Randy Bias

Co-Founder and CTO, Cloudscaling

Biography

His provocative views on the profound disruption caused by cloud computing have made Randy Bias one of the most influential voices in the industry. Randy uses this influence to advocate an open and honest debate about which technologies will win in driving clouds to large-scale adoption. He has inspired organizations and individuals to embrace the disruption of cloud computing to transform business processes and position themselves to succeed in a new world where computing resources are ubiquitous, inexpensive, instantly scalable, and highly available.

Since 1990, Randy has driven innovations in infrastructure, IT, operations, and 24×7 service delivery. He was the technical visionary at GoGrid and built the world’s first multi-cloud, multi-platform cloud management framework at CloudScale Networks. He led the open-licensing of GoGrid's API, which inspired Sun Microsystems, Rackspace Cloud, VMware and others to open-license their cloud APIs.

Randy's voice can be heard through the Cloudscaling blog, which has tens of thousands of page views monthly. Randy is recognized by The Next Web as one of the 25 Most Influential People Tweeting About Cloud. He is frequently interviewed in the trade and business media on cloud computing, and he speaks at dozens of industry events annually.

David Casper

Executive Director, UBS

Biography

David has more than 20 years of experience as an IT leader and innovator. A Wall St. hands-on exec specializing in "change the bank" core architecture and strategy who currently has CTO remit for UBS' global platform services compute and storage strategy. David has stood-up numerous production clouds at large enterprises and has also spent some time on the supply-side, working with top storage/cloud providers and thought leaders, gaining insight into maturity levels across the industry. David has two sons and he looks forward to the day when they can out-hack him.

Gilles Chekroun

Distinguished Systems Engineer, Cisco Systems Belgium

Biography

Gilles joined Cisco 18 years ago. His background is linked to IBM Mainframe networking technologies and he started at Cisco as a Network Design Engineer. Later on, Gilles joined the EMEA Consulting group in the IBM team and led many projects in the financial sector.

For the last ten years, Gilles focus was Storage, SAN extension technologies for designing and implementing Disaster Recovery Centers. He is now dedicated to Data Center Technologies like Unified Fabric, FCoE and Unified Computing System.

He is a member of the Cisco Europe Data Centre and Virtualization Team as a Distinguished Engineer.

Gilles is in the Board of Directors of SNIA Europe (Storage Networking Industry Association) as Technical Chair. He is SNIA Fibre Channel certified Practitioner and also VMware Certified Professional. He holds a BsC degree in Computer Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

Rich Petersen

Director Software Marketing, SanDisk

Biography

Rich joined SanDisk when the company acquired FlashSoft, where Rich was vice president of marketing. Rich has more than fifteen years’ experience in enterprise software marketing and strategy, with particular emphasis on early-stage growth. Rich was previously vice president marketing at LogicBlaze, a provider of open source middleware and SOA solutions, later acquired by IONA Technologies. As vice president of product marketing at Infravio, Rich helped launch the pioneering developer of Web Services management solutions, later acquired by WebMethods. Rich was also a startup executive with Interwoven, an early leader in Web content management, where he built the company’s original marketing team from the ground up, and led the company’s marketing effort from the start. He earned his MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California and BA in linguistics from Michigan State University.

Stacy Schwarz-Gardner

Strategic Technical Architect, Spectra Logic

Biography

Stacy Schwarz-Gardner has more than 25 years of storage industry experience and currently serves as Strategic Technical Architect for Spectra Logic. In this role, Stacy is the technical consultant for Spectra’s active archive and strategic focus accounts, and provides technical insight for the company’s product development, marketing and professional services divisions. Prior to joining Spectra Logic, Stacy served as CTO for Integrated Archive Systems and before that, CIO for Accountants, Inc.-Vedior. She holds multiple technical certifications in storage, data protection, virtualization and infrastructure, and is an Active Archive Alliance Certification Instructor.

