Rakesh Jain

STSM and Researcher – Cloud, IoT, Analytics at IBM Research

Working on setting the strategic vision and technical architecture for product and service offerings in the areas of integrated systems and storage management of large scale data centers, including software defined environments, information lifecycle management, optimization of resources in cloud environment and disaster recovery. In addition, Cloud native application architecture and their high availability and disaster recovery, AI enabled cloud resources management and distributed application deployment and monitoring of IoT environments. Exploring and prototyping new product ideas.

Sanil Kumar D

TOC Co-Chair, SODA Foundation

Founder & CEO, Caze Labs Private Limited.

Sanil is an industry-awarded expert with over 2 decades of experience in Open Source, Cloud, Containers, Data Management, Edge Computing, Blockchain, Linux/ARM, & Realtime Systems. He has worked in various MNCs, building technology products & solutions and is associated with industry organizations such as SODA Foundation, Linux Foundation, IEEE, SNIA, CNCF, CCICI, & OSI, in key roles. He excels in technology and open source research, contributing to business strategies, roadmaps, and new projects.

Sanil played a key role in founding SODA Foundation and KubeEdge. He has been publishing research papers and holds patents in monitoring, debugging, cloud, edge, blockchain, containers, system optimization, and application migration. He has delivered numerous keynotes and technical sessions at international conferences.

Sanil is passionate about mentoring students and professionals and collaborating with academia and corporates. He has founded a citizen volunteer group, 123Life, and enjoys cycling and writing on his blog. Sanil hails from Thiruvananthapuram, India, and currently resides in Bangalore with his family.

In May 2023, he founded Caze Labs and continues to contribute to the SODA Foundation as Technical Oversight Committee Co-Chair while pursuing his PhD in Open Source and Observability. He strongly believes that open source can drive global collaborative technology research and innovation, bringing value to business and society.

Kazuaki Harada

Infrastructure Engineer and Tech Lead for Product Development, Innovation Center, NTT Communications

Kazuaki Harada manages K8s infrastructure for NTT Communications’ R&D teams, proposes cloud-native solutions, and advocates cloud-native development.
He hopes that SODA helps disaster recovery operations across multiple clusters.

Xuewei Chen

Storage Senior R&D Specialist of China Unicom Cloud, China Unicom

Xuewei Chen has nearly 15 years of experience in storage system development.
He has worked on various designs and developments involving ip-san、SDS、storage management.

His work is mainly focused on high performance 、large scale storage、highly available architectures now.

Masanori Itoh

Project General Manager, Toyota Motor Corporation

After working for several IT vendors as a researcher/engineer with OS speciality, Masanori Itoh joined Toyota Info Technology Center (ITC) in 2018, and joined Toyota because of ITC merger in 2019.

Kiran Mova

 Senior Open Source Engineering Manager, VMware Tanzu

Kiran Mova leads the Open Source Engineering team for VMWare Tanzu multi-cloud platform focusing on Kubernetes and other upstream projects. Kiran has over 20 years of experience working on platform and infrastructure products at companies like Cisco, Lucent and Novell. Prior to joining VMware, he was the co-founder of a storage startup where he worked as an architect and engineering manager for Open Source projects that have now become part of CNCF

He is known by his team members for Laissez-faire leadership style by being transparent to the team about the business goals and putting the trust in the team to lead the efforts. He is also an active organizing member of the Open Source events and foundations led from India. He is an active member of CNCF and SODA.
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John Bent

Senior Director, Seagate

John Bent is currently a Senior Director in the Systems organization at Seagate where he previously served as Chief Architect for Seagate Government Solutions. He has researched, designed, and built storage and I/O systems all throughout his multi-decade career. His recent focus is on distributed data platforms for highly efficient mass capacity object storage. A graduate of Amherst College with a focus on cultural anthropology, John served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Palau before earning a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John has previously worked at Los Alamos National Labs, EMC, and was the the Field CTO at DDN. John is bilingual in English and Palauan, is the author of 33 academic peer-reviewed articles, including a Best Paper nominee at SC09, the author of 93 USPTO patents, and has a google scholar reported h-index of 21. John’s favorite place to be is in a speed boat at dusk heading out to the reef with a speargun in hand and a betelnut in mouth.

Yusuf Yildiz

Solutions Architect, LinBit

He aims to work for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems; especially multi-user / multi-tennant cloud systems, such as servers & storage systems. He seeks to ensure that the uptime, performance, resources, and security of the systems are all well balanced. He is currently focused on Storage as a Service, Software Defined Storage, virtualization technologies, storage systems in general and also public clouds.

Subhendu Banerjee

Storage Architect, Wipro Limited

Architect in Storage domain with relevant experience of more than 18 years. Mostly experienced in DAS, SAN, NAS, Remote Office Branch Office, RAID, SAS, SATA etc.

