Speakers

Matt Ahrens

Delphix

Matthew Ahrens is a software engineer at Delphix, where he works on filesystems for Delphix’s database storage appliance. He co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001, designed and implemented major components of ZFS including snapshots and remote replication, and helped lead the team for 9 years. Matt has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University.

Will Andrews

Software Developer, Spectra Logic

Will has been a FreeBSD user since February 1997. He worked on FreeBSD ports from 1999-2004, helping to start the KDE/FreeBSD project and the FreeBSD Ports Management Team along the way. Will remains interested in packaging and build systems, although they have not been a primary focus for some time.

Will is a 2004 Purdue University computer engineering graduate, where his primary focus was on hardware and low-level software. Since then, Will has worked on a variety of products in the areas of consumer electronics, storage, software testing, and networking. His development work has ranged from a FPGA-synthesized MIPS CPU to DOCSIS cable modem firmware to SCSI drivers & filesystems to Rails web apps.

In his copious spare time, Will enjoys playing racquetball, throwing mud on a wheel, and working on various home improvement projects.

Brian Behlendorf

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Brian Behlendorf is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he focuses on developing highly scalable, distributed
filesystems for the largest Linux HPC clusters. He has extensive experience as a Linux kernel developer and with the Lustre parallel filesystem. He is the technical lead for the ZFS on Linux project. Brian has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Bayard Bell

Software Engineer, Nexenta

Bayard Bell works as a Software Engineer at Nexenta Systems, Inc. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a SunKey membership launched his Unix career, leading to a nine-year stint as a sys admin and Unix engineer at a major investment bank, which he left as a vice president. He entered the illumos community by being mentored by Dan McDonald in the summer of 2011 for an IPsec project, and this summer he was illumos’s org admin for Google Summer of Code.

Rod Boothby

Joyent

Garrett D’Amore

Founder, illumos Project, VP of Engineering, DEY Storage Systems

Prior to co-founding DEY Storage Systems, Garrett was the senior director of engineering for platform software at Nexenta Systems, where he built an international world-class engineering team from the ground up. He is also the founder and technical lead for the illumos open source operating system project, and he remains very active in the community. Garrett has been working on operating and system software for systems ranging from enterprise-grade mainframe class systems (such as the Sun Enterprise 10K and Sun Fire 25K), down to thin client and embedded systems.

Richard Elling

CTO, DEY Storage Systems

Prior to co-founding DEY Storage Systems, Richard was senior director of solutions engineering at Nexenta Systems, where he designed and implemented large scale, unified storage solutions. He worked at Sun Microsystems for 16 years and authored “Designing Enterprise Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0 (Prentice Hall, 2002), co-authored IEEE Dependability Benchmarking for Computer Systems (Wiley, 2008), as well as other books, white papers, refereed papers and more. An early adopter of ZFS, Richard has been designing and building dependable, networked computer systems to solve complex problems for more than 25 years.

Justin Gibbs

Senior Software Architect, Spectra Logic

Justin is a Senior Software Architect currently working on storage systems for Spectra Logic Corporation. His past experience has ranged from office application development at Microsoft to embedded systems for general aviation aircraft at Avidyne. A member of the FreeBSD Development Team since 1993, Justin has contributed to many areas of the FreeBSD operating system, and is best known for his work on the SCSI subsystem and support for running FreeBSD under the Xen hypervisor. After serving on the FreeBSD Core Team from 1995-2000 he created the FreeBSD Foundation to provide a non-profit framework for funding FreeBSD development and community support. Justin is currently serving as the FreeBSD Foundation’s president.

Brendan Gregg

Lead Performance Engineer, Joyent

Brendan Gregg is the lead performance engineer at Joyent, where he analyzes performance and scalability for small to large cloud computing environments, at any level of the software stack, down to metal. He is the primary author of “DTrace” (Prentice Hall, 2011), and co-author of “Solaris Performance and Tools” (Prentice Hall, 2006), and well as numerous articles about systems performance. He was previously a performance lead and kernel engineer at Sun Microsystems, and has also been a performance consultant. He developed the DTraceToolkit and the ZFS L2ARC, and many of his DTrace scripts are shipped by default in Mac OS X and Oracle Solaris 11. His recent work has included performance visualizations for illumos and Linux kernel analysis.

Jonathan Halstuch

Co-Founder, RackTop Systems

Jonathan Halstuch is the co-founder and principal storage and virtualization architect for RackTop Systems. A graduate of Georgia Tech, Jonathan holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering as well as a Master’s degree in Engineering and Technology Management from The George Washington University. Prior to joining RackTop, Jonathan spent over 15-years working for the federal government as an engineer, technologist, and manager with a body of work, which included the management of geographically distributed complex data systems as well as the advisement of foreign governments on IT solutions. As part of his tenure, Jonathan spent many years abroad where he developed a deeper understanding for global technology implementations, operations, and support. Jonathan enjoys giving back to the community and is an adviser to non-profits and community organizations including Global Youth Justice. His passion is to promote productive business operations through the use of effective and efficient IT solutions.

Jerry Jelinek

Joyent

Jerry was a software engineer at Sun for almost 20 years before leaving for Joyent. During his last 5 years at Sun he worked on Solaris Zones and resource management. At Joyent he continues to work across to the system stack. Jerry is a co-author of the OpenSolaris Bible.