Philippe Vincent

President and CEO, SwiftTest

Biography

Philippe Vincent, President and CEO of SwiftTest Philippe brings over 20 years of experience in technology industries including BigFix, IBM and Accenture. During his tenure at BigFix, he held a leadership position in the Systems and Security Management markets, and a successful sale to IBM in 2010. Before BigFix, he was a Partner with Accenture’s High Tech strategy practice, and a leader of its Software practice. He earned his MBA from Harvard Business School, MS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley and Diplome d’Ingenieur from ENSAM (France).

Irfan Ahmad, CTO and Co-Founder, CloudPhysics

Irfan is the CTO and co-founder of CloudPhysics where he is focused on harnessing the power of big data to deliver datacenter analytics. Previously over the course of 9 years at VMware, he was tech lead for two of VMware's flagship products: Storage DRS and Storage I/O Control and worked on virtual interrupt coalescing and asynchronous i/o. Published at top ACM and IEEE venues (FAST, ATC and IISWC), his work on lights-out storage management received best paper award at the ACM SOCC conference. He has more than 20 patents pending. He is a well-known speaker with popular VMworld talks since 2005. He has spoken at the Silicon Valley and New England vMUGs and given invited talks all over the US, Canada and abroad. Irfan was Program Chair for HotStorage '11 and General Chair for VMware's own innovation conference (RADIO) and serves on the USENIX HotStorage Steering Committee.

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David Akerson, Strategic Marketing Engineer, Intel

David Akerson is a Strategic Marketing Engineer at Intel and a member of the NVM Express Work Group. David has worked at Intel for 12 years in various marketing capacities where he has been responsible for product development from concept through production.

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Michael Ault, Oracle Flash Consulting Manager, IBM

Mike Ault is a world renowned Oracle database tuning expert. Mike has written or co-written over 24 Oracle related books. Mike is a frequent presenter at local, regional and international conferences. Mike has spent the last 5 years working with TMS (now IBM) helping companies integrate flash into their database storage subsystem.

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Cameron Brett, Director Solutions Marketing, QLogic

Cameron T. Brett is Director of Solutions Marketing at QLogic Corporation. He was previously responsible for managing strategic alliances and partnerships at PMC-Sierra, and was an officer and board of director member of the SCSI Trade Association (STA). Mr. Brett has nearly 20 years of product marketing and management experience in storage technology, including QLogic, PMC-Sierra, Broadcom and Adaptec.

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Ryan Childs, VP Solutions Architecture, Actifio

For the past 15 years, Ryan Childs has been leading field teams on the planning, design and implementation of large-scale virtualization, data protection and disaster recovery solutions.  Ryan is currently responsible for defining and providing technical solutions, support and best practices to Actifio customers, prospects and partners. Prior to Actifio, Ryan worked at EMC where he served as an Advisory Technical Consultant for the Backup Recovery Solutions Division.

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Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a widely respected storage analyst and consultant. He has over 30 years in the data storage industry with multiple engineering and management positions at high profile companies. Tom is active with SMPTE, SNIA, the IEEE Magnetics Society, IEEE CE Society, and other professional organizations. Tom is the founder and organizer of the Annual Storage Visions Conference (www.storagevisions.com), a partner to the International Consumer Electronics Show, as well as the Creative Storage Conference (www.creativestorage.org). He is the general chairman of the annual Flash Memory Summit. He is a Senior member of the IEEE, Leader in the Gerson Lehrman Group Councils of Advisors and a member of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley (CNSV). For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications. go to www.tomcoughlin.com.

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Radoslav Danilak, Co-founder & CEO Skyera CCO, Solution Technology

Dr. Danilak has over 20 years of experience and has filed more than 80 patents while architecting and designing state-of-the-art processing engines. Prior to Skyera Inc., Radoslav was founder and CTO of SandForce Inc., the first and currently only company that enabled MLC flash memory in enterprise storage. Radoslav was a senior chipset and graphics processor architect at NVIDIA, and prior to that, held senior engineering and architect positions at Nishan Systems, Toshiba, Gizmo Technologies and DanSoft. Radoslav earned his Ph.D in Computer Science and his MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Technical University of Kosice, Slovak Republic.

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David Deming, CCO, Solution Technology

David Deming is the founder, President and CTO of Solution Technology. With a degree in Electronics Engineering and more than 25 years of industry experience, David has designed many courses covering a wide range of storage networking technologies.

