EVOLVE 2014 Sessions
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Keynote 

Industry visionaries are building the next wave of competitive advantage in the data center. Join Mendel Rosenblum as he shares his experience in building industry titan, VMware. He will show you how you can stay ahead in this fast paced, evolving technology landscape.

As the Chief Scientist of VMware for the company’s first 10 years he helped design and build virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms. He is a 1992 recipient of the National Science Foundation's National Young Investigator award and a 1994 recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He was a co-winner of the 1992 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the 2002 ACM/SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for creativity and innovation in operating systems research. In 2009 he was a co-winner of the ACM System Software Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an ACM Fellow

Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology. He’s always been fascinated by what comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of subjects. At Battery, he advises the firm and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assists with deal sourcing and due diligence.

Before joining Battery, Adrian helped lead Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform. Prior to that at Netflix he managed a team working on personalization algorithms and service-oriented refactoring.

Adrian was a founding member of eBay Research Labs, developing advanced mobile applications and even building his own homebrew phone, years before iPhone and Android launched. As a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems he wrote the best-selling “Sun Performance and Tuning” book and was chief architect for High Performance Technical Computing.

Neil is a software architect at Pure Storage driving design and implementation of the Flash Array.  He has been involved in most aspects of the design and implementation of the Flash Array including flash management, data reduction, data resilience, high availability, and performance.  Prior to Pure Storage, Neil was a Senior Engineer on the compiler optimization team at Google where he worked on tools and infrastructure to improve the performance of large scale backend data-center applications.  Neil has a BSE in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University.

The Uncertainty Panel

The Heisenberg principle (or uncertainty principle) says that the more precisely you know where something is, the less precisely you can measure its momentum, and vice versa.  In this world of constant disruption that comprises the architecture of IT systems, this theory seems to have a second home.   

Whether you use a public or private cloud, an internal data center or a combination of them all, the data landscape above it and the hardware architectures that support each are changing.  This panel of forward leaning innovators have made that leap and will debate both where and how quickly the macro-trends of cloud, flash and data analytics are changing (and into what, exactly).

Mendel Rosenblum
Co-Founder, Former CTO
VMware

Adrian Cockcroft
Technology Fellow
Battery Ventures
Former Cloud Architect, Netflix

Neil Vaccharachani
Architect
Pure Storage 

Karthik Ramasamy
Engineering Manager, Real Time Analytics
Twitter

Karthik is the engineering manager and technical lead for Storm@Twitter, the real time analytics engine. He has two decades of experience working in parallel databases, big data infrastructure and networking. He cofounded Locomatix, a company specialized in realtime streaming processing on Hadoop and Cassandra using SQL. Locomatix was acquired by Twitter. Before Locomatix, Karthik was at Juniper Networks where he designed and delivered platforms, protocols, databases and high availability solutions for network routers that are widely deployed in the Internet. Before Juniper, at University of Wisconsin, he worked extensively in parallel database systems, query processing, scale out technologies, storage engine and online analytical systems. Several of these research were spun as companies later acquired by Teradata. He is the author of several publications, patents and one of the best selling book "Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols and Architectures." He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UW Madison.

Flash Visionaries Panel

Industry visionaries are gaining a competitive advantage with flash today as it is disrupting the storage industry at a pace much faster than many expected or even believe.  Hear from IT leaders from across industries about how they are leveraging flash to create a revolution in their data centers -  powering the next generation of applications, cloud infrastructures, data insights and mobile experiences.

Speakers

Speakers

Speakers

Bryan Wise
Senior Director of IT
Coherent 

Ron Kielty
Data Center Manager
College of Central Florida 

Technical Breakout Sessions

Enterprise organizations are fueled by the interactions between technology partners and IT sector leaders. How we integrate them together will determine the success, or failure, of an organization. These technology sessions will educate you on different application integrations and how best to utilize them to accelerate your infrastructure, increase cost savings and efficiency, and overall performance.

Mr. Wright is a Business Technology Leader for Aetna. He consults Aetna executive leadership on IT Strategy and Architecture, particularly for their affiliate businesses. His broad-based IT consulting career has touched nearly every aspect of enterprise IT and Operations. His current job focus is helping business leaders apply technology to solve business problems and make intelligent forward-thinking IT decisions, including investments in disruptive innovations in technology like Pure Storage. He was instrumental in introducing Pure Storage at Coventry Health Care and now Aetna and its affiliates.
Mr. Wright gained much of his enterprise IT experience at American Express, IBM, and Andersen Consulting. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Physics, Computer Science, and Mathematics from Brigham Young University.

