Monthly Archives: July 2015

Technology areas that IBM Pune Storage Team works on

Technology, , ,

Yesterday, Golbal CTO of Storage and SDE at IBM Vincent Hsu gave a tech talk. As part of that, Pankaj Bavishi, Program Director, Storage Development at IBM Pune put up a slide of the kind of technology that the IBM Storage team in Pune is working on.

I thought this was information that PuneTech readers might find interesting.

Storage areas the IBM Pune works on:

  • File System Development
    • Areas: Deep filesystem expertise, Cloud Tier using Active File Management
    • IBM Products: GPFS, AFS
  • Network Attached Storage (NAS) Development
    • Areas: Object Storage, Authentication & Security, File Protocols
    • IBM Products: SONAS, Storwize V7000 Unified, Spectrum Scale
  • Block Storage Development:
    • Areas: Protocls, Virtualization, Cloud Management & Protection
    • IBM Products: Spectrum Virtualize, Cloud Storage, Subsystem Device Driver
    • For example: iSCSI and FCoE implementations happened in IBM Pune
  • Storage & SDS Strategy – CTO Projects
    • Work with IBM Global Technical Experts (IBM Fellows and Distinguished Engineers)

IBM Initiatives in India:

  • Deeper connections with Top Tier Institutes (IITs, NITs, COEP, IISc, IIITs)
  • University Courses, Faculty Enablement, Joint Research
  • 20+ White Papers, Extreme Blue & Internship Projects
  • Paper Publications and Presentations in Top Storage Conferences and User Groups

Would you like to let PuneTech readers about what interesting technology work happens in your group in your company? Please mail us the information, and if our editors like it, we will feature it in PuneTech.

Note: Your write-up should be short, to-the-point, and written by a technical person, not a marketing person. And it should be unique or cutting edge technology – that not many other companies are working on.

Event: “Trends in Storage & Software Defined Environments” by Vincent Hsu, CTO of IBM Storage

External Visitors, , , , ,

Announcing a talk by yet another global CTO of a top tech company in Pune.

Earlier this week we had the CTO of Seagate in Pune. One week later, we have Vincent Hsu, CTO for Storage and SDE at IBM who will talk about trends in Storage and in Software Defined Environments.

The event will be on Tuesday, July 28th, at ICC Trade Center, SB Road. The schedule is as follows:

  • 5:30 – 6:00 pm Networking
  • 6:00 – 6:05 – Introduction
  • 6:05 – 7:00 pm – Vincent’s Talk
  • 7:00 – 7:15 pm – Q&A and closure

(There is parking at the venue, but you’ll need to budget 10 minutes extra for security and parking. We started this week’s event exactly on time, so please plan to reach a bit early.)

About the Speaker – Vincent Hsu

Vincent (Yu-Cheng) Hsu is Vice President, IBM Fellow, CTO for Storage and SW Defined Environments. His responsibilities include future storage technology, storage system architecture, design and the solution integration. Currently, he is technical leader on IBM Storage technology for big data, cloud storage and software defined storage infrastructure.

Mr. Hsu has devoted his entire 23 years of his career on enterprise storage system development. He is a master inventor at IBM. He was named an IBM Fellow in 2012. In 2005 he was named a Distinguished Engineer (executive level engineer) and Chief Engineer for IBM Enterprise storage. In 2009, he was named the CTO for IBM disk storage leading IBM storage technology council to oversee storage technology for all IBM disk storage products.

Mr. Hsu is a graduate of the University of Arizona, and holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Engineer and MBA degree. He is also a member of IBM Academy of Technology.

Fees, Registration, Logistics

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://punetech.eventbrite.com/?aff=punetech

The event is from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, on Tuesday, 28 July, at Hall #4, 5th Floor, A Wing, MCCIA, ICC Trade Tower, SB Road.

Event: Talks on Challenges in Storage Technology by CTO & VP of Seagate – 21 July

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We have two visitors in town – Dr. Mark Re, CTO of Seagate Technology and Pravin Desale, VP of Product Development at Seagate – and we are taking this opportunity of arranging an event where PuneTech readers get to hear them talk about the latest challenges in the area of storage technology.

The event will be on Tuesday, 21 July, at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, MCCIA, ICC Trade Tower, SB Road, and the agenda is:

  • 5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking: Snacks and tea will be served
  • 6:00pm-6:05pm: Introduction of the Speakers
  • 6:05pm-6:30pm: Pravin Desale’s talk “Managing Storage Solutions in the Era of Data Explosion”
  • 6:30pm-7:15pm: Mark Re’s talk “Challenges in Hard Disk Design and Manufacturing and Case for a Hybrid Drive”.
  • 7:15pm-7:30pm: Q&A

Talk #1: Managing Storage Solutions in the Era of Data Explosion – Pravin Desale

Data has evolved from static information stored and forgotten, to a living entity that drives every interaction of every day. We are creating solutions to fit the increasing needs and demands of our data-driven society. The demand is literally exploding and we need a vast range of storage solution to address needs of this data explosion.

In this talk, we will illustrate how different technologies from accelerators to flash solutions to HDDs to archival HDDs address needs of different markets, for variety of platforms in multitude of use cases.

About the Speaker – Pravin Desale

Pravin Desale is Vice President of Product Development at Seagate Technology. He is responsible for all ASSPs, ASICs, FPGAs and structured ASICs for Seagate’s Hard drives, Hybrid Drives, Flash Acceleration Cards and Solid State Drives. Pravin Desale is also responsible for guiding India investments of Seagate and management structure for India entity for the company. Pravin Desale and his management team joined Seagate as a result of acquisition of Flash Business by Seagate from LSI Corporation/Avago in 2014.

