SEPTEMBER 24, 2019

THE GLASSHOUSE, SAN JOSE, CA

Super Early Bird Registration Open Now

Our last interview-based technical event sold out quickly. Get a seat today to ensure a spot.

Storage is no longer an afterthought and innovations in networks are pushing the limits of what is possible in today’s large-scale datacenters.

We have outlined this convergence in depth and are gathering the leaders from both storage and networking realms to dive into architectures, approaches, shifting workloads, and what the future holds.

Never before has the interconnect and storage hierarchy – moving from compute cores out through caches and now multiple layers of main memory, and fanning out to layers of flash and disk storage and expanding to tape and cloud archives – been so wide, so deep, and so interdependent. And never before have their been so many different options for optimizing the performance of servers and the distributed computing platforms for which they are the building block.

Given all the interest in the data storage and movement that day we are breaking this topic out for an I/O focused event, which we expect will be as technical and dynamic.

This storage and networking confluence will be at the heart of The Next I/O Platform event in San Jose on September 24, 2019.

This will be an interview-focused event with no PowerPoints; just in-depth, live, on-stage interviews with those at the bleeding edge of storage and networks on both the technology creation and end user sides.

As regular readers know, The Next Platform goes far beyond the basics to understand how things work, what they replace and why, who will use what technologies and why, what the ROI is, and finally, how these new innovations impact the wider market and competitive ecosystems.

Interviewers at The Next I/O Platform will ask the same deep, relevant questions with opportunities for audience questions and plenty of time for networking and one-on-one conversations.

Here are some of the live interview-based discussions to expect on this packed, conversation-based day:

Andy Bechtolsheim – Networking pioneer and luminary. Founder and head of development at Arista Networks. Will talk about the issues facing future of networking in the datacenter.

Ville Tuulos, Manager, Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix, will talk about optimization of I/O for large-scale AI in Netflix’s AWS-centric cloud environment as well as future challenges as ML workloads increase in scope.

Michael Liberte, Senior Manager, Production Storage Engineering, LinkedIn will discuss the evolution of storage infrastructure at the social media giant over time, bringing us to the present installations and where workloads will drive next-generation storage and I/O.

Andrew Fikes, VP, Engineering Fellow at Google will describe storage innovations at Google with an emphasis on optimizing for large-scale production databases.

Nick McKeown, Stanford professor and networking luminary. Founder, former CEO of Barefoot Networks (just acquired by Intel).

Dirk Petersen, Infrastructure Director at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, will go into depth about the evolution of the research center’s infrastructure and describe when, where, and how it makes sense to take risks with cutting-edge memory, storage, and networking technologies and when it’s not practical.

Steve Scott, Interconnect pioneer, will describe the evolution of the modern interconnect and his role in those transitions and will focus on the current “Slingshot” interconnect.

Peter Braam, creator of the Lustre parallel file system. Widely recognized thought leader and academic on all things I/O with an evolutionary perspective on the past, present, and future of file systems.

Lakshmi Sharma, Director, Product Management, Networking at Google will focus on cloud infrastructure and network performance.

Guru Chahal of Lightspeed Venture Partners will put storage and networking technology trends in market context.

Shailesh Shukla, VP Product Management, Networking and Compute, Google will focus on creating balanced compute infrastructure and cloud networking.

Main interviewers for the event include co-founders of The Next Platform, Timothy Prickett Morgan and Nicole Hemsoth. Guest interviewers include computer memory pioneer, Rob Peglarand Los Alamos National Lab‘s storage guru (and I/O expert), Gary Grider, among others.

Full agenda and topic breakdown coming soon. The format and flow will be similar to our sold-out Next AI Platform event in May in terms of interview timing/panel balance/breaks and networking.

Register early bird to ensure a seat.

More coming soon.

Agenda and participants will be updated this week. Keep checking back for more information.

In the meantime, please reach out to event chair, Nicole Hemsoth at nicole@nextplatform.com or event producer, Jimme Peters at jimme@24-7consulting.com with any questions.