SODA TOC Election

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yusuf Yildiz

Solution Architect, LINBIT

After more than 10 years spending in system management and operations management , I am currently working as a solution architect. Thru these years, i expanded my knowledge especially in the field of multi-tennant cloud storage. After serving successfully the largest “storage as a service” solution in Turkey, I started working in LINBIT, which is developing block storage solutions for over 20 years.