SNIA Developer Conference (SDC)

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.

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.

Carl D’Halluin brings over 25 years of deep expertise in designing distributed storage systems. He was a core architect behind Dell EMC Centera, the world’s first commercial object storage system. Centera established early standards for immutable and compliant storage. Carl was also the lead architect at Q-layer, a pioneer in cloud virtualization technology later acquired by Sun Microsystems. He continued pushing innovation at Amplidata as Chief Architect, designing an ultra-scalable, geo-distributed S3-compatible storage system. Following successive acquisitions by Western Digital and Quantum, this product is currently known as Quantum ActiveScale Object Storage. Now serving as Chief Technology Officer at Datadobi, Carl has shifted focus from the storage backend to the client layer, building intelligent software solutions for data analysis and data mobility in large-scale hybrid cloud environments, across file and object storage. An inventor at heart, Carl holds more than 25 patents in data storage technologies. His work continues to advance the state of the art in high-performance, hybrid data infrastructure for the enterprise.

Hammerspace founder and Chief Executive Officer David Flynn is a recognized leader in IT innovation who has been architecting disruptive computing platforms since his early work in supercomputing and Linux systems. David pioneered the use of flash for enterprise application acceleration as founder and former CEO of Fusion-io, which was acquired by SanDisk in 2014. He served as Fusion-io President and CEO until May 2013 and board member until July 2013. Previously, David served as Chief-Architect at Linux Networx where he was instrumental in the creation of the OpenFabrics stack and designed several of the world’s largest supercomputers leveraging Linux clustering, InfiniBand, RDMA-based technologies. David holds more than 100 patents in areas across web browser technologies, mobile device management, network switching and protocols to distributed storage systems. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Brigham Young University and serves on boards for several organizations and startup companies.

Christoph Hellwig has been working with and on the Linux kernel since 1999. In addition he is or was involved with various other Open Source projects. After a number of smaller network administration and programming jobs he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and user level aspects of the OpenLinux distribution. Since 2004 he has been running his own consulting business specializing in Linux file systems and storage, but also working on virtualization and the RISC-V open source instruction set. He is an active participant in the NVMe technical working group and the IEFT Network File System Version 4 working group. He is one of the maintainers of the NVMe driver in Linux, and one of the busiest contributors to the Linux kernel. Christoph Hellwig has worked for well known customers such as Dell, Facebook, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat, Silicon Graphics, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Western Digital and various startups.

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 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.

William Moyes is a key contributor and Editor for the SDXI specification. He is an AMD Fellow and End-to-End Server Architect with 25 years of experience in the PC ecosystem. His background includes Security, Storage, Firmware, and Persistent Memory. He also serves on the UEFI board of directors.

Sergei Platonov is the Vice President of Strategy at Xinnor, a technology company specializing in storage solutions. Sergei's journey in the tech industry began in 2010 when he graduated from the university, earning a degree in Computer Science. With a strong passion for storage technologies, he joined SDS start-up in 2009. Throughout his career, Sergei has been instrumental in the development of Storage Area Networks (SAN) and has focused on the research and implementation of cutting-edge technologies such as Flash, NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), CXL (Compute Express Link), and storage performance improvement techniques. His expertise in these areas has enabled Xinnor to create highly efficient and reliable storage solutions that cater to the evolving needs of businesses. Sergei's contributions to the industry go beyond development work. He is a recognized thought leader and has delivered more than 30 presentations at conferences, sharing his insights and knowledge on storage technologies. Additionally, he has authored numerous articles, shedding light on the advancements in Storage Class Memory and its impact on storage performance.

Shruti Sethi is a Zealous professional having a deep experience in both computing and storage systems. She has 12+ years industry experience working extensively on Graphics power management, workload management, setting performance targets and Data Center storage hardware. She is currently most vested into End-to-End Cost Optimized Storage, Efficient Storage Management techniques, Pricing for Storage Services and simultaneously driving Sustainability in Storage Solutions. Shruti is a part of the strategy product team driving the next wave of initiatives in AZURE STORAGE. She is also the Steering Committee Representative of Open Compute Project's Sustainability Projects and strives to push industry Sustainability work. Shruti has a Master of Science in Computer Architecture from Georgia Institute of technology and an MBA from University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business).

Addison Snell is a veteran of the High Performance Computing industry and the co-founder and CEO of Intersect360 Research, delivering data and insights covering the HPC-AI market and coordinating the HPC-AI Leadership Organization (HALO). He launched his company in 2007 as Tabor Research, a division of Tabor Communications. He brought the company independent in 2009 as Intersect360 Research together with his partner, Christopher Willard, Ph.D. Under his leadership, Intersect360 Research has become a premier source of market information, analysis, and consulting for the high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Addison is a frequent keynote speaker and panel moderator at industry events, has testified before the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission Congressional Subcommittee, and was named one of 2010’s “People to Watch” by HPCwire. Prior to Intersect360 Research, Addison was an HPC industry analyst for IDC. Addison originally gained industry recognition as a marketing leader and spokesperson for SGI’s supercomputing products and strategy. Addison holds a master’s degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. Addison is a competent bridge player, an excellent Scrabble player, and a puzzle and game enthusiast, particularly word puzzles. In 2022 he achieved a life “bucket list” goal of constructing crosswords for the New York Times.

Ross Stenfort is a Hardware System Engineer at Meta delivering scalable storage solutions. He has been involved in the development of storage systems, SSDs, ROCs, HBAs and HDDs with many successful products and over 40 patents. Some of his industry and ecosystem activities include being OCP Storage Co-Lead and a NVM Express board member.

Ace Stryker is the director of market development at Solidigm, a California-based maker of SSDs, where he focuses on emerging AI technologies and the value of storage. He previously worked at Intel. He has an MBA from Cornell University and is based in the Sacramento area. In 2006, he was named the TIME Magazine person of the year.

Anisa Su joined the Global Open eco-System Team within the memory division of Samsung as a software engineer after graduating from the University of Washington with a B.S. in Computer Science in 2024. She is interested in building expertise in systems software/memory management.

Vasily Tarasov is a Principal Research Scientist at IBM. His research and engineering interests revolve around data storage, focusing on high-performance storage systems for Hybrid Clouds and AI. At IBM Vasily led research projects on making IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS) container-native, building a storage acceleration tier for AI workloads, and creating high-performance object store for data lakehouse. Most recently Vasily works on building and operating high-performance storage solutions for IBM's Vela supercomputer for AI. In the past, Vasily studied data deduplication, storage performance and workload analysis, user-space file systems, and storage for containers. Vasily holds Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stony Brook University, published dozens of papers in systems conferences, and regularly serves on program committees of top-tier storage conferences.

Jeff Terrace is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he has worked on Google Cloud Storage for the past 12 years. He is a tech lead for GCS's Serving Frontend team, which maintains GCS's XML compatibility API. Prior to coming to Google, he earned his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University where he studied distributed systems. He currently lives and works from his home in Massachusetts.

Huihuo Zheng is a Computer Scientist in the AI/ML group at Argonne National Laboratory. His research focuses on high-performance data management, parallel I/O, and large-scale distributed training for deep learning and large language models. He applies these techniques to advance domain sciences such as physics, chemistry, and material sciences. As the co-lead of the MLPerf Storage Working Group, Huihuo plays a key role in developing benchmark suites to evaluate storage system performance for demanding AI applications.