tech lead for GCS's Serving Fabric team, focusing on improving performance and throughput.

40+ year veteran with most of that time focused on flash memory component and SSD design. He holds 65+ patents covering flash memory and security. He is currently retired and enjoying contributing time and energy to the industry he's spent his entire adult life developing.

40+ year veteran with most of that time focused on flash memory component and SSD design. He holds 65+ patents covering flash memory and security. He is currently retired and enjoying contributing time and energy to the industry he's spent his entire adult life developing.

Diman Zad Tootaghaj is a Senior Researcher at Hewlett Packard Labs in California. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, and her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. Her research focuses on advancing computer networks and distributed systems, with interests spanning serverless computing, sustainability in computing, network programmability, SmartNICs, SD-WAN, edge-as-a-service platforms, serverless orchestration and auto-scaling, CXL, optimization algorithms, and consensus protocols.