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Lee Donnahoo, Storage Architect, Microsoft

Lee Donnahoo has worked in the storage industry for over 15 years, 12 of those years as a storage engineer/architect in various IT groups at Microsoft. A recovering software developer, my education is in Business Management with an emphasis financial modeling and risk assessments.

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Michael Elliott , Enterprise Cloud Evangelist, Dell

Michael Elliott has over 15 years of technology marketing experience and focuses on Cloud evangelism for Large Enterprises at Dell. In this capacity, he we works with companies throughout North America on their cloud architecture. Michael started his career as a mainframe programmer for General Electric and held the role of adjunct professor of marketing at the University of Akron. Michael has a mathematics degree from the University of Cincinnati and an MBA from Pennsylvania State University.

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David Fair, ESF- Board of Directors, Unified Networking Marketing Manager, Intel

David Fair is responsible for driving demand for Intel’s storage over Ethernet (NAS, iSCSI, & FCoE) and RDMA over Ethernet (iWARP) technologies. He serves on the BoDs of the Ethernet Alliance and the Ethernet Storage Forum of SNIA. Previously at Intel, David managed enterprise IHV enabling, primarily on PCI Express, for server and workstation platforms. David represented Intel as Chair of the Ethernet Alliance iWARP Working Group. Before joining the Data Center Group, he drove new technologies into the client industry ecosystem including DVI, AGP, DVD, IEEE 1394, and PC DTV.

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Robert Finlay , Business Development Manager, JDSU

Robert has over 16 years experience helping large and small companies around the globe adopt and utilize software and Internet-based solutions for increased business productivity. Prior to JDSU, Robert worked for a number of network performance companies including Fluke Networks, Network Associates, Network General and WebTrends. Robert earned his Executive MBA from the University of Washington in 2006.

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Jim Handy, Director, Objective Analysis

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon. A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his technical depth, accurate forecasts, widespread industry presence and volume of publication. He has written hundreds of market reports, articles for trade journals, and white papers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media.

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Jared Hulbert, Software Development Manager, Micron Technology

Jared’s pioneering work on a holistic approach to therapy is starting to solve real world relationship issues between Micron enterprise SSD’s and the applications they love. Lifeless monochrome cubicles at Intel, Numonyx, and now Micron have all stored his gear over the past decade while he merrily hacked at the Linux kernel and solved memory performance issues.

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Marcelo Leal, Storage Architect, Locaweb

Marcelo Leal works with infrastructure: network, storage, and Operating Systems. Strong experience (more than 15 years): analysing and troubleshooting current solutions; prospecting and implementing new solutions to provide Internet services, operational infrastructure, storage (SAN/NAS), Network, Operating Systems and Highly Available Solutions. Marcelo is the author of the Book: "ZFS – Para usuários OpenSolaris, Windows, Mac e Linux" (Brasport, 2010) - Brazilizan Portuguese, and was a speaker at first "Open High Available Cluster" Summit at San Francisco/California - USA (2009) at OpenSolaris Community, presenting: OHAC and AVS to provide High Available services using NON-shared disks. Marcelo got three prizes (2007/2008) at the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards and an honor for participation in prize "Prêmio TI e Governo 2005" for project "Metropole" at PROCERGS/Brazil (2005). Marcelo was an Open HA Clusters Contributor at the OpenSolaris Community (2008).

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Kirill Malkin, CTO, Starboard Storage

Kirill Malkin has more than fifteen years of experience in the computer systems, data storage, networking technologies and enterprise software development industries. He was founder and CEO of Reliable Data Technology, Inc. from 1993 until 2005, when the company was acquired by RELDATA. Previously, he held key development roles at Cantor Fitzgerald and Chase Manhattan Bank.

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Alex McDonald, CTO Office, NetApp

Alex joined NetApp in 2005, after more than 30 years in a variety of roles with some of the best known names in the software industry (Legent, Oracle, BMC and others). With a background in software development, support, sales and a period as an independent consultant, Alex is now part of NetApp’s CTO Office that supports industry activities and promotes technology & standards based solutions, and is currently co-chair of the SNIA CSI (Cloud Storage Initiative), and chair of the SNIA File Protocols Special Interest Group.

