TECHNICAL SESSIONS SPEAKERS

Wednesday, November 10 | Thursday, November 11 | Friday, November 12 | Invited Talk Speakers

John Adams, Operations at Twitter: Scaling Beyond 100 Million Users
John Adams (Twitter Operations) has worked in computer security, operations, and systems engineering for over 18 years. Prior to Twitter, he worked at Apple, Inktomi, c|net, and a major video-on-demand site, improving security, performance, and reliability at a large scale.

Stephen Beck, Panel: Legal and Privacy Issues in Cloud Computing
Stephen Beck is VMware's Director of Worldwide Cloud Consulting delivery. His team of experts in cloud process, operations, architecture, design, implementation, and management are responsible for customer success in Public Service Provider Cloud and Enterprise Private Cloud deployment. Prior to joining VMware, Steve held executive professional services positions at Apprion Inc., RSA Security, Entegrity Solutions, and Unisys Corp. He also held senior-level roles at companies such as Unix International and Bell Laboratories. Steve is a frequent speaker and presenter on virtualization and IT security topics and is the patent-pending inventor of an anti-phishing, anti-spam system design based on the use of Public Key Infrastructure. He graduated from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management's Executive Development Program. He received his MS in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his BS in computer science from Brown University.

David N. Blank-Edelman, Closing Session: Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's a Sysadmin!
David N. Blank-Edelman is the Director of Technology at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and the author of the O'Reilly book Automating System Administration with Perl. He has spent the past 25+ years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He was the program chair of LISA '05 and was one of the LISA '06 Invited Talks co-chairs. David is honored to have been the recipient of the 2009 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award and to serve on the USENIX Board of Directors.

Patrick Carlisle, Scalable, Good, Cheap: Get Your Infrastructure Started Right
Patrick graduated from Reed College. He now works as a developer at WooMe.com. Prior to this, he was employed at Apple as a Scientific Application Engineer, working on various complex and cool projects, such as developing a new audio compression codec and working with speech synthesis.

Tony Cass, Keynote Address: The LHC Computing Challenge: Preparation, Reality, and Future Outlook
Tony Cass joined CERN's Information Technology Department in 1987, after completing a PhD in particle physics at the University of Liverpool. Tony played a leading role in the development of workstation-based interactive computing at CERN, had major responsibilities in the operation and management of large-scale batch processing and data storage systems, and was responsible for the refurbishing of the 30-year-old computer center to meet the needs of LHC computing. Tony currently oversees the various database services at CERN, a remit ranging from corporate databases and databases central to the operation of LHC, the world's highest-energy particle collider, to databases supporting the work of LHC physics experiments.

William Cheswick, Rethinking Passwords
Ches is an early innovator in Internet security. He is known for his work in firewalls, proxies, and Internet mapping at Bell Labs and Lumeta Corp. He is best known for the book he co-authored with Steve Bellovin and now Avi Rubin, Firewalls and Internet Security; Repelling the Wily Hacker. Ches is now a member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs—Research in Florham Park, NJ, where he is working on security, visualization, user interfaces, and a variety of other things.

Marc Cluet, Scalable, Good, Cheap: Get Your Infrastructure Started Right
Marc is a Senior Systems Administrator at WooMe.com. Before joining WooMe, he worked as a consultant for companies in New York, Montreal, Geneva, and Barcelona. He's also deeply involved with the NGO iwith.org.

Mike Cutler, 10,000,000,000 Files Available Anywhere: NFS at Dreamworks
Mike Cutler is a Principal Engineer for PDI/Dreamworks, based in Redwood City, CA. He joined Dreamworks in 1993 and focuses on networking, storage, and HPC.

James Donn, Centralized Logging in a Decentralized World
James Donn is a Network Management Systems Engineer at Harvard University, where he architects and implements management solutions and delivers fault notifications. He previously worked at HSBC. He has thirteen years of IT experience, from NOC employee to senior engineer.