Geoffrey R. Wright
Business Technology Leader
Aetna 

Ben Woo is a Research Analyst at Gigaom Research, and the founder and Managing Director of Neuralytix, Inc. Ben has dedicated his career to the data infrastructure and data management industries, and is a recognized market visionary, thought leader and provocateur. He provides in-depth market insights and advisory services to both technology vendors and end users, and advises Wall Street clients and other key stakeholders on key aspects of the IT marketplace. 

Prior to founding Neuralytix, Ben was the Program Vice President Worldwide Storage Systems Research at IDC, where he led a team of analysts responsible for advising clients on the evolution and trends related to data storage systems; he also initiated the firm's research on Big Data. Before joining IDC, Ben served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing at a national provider of technology solutions and services, where he was responsible for the dramatic growth and expansion of the company. He has served in several key sales and management roles at Network Appliance, Inc. and MTI Technology Corporation, starting his career in Sydney, Australia, where he delivered one of the very first keynote speeches on the then nascent data storage technology now known as RAID.

Ben Woo
Research Analyst
Gigaom Research
Founder and Managing Director
Neuralytix, Inc.

Ronald Kielty has been employed at the College of Central Florida for 26 years. During this time he has worked on IBM mainframes, servers, storage systems, networks, and many different operating systems (i.e., IBM VSE/ESA, OS/2 Worp, Novell Netware, Windows-based server operating systems, VMWare). As the data center manager he is responsible for all operations within the data center and communications systems.

Justin Stottlemyer
Infrastructure Distinguished Engineer
Intuit 

Technology Session 1: Citrix

Technology Session 3: VMware

Technology Session 2: MongoDB

The advent of all flash storage is changing the landscape, removing the complexity associated with legacy storage, while delivering supercharged performance that allows you to virtualize mission critical applications with confidence. This session will explore architectural considerations and best practices that will allow you to virtualize your business critical application with Flash, as well as exploring new cloud architectures, like Database-as-a-Service, that are being enable by flash technologies.

Secure, flexible, mobile access to apps and desktops requires a reliable, high-performance foundation.  Citrix will discuss how flash storage helps deliver an exceptional user experience and drive productivity.

 MongoDB is the leading NoSQL database, empowering businesses to become more agile and scalable.  Having certified the FA-400 series on MongoDB 2.6, Pure Storage is a “MongoDB Ready” Hardware Partner.  MongoDB will be discussing how their application integration is optimized on flash technology.  

Bryan Wise is the Sr. Director of IT responsible for Coherent’s Worldwide Infrastructure and Operations. During his eight year tenure at Coherent, he has provided leadership in architecting an infrastructure to ensure that IT can meet the demands of the growing business. He is responsible for bringing in new technologies that align to this growth. As one of the original Beta customers for Pure Storage, he recognized the value of an all flash array and how it can transform business workloads. Bryan is a Silicon Valley native and prior to Coherent, he has worked at many startups with experience in the dot com boom and bust. He is a huge fan of the San Francisco Giants. Maybe it was the Pure Orange that really caught his eye?

Stottlemyer is a former Fellow and Storage Architect at Shutterfly Inc., the online photo storage site. He joined the company – which calls itself “the leading Internet-based social expression and personal publishing platform” – in November 2009 as Director of Storage Architecture, a role in which he was charged with identifying a more reliable, scalable storage solution for its archive of images and to reduce its operational costs while leading business development and Internet Operations initiatives.  Stottlemyer was the driving force behind the redesign of the company’s massive archive of more than 15 billion images from relatively expensive, industry-standard hardware to state-of-the-art, Shutterfly-designed hardware. Formerly a member of the Advisory Board for Maxiscale, Stottlemyer has also held positions at Rearden Commerce as an Infrastructure Architect; at Facebook, where he worked with the development team on Haystack; and at eBay, where he designed and implemented multiple HA solutions and eBay’s SAN – which is still in use today.  He is currently the Infrastructure Distinguished Engineer at Intuit and holds a place on the Board of Directors at Packetsled.