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Jim McGann, Vice President, Index Engines

Jim McGann is Vice President of Index Engines. He has extensive experience with Big Data and Information Management in the Fortune 2000 sector. He has worked for leading software firms, including Information Builders and the French based engineering software provider Dassault Systems. In recent years he has worked for technology based start-ups that provided financial services and information management solutions. Prior to Index Engines, Jim was responsible for the business development of Scopeware at Mirror Worlds Technologies, the knowledge management software firm founded by Dr. David Gelernter of Yale University. Jim graduated from Villanova University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.

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Thomas Nadeau, Distinguished Engineer, Juniper Networks

Prior to Juniper Tom was a VP/Senior Principle Software Architect at CA Technologies where he is responsible for architecture and standards leadership around CA’s network infrastructure management and service assurance products.

Prior to joining CA Technologies, Tom held Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect roles at Huawei Technologies, BT and Cisco Systems.

Tom is an active participant in the IETF, ITU, and IEEE. He is co-author numerous protocol, architecture and MIB documents in the MPLS, BFD, L2/L3 VPN, MPLS-TP, pseudo-wire, and traffic engineering areas, including being a co-author of over 40 IETF RFCs, numerous internet drafts, and ITU-T contributions. Tom has been granted 14 US Patents including #7099947, #7,408,941, #7447167, #7526480, #7,583,593, #7,599,303, #7,746,793, #7,773,611, #7,782,790, #7,808,919, #7,839,847, and #7,912,934.

Tom received his BSCS from The University of New Hampshire, and a M.Sc. from The University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he has been an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science since 2000 and teaches courses on the topic of data communications. He is also on the technical committee of several prominent networking conferences where he provides technical guidance on their content, as well as frequently presents. He has been a guest editor for three issues of IEEE Communications magazine (October 2004, June 2005, and March 2008). He is the author of MPLS Network Management: MIBs, Tools, and Techniques (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2002), technical editor of Enabling VPN Aware Networks with MPLS (Prentice-Hall Publishers, 2001), contributing author of Network Management Know It All (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2008) as well as MPLS: Next Steps, Volume 1 (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2008). Tom is currently working on several books on the topic of SDN and Network Programmability.

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Philippe Nicolas, Director of Product Strategy, Scality

Philippe Nicolas is a recognized storage industry expert with 20 years of experience. He currently drives the Product Strategy at Scality (www.scality.com). Before, he launched The IT Press Tour and initiated a P2P dispersed storage software project named KerStor. Previously, he was at Brocade for 2 years as technology evangelist and strategist and spent nearly 10 years at Veritas Software and Symantec. Prior 1997, he served various technical positions at SGI and Compaq. He holds an engineering degree in computer sciences from ESI. In parallel, Philippe started the SNIA Europe France regional committee in 2001, and he served as Chairman for France until February 2010.

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David Pease, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Almaden Research Center

Dr. David Pease is a research manager and Distinguished Engineer at IBM's Almaden Research Center. He has worked in storage research for more than 20 years, and has contributed to such well-known technologies as IBM's TSM product and the UDF file system for DVD/BluRay disks. Most recently, he invented and led the development of the Linear Tape File System. He is also an Adjiunct Professor at U. C. Santa Cruz.

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Thomas Rivera, Sr. Technical Associate, File, Content & Cloud Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems

Thomas Rivera has over 27 years of experience in the storage industry, specializing in file services and data protection technology, and is a Senior Technology Associate, with Hitachi Data Systems. Thomas is also an active member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), participating as Chair of the Data Protection and Capacity Optimization (DPCO) Committee, and is a member of the Archive & Preservation Special Interest Group under SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative, as well as a member of the newly formed Analytics and Big Data Committee.