Keshava Munegowda

Vice president, Goldman Sachs

Dr Keshava Munegowda is the founder of open source project SBK (Storage Benchmark Kit): https://github.com/kmgowda/SBK

Dr. Keshava Munegowda is currently working as Vice President at Securities database engineering division of Goldman Sachs, Bangalore, India. He received Bachelor’s Degree in Computer science and Engineering in 2001 from Bangalore University, India, and M-Tech degree in computer Science and Engineering in 2004 from Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Karnataka and received PhD degree in field of computer science from VTU in 2016. He is working in the field of storage systems, file systems, Big data and Network Protocols. Dr. Keshava Munegowda holds several U S patents in the field of File systems and he has published research papers in international conferences and Journals.

Sanil Kumar D

TOC Co-Chair SODA Foundation

Sanil Kumar is leading the effort of building the Open Data Framework for SODA Foundation. He has more than 23 years of product development expertise in Linux, Open Source, ARM Ecosystem, Cloud, Data Management, Edge Computing, Blockchain and Distributed Computing. He incubated multiple open source projects and has multiple patents and papers in his credit. He is an industry-awarded technologist and has been featured in the Times of India. He has presented keynotes and technical sessions at leading international conferences and is also contributing to the industry through important roles at CNCF, SODA, IEEE, CCICI and various open source projects.

He founded 123Life, a citizen volunteer group, and has been active in social support initiatives. He believes that open source is a great avenue for young developers to the global technology research landscape.

Currently he is building a new technology startup and also doing his PhD in Open Source and Observability.

Pankaj Deshpande

IBM India

Innovator, 2-times entrepreneur, start-up specialist along with experience of working in large corporate, Pankaj Deshpande has designed and delivered innovative, quality system software products in the areas of storage, networking, security, cloud, consumer segment etc. In a career spread over more than 20+ years, He has worked on various designs involving scale-out, distributed, high performance, highly available architectures.

At IBM, Pankaj is working as an Architect, Strategist for IBM Storage Systems. Key part of his role in IBM is in architecture, design and development of products, evolving technology/product strategy for IBM. Key technical contributions include storage technologies, storage security, cyber-security, public/private cloud integration, storage for VMs/Kubernetes etc. Pankaj also represents IBM point of view in some of the standards bodies.

Good Communicator, Motivator and Evangelist, Pankaj has keen interest to develop leaders, provide mentor-ship to entrepreneurs and contribute to social impact causes.”

Yusuf Yildiz

Solutions Architect, LinBit

He aims to work for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems; especially multi-user / multi-tennant cloud systems, such as servers & storage systems. He seeks to ensure that the uptime, performance, resources, and security of the systems are all well balanced. He is currently focused on Storage as a Service, Software Defined Storage, virtualization technologies, storage systems in general and also public clouds.

Kiran Mova

 Senior Open Source Engineering Manager, VMware Tanzu

Kiran Mova leads the Open Source Engineering team for VMWare Tanzu multi-cloud platform focusing on Kubernetes and other upstream projects. Kiran has over 20 years of experience working on platform and infrastructure products at companies like Cisco, Lucent and Novell. Prior to joining VMware, he was the co-founder of a storage startup where he worked as an architect and engineering manager for Open Source projects that have now become part of CNCF

He is known by his team members for Laissez-faire leadership style by being transparent to the team about the business goals and putting the trust in the team to lead the efforts. He is also an active organizing member of the Open Source events and foundations led from India. He is an active member of CNCF and SODA.
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Yusuke Sato

Engineer, Yahoo! JAPAN

Yusuke Sato is responsible for private cloud compute and storage at Yahoo Japan Corporation. He has been engaged mainly in verification of server hardware, operation of storage systems, and establishment and operation of virtual environments. He led the server and OS team from 2013 to 2016, and started leading the storage team for private cloud environment in April 2017. Yusuke Sato graduated from Kyushu Institute of Technology with a master’s degree in Life Science and Systems Engineering and is a member of the OpenSDS End-User Advisory Committee since July 2017.

Noel McLoughlin

SRE, GBE Technologies, Ireland

Noel McLoughlin is an accomplished computer systems engineer. His career spans roles in R&D/Telecom management R&D, Production Engineering, and Financial Services – previous employers include Credit Suisse, Oracle, Ericsson, Overstock, GBET. In the Storage domain, Noel was Technical Lead for a Telecoms O&M Backup and Restore Solution from 2005-2010 and involved in Storage management solutions in the past decade. Noel is an Open Source Enthusiast contributing to the SODA foundation and Saltstack Formulas. He is a specialist in Infrastructure as Code, Storage management, and IoT/Edge use cases. Noel is currently Lead SRE at GBE Technologies.