Adam Leventhal

Delphix

Adam Leventhal is a software engineer at Delphix, where his focus is the systems stack. Before joining Delphix, Adam was a founding member of the Fishworks group at Sun (now Oracle) that developed an innovative storage appliance built on ZFS, DTrace and other Solaris technologies. At Fishworks, Adam invented the Hybrid Storage Pool, integrating flash into the storage hierarchy, and was responsible for the company-wide flash memory strategy and roadmap. Adam began his career in the Solaris Kernel Group after graduating from Brown Univerity, cum laude. In the kernel group, he was the co-inventor of DTrace, the dynamic tracing framework that has since been incorporated into Mac OS X and FreeBSD. For his work on DTrace, Adam was awarded Sun’s Chairman’s Award in 2005, top honors from the Wall Street Journal’s innovators award in 2006, and the USENIX STUG prize in 2008. Adam has been granted 9 patents with several pending.

Dan McDonald

Nexenta

Dan’s jack-of-all-trades work for Nexenta covers things ranging from iSCSI primtives to device drivers, from minor ZFS improvements to MAC-layer bugfixes.  Prior to Nexenta, he spent 15 years at Sun as project lead for IP security (IPsec) in Solaris.  Dan has written or co-written three RFCs, and worked on the first IPsec for BSD at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Robert Mustacchi

Software Engineer, Joyent

Robert Mustacchi is a Software Engineer at Joyent, where he has primarily worked on the port of the KVM hypervisor to illumos, the illumos kernel, and Cloud Analytics: a real-time DTrace/Node.js-based system for visualizing server and application performance. Prior to Joyent, Robert worked in Sun Microsystem’s Fishworks team on the Sun Storage 7000 series of products. Robert holds a Sc.B. from Brown University with honors in Computer Science.

Chris Nelson

Director, North America Sales Engineering, Nexenta

Chris Nelson is the Director of Sales Engineering at Nexenta Systems, where he leads a team of pre-sales storage architects. Prior to joining Nexenta in a sales-focused role, he spent over 10 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of engineering roles–leading up to work with the Fishworks team on the Sun Storage 7000 series. Chris holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering , summa cum laude, from Kettering University and an M.S. in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University. He has been a long-time advocate of Solaris and the innovations now thriving in illumos and is the author of several white papers educating storage users on the benefits of ZFS.

Bill Pijewski

Joyent

Bill Pijewski is a Software Engineer at Joyent working on operating system and storage features. After receiving a B.S. in Computer Science from Brown University in 2007, he started working at Sun Microsystems in the Fishworks group to help build the Sun Storage 7000 series of storage appliances, focusing on Microsoft interoperability and data protocols for both file and block access. Since joining Joyent in 2010, he has worked both on Joyent’s cloud services around ZFS and storage, as well operating system features to support those services.

Ben Rockwood

Director of Systems Engineering at Joyent

Joyent has offered a cloud IaaS offering since 2006. His Web site, cuddletech.com, has been offering resources on a variety of enterprise and open source solutions for system administrators since 1999 and is the longest-running and most widely read Solaris blog. He is the author of the USENIX Short Topics book The Sysadmin’s Guide to Oracle. A Solaris zealot, he rode the waves of OpenSolaris from being the first member of the pilot program to the last dissenter when the community disbanded.

Bill Roth

VP of Marketing, Nexenta

Bill is an experienced veteran of both startups and name-brand companies. Bill has more than 25 years of experience architecting, designing, and implementing enterprise software solutions for small and large companies, as well as being a technology journalist and company spokesperson.

Prior to joining Nexenta, he was Chief Marketing Officer at LogLogic, a Sequoia Capital funded startup in the Security and Information Event Management Industry. Prior to that he was Vice President/General Manager of the Tools Business Unit at BEA Systems, and he led that group for 3 years. He also spent time at Sun Microsystems, where he led product management and product marketing for Java 2, Enterprise Edition. He has also worked in organizations as diverse as Morgan Stanley and GSI Commerce. He has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin.

Eric Sproul

OmniTI

Eric Sproul is a build engineer at OmniTI where he currently works on OmniOS, primarily building up a library of installable software for OmniTI’s managed services business. A sysadmin by trade, he has worked on a variety of UNIX, BSD and Linux platforms over the past 15 years, but Solaris 10 and its open-source progeny are his favorite.

Deirdré Straughan

Community Architect, SmartOS and illumos

Deirdré Straughan has long been an innovator in technology communications, from tech writing to UI design to customer service. She has especially focused on new uses of media, in recent years producing hundreds of technical videos for Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Joyent, including live video streams. She currently works for Joyent as Community Architect for the SmartOS and illumos open source communities. You can learn more on her blog, and she’s @deirdres on Twitter.

George Wilson

Delphix

George Wilson is a software engineer at Delphix where he works on filesystems for Delphix’s database storage appliance. Before joining Delphix, George was a senior member of the ZFS kernel development team at Sun Microsystems working on key features such as LUN expansion, Log Device removal, and Deduplication. He was also the tech lead for the Solaris 10 ZFS integration and developed an in-depth ZFS training course for Sun’s field organization. During his 16-year career with Sun Microsystems, George was also a member of the Sustaining Engineering team, where he worked on high-availability systems, and of the Customer Support team. George graduated from Clemson University with a BS in Computer Science.

Jason Yoho

CEO, DEY Storage Systems

Jason has worked in the data center infrastructure technology field for 15 years. Prior to co-founding DEY and becoming the Chief Executive Officer, he was the Vice President of Business Development at Nexenta Systems, where he crafted strategy and programs for technology and go to market partners. He was Chief Executive Officer of Quail Technologies, a data center systems integrator specializing in large scale systems; Vice President of Business Development at Active Reasoning, which focused on IT audit and control for the data center; and spent five years at Sun Microsystems, where his team was responsible for building managed services within Sun’s global service provider customers.