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Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - Chicago

Hollis Beall, Director of Performance Engineering, X-IO Technologies.
With almost 20 years in the data storage field, Hollis has worked in roles from hardware qualification testing, replication solutions design, proof of concept testing, and technical marketing. As the director of performance engineering, Hollis is responsible for benchmark testing, performance data analysis and visualization, and performance troubleshooting. Hollis holds a B.S. in Engineering from Louisiana Tech University.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, Senior Systems Engineer, Exablaze.
Matthew is a Senior Systems Engineer at Exablaze. He's been working with the Exablaze family of companies for over 8 years. In that time, he has been involved in trading strategy development, market data acquisition, FPGA acceleration, systems optimisation, and measurement and analytics. Matthew holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. His research work focused on techniques for managing and mitigating latency variance in hyper-scale datacenter networks. He continues to publish widely in the fields of big-data, hyperscale datacenters, networks, latency and network measurement.

Ashish Gupta, VP Products and Marketing, Vexata.
Ashish has over 2 decades of experience bringing to market disruptive technologies from programmable silicon based systems to network security solutions and more recently high performance enterprise memory class storage technologies. He has been a product and marketing leader at various stops along his journey through Silicon Valley infrastructure companies like Altera (Intel), HP, Juniper, NetApp to startups that have brought to market solutions like the first all Flash Arrays, SSL Security solutions and first cloud managed services technologies. As Vexata’s CMO he is responsible for Product, Solutions and GTM efforts around the company’s core Real Time Architecture, which provides near-memory like response to all applications at scale. Ashish holds a BS/MS in EE and an MBA.

Gerd Heber, Applications Architect, HDF Group.
Gerd is an Applications Architect at The HDF Group in Champaign, IL. His interests include constructive and applied mathematics, high-performance computing, and data modeling. He holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University in Greifswald, Germany.

Ron Herrmann, Director Sales Engineering, E8 Storage.
Ron is a veteran in the storage and networking industry. Prior to joining E8 Storage, Ron worked at IBM (after the Diligent Technologies acquisition). He also held key positions at several start-ups including Prominet and Agile (both acquired by Lucent) and Cereva (acquired by EMC). Ron also served as the Systems Group Leader for the Michigan Supreme Court and worked at Chipcom (acquired by 3Com) and Timeplex (acquired by Unisys).

Peter Lankford, Founder & Director, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter leads STAC®, which provides hands-on technology research and testing tools to the finance industry and facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council™, a group of leading financial institutions and vendors that engages in technical dialog and specifies standard ways to assess technologies used in finance. Prior to STAC, Peter was SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters. Prior to Reuters, Peter held management positions at Citibank, First Chicago Corp., and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Masters in International Relations, and Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Ted Lin, Strategic Technical Account Manager, Mentor Graphics.
Ted is a Strategic Technical Account Manager with Mentor, A Siemens Business. He works with many global technology companies designing cutting-edge FPGAs, ASICS, and Systems. Prior to joining Mentor in 2006, he was the technical team lead and manager for Tyco Electronics, Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratory, and McData/Brocade. He is currently the lead FinTech Technologist at Siemens (Mentor). He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers University, and an MS in Electrical Engineering from University of Pennsylvania, joint program with the Wharton School of Business.

Chris Roben, Sales General Manager, Supermicro.
Chris is the Sr Leader responsible for Supermicro’s Fortune 500 customers in North Central US. Over the past four years, Chris focused his career on OEM/ODM technologies. Prior, Chris was the WW Sr. Director for Object Storage and Hyperconvergence at Seagate. Chris spent over 14 years in the Tier 1 manufacturer space. Chris was a CTO and held WW responsibility for HP’s Interoperability and Competitive Labs Team. Chris was also a CTO at Vmware responsible for Enterprise Management in US Central. At Cisco, Chris was tasked to bring Optical, MDS, Nexus, and UCS to market in Product Specialty roles.

Patrick Scateni, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, Ciara Technologies.
Vice President of Sales & Marketing and one of the minds behind the technical development of CIARA Performance Computing products. Patrick participated in the creation of products such as the NEXXUS Personal Cluster, FUSION1200 x86 SMP server and the VXR-3DT Commodity Supercomputer. Patrick was also one of the minds behind the CRAY CX1 Deskside Supercomputer, and the acclaimed CIARA ORION HF, the world fastest x86 Single and Dual Processor Server line. Before joining Ciara Technologies, Patrick spent 20 years in varied management positions, at GE and IBM, hold technical certifications in a variety of Intel, IBM and Sun technologies.

Dr David Snowdon, CTO, Metamako.
David is a Founder and co-CTO at Metamako, with his core role comprising product and technology strategy at the company. His role liasing with customers about their needs gives him a unique view into the challenges faced by such firms. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for HFT firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems, looking at and taking advantage of the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Energy efficiency has long been an interest, with ten years spent designing, building and racing high performance solar powered cars in international events. David’s team formerly held the Guiness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.

Bob Van Valzah, Performance Engineering, Sun Trading LLC.
For the last four years, Bob has looked after all aspects of performance improvement at Sun. He starts with the hardware of servers and networks and looks at the world from the perspective of picoseconds up. Prior to joining Sun, Bob was a co-founder of 29West, a company that pioneered the development of ultra-low-latency messaging. Bob was in on the ground floor of microprocessors in 1975, C in 1977, Unix and the ARPAnet in 1979, TCP/IP and the Internet in 1985, the World Wide Web in 1992, and reliable multicast in 1998.