Prior to joining Seagate, Pravin held various roles at LSI Corporation/Avago ranging from VP of RAID storage product development to General Manager of LSI’s India operations. Pravin has been Founder/Engineering leader at a number of smaller companies that he helped acquire/integrate within fortune 500 companies such as LSI corporation, National Semiconductor in India and the US. Pravin continues to be active within venture community as well as has held fiduciary roles at emerging technology start up entities over past few years.

Pravin has 23+ years of professional experience ranging from research and development of storage, networking and multimedia/communication products to managing profit loss (P&Ls), operational and engineering competencies for global development centers.

Talk #2: Challenges in Hard Disk Design and Manufacturing and Case for a Hybrid Drive – Mark Re

Dr. Re’s talk will focus on the hard disk drive challenges; clarify some misconceptions and share industry and technology roadmaps. These roadmaps address the capacity and performance challenges for designing and manufacturing storage products. He will highlight key features in each of these technologies, including sharing a Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) video demonstration. He will make the case for the solid-state hybrid drives, which combine the speed of flash technology with the capacity and cost benefits of hard drives. He will also introduce enhanced cache drives, briefly comparing the architectural data flows between hybrid drives and enhanced cache drives- highlighting innovation behind increased performance.

About the Speaker – Mark Re

Mark Re is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Seagate Technology. He is responsible for all hard disk drive product and component research and development. Prior to his appointment as CTO on July 1, 2013, Re held many different roles within Seagate, including: SVP of R&D Media, Media Operations, and Heads R&D.

Prior to joining Seagate in 2003, Re served as SVP of Research and Development at Read-Rite in Fremont, California. Earlier career highlights include management positions at IBM in San Jose, California, and Yorktown Heights, New York, where Re’s primary focus was magnetic recording heads. During his tenure there, Re was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 1997.

Re holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.

About Seagate Technology

Seagate started off as a hard disk manufacturer – being the first company to develop the 5.25″ HDD – and quickly becoming one of the world’s leading brands of HDDs, but over the years it has extended its reach into other aspects of enterprise storage, and is now a leader in data storage solutions. The company provides hard disk drives, solid state drives, and solid state hybrid drives that are designed for enterprise servers and storage systems in mission critical and nearline applications; for client compute applications comprising desktop and mobile computing; and for client non-compute applications, such as digital video recorders, personal data backup systems, portable external storage systems, and digital media systems.

Seagate also offers data storage services, including online backup, data protection, and recovery solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. In addition, the company ships external backup storage solutions under its Backup Plus and Expansion product lines, as well as under the Samsung and LaCie brand names; Wireless Plus wireless drives; and network attached storage solutions under its Central, NAS, NAS Pro, and Rackmount NAS product lines. It sells its products primarily to OEMs, distributors, and retailers.

On March 12, 2013, Seagate announced that it was the first disk manufacturer to have cumulatively shipped two billion HDDs.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://punetech.eventbrite.com/?aff=punetech

The event is from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, on Tuesday, 21 July, at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, MCCIA, ICC Trade Tower, SB Road.

Event: Testing Business Logic using DSLs in Clojure – Mayank Jain of @HelpShift

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TechJam presents a talk about testing business logic using DSLs, by Mayank Jain, of @Helpshift, on Thursday 16 July, at 6:30pm, at IDeaS.com, Baner Road.

Testing business logic quickly becomes tricky, as applications grow and scale. Example based unit and integration tests, and exploratory tests become poor choices to check and verify a large state space. Also such methods are not well-suited to clearly describe the state space / transitions we want to test.

Since we use Clojure to write test suites and tools at Helpshift, we tried experimenting with DSLs to express some of our testing problems. We’ve found that mini DSLs can indeed become useful to describe and test fairly complicated business logic.

In this talk I will cover some of the mini-DSL approaches we’ve tried, demonstrate one of them by example, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks based on current experience.

About TechJam

TechJam is a non-profit initiative to build a community of techies, who are interested in learning and exploring new technologies.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://techjam.org/#dsl_clojure

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

Event: “How to think like an MIT Media Lab Inventor” by Dr. Raskar of Media Lab – 10 July

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Prof Ramesh Raskar, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and head of the Camera Culture research group at MIT Media Lab, will give a talk on “How to think like an MIT Media Lab Inventor” at COEP, on 10 July (tomorrow) from 11am to 12noon. (Note: the talk has been kept early to ensure that you will not get stuck in Palkhi traffic restrictions. There is parking at the venue)

Normally, I am not a fan of talk on “innovation”. But in this case, I would make an exception. Ramesh Raskar, has been involved in a number of innovations that are, to me, mindblowing. Like, the camera that can see around corners, visualizing individual photons in motion by recording video at a trillion frames per second, and much other such research. But, in addition to such high tech work, he is also looking at the bottom of the pyramid. For example, EyeNetra is a cheap (less than Rs. 100) accessory that anyone can snap on to an Android smartphone and use for detecting cataracts and other vision problems in places like rural India.

Most recently, he has started an initiative to bring innovation to solve real world urbanization problems in smaller towns in developing countries. This is Kumbhathon, which has been running in Nashik for the last few years.

Raskar is an alumnus of College of Engineering Pune.

The topic of this talk is to discuss Prof Raskar’s idea hexagon to let you build your own innovations the Media Lab way. Having been an inventor of 50 plus patents and author of numerous international publications, Prof Raskar proposes an idea hexagon that allows anyone to build game changing innovations.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1603875396527164/.

Event Details

  • Date: Friday 10th July
  • Time: 11 am to 12 noon (Updated timing)
  • Venue: CoEP mini auditorium near boat club
  • Fees and Registration: This event is free, and open for anyone to attend. Please register here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1603875396527164/