Stephen Foskett, Storage over Ethernet: What's in It for Me?
Stephen Foskett is an active participant in the world of enterprise information technology, currently focusing on enterprise storage and cloud computing. He is responsible for Gestalt IT, a community of independent IT thought leaders, and has been a voice in the storage industry for over a decade with numerous presentations and publications.

Richard P. Goldberg, Flying Instruments-Only: Navigating Legal and Security Issues from the Cloud; Panel: Legal and Privacy Issues in Cloud Computing
A software architect turned attorney, Richard's clients include private software companies, public open source companies, information security consultancies, federal appointees and civil service employees, and corporate officers. His practice ranges from corporate work, including spin-offs, acquisitions, and privacy and information security issues, to litigation, including government investigations and vendor, shareholder, and user disputes. Prior to joining the legal profession, Richard worked as a software developer and architect at several Internet start-ups and commercial consultancies, where he designed enterprise-level systems for Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and the U.S. military. Richard is a graduate of Duke University Law School.

Brendan Gregg, Visualizations for Performance Analysis (and More)
Brendan Gregg is a performance specialist and software engineer at Joyent and is known worldwide in the field of Solaris performance and DTrace. He created and developed the DTraceToolkit and is the co-author of Solaris Performance and Tools and the upcoming DTrace, both published by Prentice Hall. He was previously the performance lead for the Sun/Oracle ZFS storage appliance and a software developer on the Fishworks Advanced Development Team, where he developed the ZFS L2ARC. He has also worked as a performance consultant and instructor and has taught and authored workshops worldwide on performance and DTrace. Brendan graduated from the University of Newcastle, Australia, with a Bachelor of Engineering in computer engineering.

Eben M. Haber, System Administrators in the Wild: An Outsider's View of Your World and Work
Eben is not currently a sysadmin, although his first summer job, at age 14, included loading the mag tapes and setting the dip switches to boot the Xerox Sigma 3 every morning. He followed a computer science path in college and grad school and worked at Silicon Graphics and a variety of dot-coms before settling at IBM, where he picked up anthropology part-time. He also holds a British Horse Society Intermediate Instructor certification—good to know in case you have any questions about equine configuration and maintenance.

Tim Hartmann, Centralized Logging in a Decentralized World
Tim Hartmann is a member of the Network Infrastructure Systems & Services Team at Harvard University, where he architects and implements authentication solutions and troubleshoots various server-related issues. He previously worked in another division within the university. He has eleven years of IT experience, from help desk employee to senior engineer.

Richard Jimmerson, IPv6: No Longer Optional
Richard Jimmerson is Chief Information Officer of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). Richard has twelve years of experience managing global Internet number resources. In recent years Richard has been conducting extensive outreach on the topic of IPv4 depletion and the need to adopt IPv6.

Robert Johnson, Reliability at Massive Scale: Lessons Learned at Facebook
Robert Johnson is Director of Engineering at Facebook, where he leads the software development efforts to cost-effectively scale Facebook's infrastructure and optimize performance for its many millions of users. During his time with the company, the number of users has expanded by more than fiftyfold and Facebook now handles billions of page views a day.

Robert was previously at ActiveVideo Networks, where he led the distributed systems and set-top software development teams. He has worked in a wide variety of engineering roles, from robotics to embedded systems to Web software. He received a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech.

Sean Kamath, 10,000,000,000 Files Available Anywhere: NFS at Dreamworks
Sean Kamath is a System Architect for PDI/Dreamworks, based in Redwood City, CA. He joined Dreamworks in 2006 and specializes in operating systems and performance.

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Data Structures from the Future: Bloom Filters, Distributed Hash Tables, and More!
Thomas A. Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His books include The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley) and Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly). He received the SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He works at Google in NYC and blogs at https://EverythingSysadmin.com/.