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Scott Shimomura, Director, Product Marketing, Brocade

Scott Shimomura is the Director of Product Marketing for Data Center Storage and Solutions. He is responsible for defining and executing the product marketing strategy for Brocade’s Fibre Channel SAN product portfolio. He joined Brocade in 2007, bringing over 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry. Shimomura holds an BA from University of California, Santa Barbara and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

hksingh@juniper.net Twitter: @singhkharsh

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Gregory Touretsky, Solutions Architect, Intel IT

Gregory Touretsky is Solutions Architect in the Intel IT organization. He is interested in distributed computing and storage solutions, data sharing and cloud topics. Gregory holds MSc in Computers Engineering from Novosibirsk State Technical University and MBA from Tel-Aviv University. His email is gregory.touretsky at intel.com

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Rick Walsworth, Director Product Marketing, EMC

Rick Walsworth is Director of Product Marketing for EMC’s Advanced Software Division. Rick joined EMC as part of the Kashya acquisition in 2006 where he served as Vice President of Marketing at Kashya, Prior to that, Rick was Vice President of marketing at Maranti Networks and SAN Valley Systems and has held senior executive, product management and technical positions at Com21, First Pacific Networks and Verizon (GTE). Mr. Walsworth has a BSEE from San Jose State University.

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Khye Wei, Flash Product Planning Manager, Samsung

Khye Wei is Flash Product Planning Manager at Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. In this position, he oversees the defining and enabling of Flash products. Khye also is leading efforts to build an integrated flash memory ecosystem by collaborating with Samsung partners and customers in developing the most viable approaches to growth of the Flash sector. Previously, he held engineering and marketing positions at Silicon Storage Technology for six years. He holds master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University.

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Dr. Joseph White, Distinguished Engineer, Juniper Networks

Dr. Joseph L. White is currently a Distinguished Engineer with Juniper Networks in the Campus and Data Center Business Unit. Dr. White has previously worked for Decru (NetApp) as a Techincal Director and McDATA as part of the Office of the CTO. He joined McDATA in 2003 through the Nishan Systems acquisition. In 1998, he co-founded Nishan Systems, one of the first companies to champion IP storage within the industry and deliver enterprise quality, high performance, multi-protocol SAN switches, routers, and gateways. Prior to Nishan, Dr. White worked as a physicist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center focusing on data acquisition, data analysis, and control systems programming for high energy physics experiments. He holds a PhD in High Energy Particle Physics from Rice University.

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Chris Winter, Director, Product Management, SafeNet

Chris Winter has over 20 years of experience in technical management roles for storage, security and encryption products. His background includes engineering, product management and product line director positions at Veritas, MaXXan, NeoScale, SonicWALL, LSI, and NetApp before joining SafeNet. Chris has experience in all aspects of storage and encryption product development, from market definition to user acceptance, and everything in between. He has presented at industry security and storage conferences around the world as well as reseller and developer’s conferences and CIO forums. He brings a unique, broad perspective both to the challenges facing the industry today and the difficulties that end users experience making critical technology decisions.

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SW Worth, Sr. Standards Program Manager, Microsoft

SW Worth is a Senior Standards Program Manager at Microsoft, and an elected member of the SNIA Board of Directors. From 2002 through 2006 he was the worldwide lead for the SNIA Tutorials. Before joining Microsoft in late 2003, SW Worth was Technical Marketing Manager at Crossroads Systems. From 1991-1999 he was an internal IT consultant with a large integrated electric and gas utility in the northeastern United States. He has a background in environmental engineering, and worked in paper mills in several U.S. states and in France.

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Swapna Yasarapu, Director SSD Product Marketing, Mellanox Technologies

As a director for SSD products at Mellanox Technologies, Swapna Yasarapu is charged with leading Mellanox Technologies advance SSD computing group to deliver state of the art design and products. With a Masters in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Irvine, specializing in Computer systems and software, along with an MBA from Anderson School of Management, University of California, LA with emphasis in Marketing and Strategy, Swapna blends her technical knowledge with her knowledge of the hi -tech industry in bringing enterprise-class products to market. Swapna has more than 10 years of in-depth experience in high-tech storage networks, with responsibilities spanning from ASIC development, product development, to managing hardware and software storage products through concept and development to production.

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Wen Yu, Storage Architect, Nimble Storage

Bio Pending