Dinah McNutt, The 10 Commandments of Release Engineering
Dinah McNutt is a Release Engineer at Google, Inc. She has been involved with system administration since the mid-1980s. Some of her accomplishments include writing the "Daemons & Dragons" column for Unix Review Magazine and writing for SunExpert Magazine, Byte, and other publications. She has twenty years of commercial-release engineering experience and has released all types of UNIX-based software, from shrink-wrapped through Web-based services to network appliances.

Bill Mooz, Panel: Legal and Privacy Issues in Cloud Computing
Bill Mooz heads the legal support team for VMware's Cloud Computing, Channels, and Services groups. Previously, he ran a utility computing business for Sun Microsystems, served as general counsel for a SaaS company, and headed legal support for Sun's largest services business. Before moving in-house, Bill was a partner in the law firm of Holland & Hart, LLP.

Adam Moskowitz, The Path to Senior Sysadmin
For nearly one-third of his sysadmin career, Adam Moskowitz held titles such as Senior System Administrator, System Architect, and IT Manager. Despite having returned to his roots as a programmer, Adam remains active in the sysadmin community, including running the LISA Advanced Topics Workshop and serving on the LOPSA Leadership Committee. He claims he does all of this only to support his hobby of judging barbecue contests and to keep food in his puppy's bowl.

Mario Obejas, Enterprise-scale Employee Monitoring
Mario Obejas started his tech career as an Air Defense programmer in 1980, performing final acceptance tests in a war zone on his very first program. In the early 1990s he switched to sysadmin work, including writing a "one-page installation instructions" document for an air traffic control system deployment. In the late 1990s he switched divisions and started supporting chip designers and cluster computing infrastructures; he also started to promote open source use. Eventually he landed in information security, where he works today. Decades ago, Mario earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Wabash College, and a Master of Science from the University of Southern California (USC). These days, Mario wants to master keeping up with his two teenage sons.

Cat Okita, Er, What? Requirements, Specifications, and Reality: Distilling Truth from Friction
Cat Okita has many years of experience as a senior systems, security, and network professional in the financial, Internet, manufacturing, and telecom sectors. She has designed, managed, and contributed to a variety of geographically diverse projects and installations. Her assignments have included proposing and seeing to completion a wide variety of security, Internet, enterprise, and monitoring projects, including highly available, redundant, fault-tolerant systems for security, Web services, logging, monitoring, statistics gathering, and analysis. Her research interests include privacy, reputation, and practical security.

Adam J. Oliner, Using Influence to Understand Complex Systems
Adam Oliner is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, working with Alex Aiken. Before coming to Stanford, he earned a Master of Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, where he also received undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics.

Matt Provost, Storage Performance Management at Weta Digital
Matt Provost is the Systems Manager at Weta Digital. Weta Digital is a five-time Academy Award–winning visual effects facility in Wellington, New Zealand. The systems team at Weta is responsible for all of the company's servers, storage, and networking. They run a 4352-node renderwall which occupies five positions on the Top 500 Supercomputer list. Matt has been a system and network administrator for over twelve years. He has a BA from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Roland van Rijswijk, Commencing Countdown: DNSSEC On!
Roland van Rijswijk is technical product manager at SURFnet, the National Research and Educational Network in The Netherlands. He is responsible for SURFnet's DNS infrastructure and is project leader for several innovation projects concerning DNSSEC, identity management, and cryptography. In the past, Roland worked for InTraffic, AET, and Philips Electronics. Roland has an MSc in computer science from Twente University.

Wietse Venema, Postfix: Past, Present, and Future
Wietse Venema is known for his software such as the TCP Wrapper and the Postfix mail system. He co-authored the SATAN network scanner and the Coroner's Toolkit (TCT) for forensic analysis, as well as the book Forensic Discovery. Wietse has received awards from the Free Software Foundation, SAGE, and NLUUG, as well as a Sendmail innovation award. Wietse is currently a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Avleen Vig, Scalable, Good, Cheap: Get Your Infrastructure Started Right
Avleen is a senior systems administrator at WooMe.com. Before joining WooMe, he worked at large tech companies, including EarthLink and Google, as well as at a number of small successful startups.