TECHNICAL SESSIONS SPEAKERS

Dimitri Aivaliotis, Converting the Ad-Hoc Configuration of a Heterogeneous Environment to a CFM, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chef
Dimitri Aivaliotis is the leader of the UNIX Team at EveryWare AG, a hosting provider based in Zurich, Switzerland. His career has taken him from building a Linux-based computer network for a school up through dual-datacenter high-availability infrastructures for banks and online portals. He has spent over a decade solving his customers' problems and enjoys finding new ways to engineer himself out of a job. Dimitri graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and followed that with an MS in Management Information Systems at Florida State University.

J. Brandon Arsenault, Fixing the Flying Plane: A Production DevOps Team
J. Brandon Arsenault is responsible for the design and maintenance of Hosting's central databases, and also for planning and managing the group's long-term development tasks. His impressive organizational skills come from a career of rescuing at-risk development projects and databases.

Elijah Aydnwylde, Fixing the Flying Plane: A Production DevOps Team
Elijah Aydnwylde is Scholastic Hosting's Operations Lead and the person the team relies on to spot when a change will affect any part of the greater environment. An experienced system administrator, his broad (and increasing) skill set includes virtualization, backup schemas, networking, and staying up all night at a terminal.

David N. Blank-Edelman, Copacetic.
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 26+ 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 one of the LISA '06 Invited Talks co-chairs. David is honored to be the recipient of the 2009 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award and to serve on the USENIX Board of Directors.

Mark Burgess, 3 Myths and 3 Challenges to Bring System Administration out of the Dark Ages
Mark Burgess is CTO and Founder and original author of CFEngine, a professor of network and system administration, and the author of many books and research papers on system administration. During the 1990s he invented the convergent-idempotent approach to configuration management now used in most modern configuration tools.

Kris Buytaert, DevOps: The past and future are here. It's just not evenly distributed (yet).
Kris Buytaert is a longtime Linux and open source consultant. One of the instigators of the DevOps movement, he's currently working for Inuits. Kris is the co-author of Virtualization with Xen, used to be the maintainer of the openMosix HOWTO, and writes for various technical publications. He frequently speaks or organizes international conferences. He spends most of his time working on Linux clustering (high availability, scalability, and HPC), virtualization, and large infrastructure management projects—hence, trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th floor test, better known today as the cloud, while actively promoting the DevOps idea! His blog, Everything Is a Freaking DNS Problem, can be found at https://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/.

Jesse Campbell, Fixing the Flying Plane: A Production DevOps Team
Jesse Campbell comes to Scholastic from a test- and release-engineering background. His input on the development team ensured that creative solutions were thoroughly vetted and implemented with the whole ops environment in mind.

Rodrigo Campos, Linux Systems Capacity Planning: Beyond RRD and top
Rodrigo Campos has worked in systems operations, engineering, and programming for over 16 years. Prior to his current position he worked as operations manager at UOL, one of the largest Internet portals in Latin America, and was involved with the design and implementation of several high-demand systems.

Bryan M. Cantrill, Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos
Bryan Cantrill is the VP of Engineering at Joyent, where he oversees worldwide development of Joyent's SmartOS and SmartDataCenter products. Previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Bryan has spent fifteen years working on system software, from the guts of the kernel to client code on the browser and much in between. In particular, Bryan led the team that designed and implemented DTrace, a facility for dynamic instrumentation of production systems that won the Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Award in 2006 and the USENIX Software Tools User Group Award in 2008. Bryan received the ScB magna cum laude with honors in Computer Science from Brown University.

John D'Ambrosia, Ethernet's Future Trajectory
John D'Ambrosia is the Chief Ethernet Evangelist in the CTO Office at Force10 Networks. In this capacity John has been an industry leader in the development of Ethernet-related technologies since 1999. He served as chair of the IEEE P802.3ba Task Force, which developed the specifications for 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s Ethernet, and is currently chairing the IEEE 802.3 100 Gb/s Backplane and Copper Cable Study Group and the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment Ad hoc. In addition, he is the chairman of the Ethernet Alliance. Prior to these efforts, John served as secretary for the IEEE 802.3ap Backplane Ethernet Task Force and participated in the development of XAUI for 10 Gigabit Ethernet. John has also been a leader in other organizations, such as being a founder of the Ethernet Alliance and serving on its Board of Directors, chair of the XAUI Interoperability work group for the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance, and chair of the Optical Internetworking Forum's Market Awareness and Education Committee. For all of his efforts related to Ethernet, John was recognized by Network World in 2006 on its "50 Most Powerful People in Networking" list.

Veera Deenadhayalan, GPFS Native RAID for 100,000-Disk Petascale Systems
Veera Deenadhayalan of the IBM Research Division of IBM Almaden Research Center has been working on storage systems research since 2003 in the areas of advanced RAID algorithms, scalable storage systems, and undetected disk errors. Most recently, he has worked on the PERCS (Productive Easy-to-use Reliable Computing System) project as the project lead of the GPFS Native RAID functionality. Prior to his efforts in storage research, he worked in the IBM Mylex Subsystems product development group, where he was a lead firmware engineer of Mylex RAID adapters and was responsible for, among other things, the design and development of its second-generation disk metadata management. He holds 6 patents and has published papers in the storage systems area. In 2010, IBM presented him with an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for his contribution to IBM's flagship enterprise storage system, DS8000.

Owen DeLong, IPv6: No Longer Optional
Owen DeLong is an IPv6 Evangelist and Director of Professional Services at Hurricane Electric and a member of the ARIN Advisory Council. Owen brings more than 25 years of industry experience. He is an active member of the system administration, operations, and IP policy communities. In the past, Owen has worked at Tellme Networks (Senior Network Engineer); Exodus Communications (Senior Backbone Engineer), where he was part of the team that took Exodus from a pre-IPO start up with 2 datacenters to a major global provider of hosting services; Netcom Online (Network Engineer), where he worked on a team that moved the Internet from an expensive R&E tool to a widely available public access system accessible to anyone with a computer; Sun Microsystems (Senccccior Systems Administrator); and more. He can be reached as owend at he dot net.

Calvin Domenico, Fixing the Flying Plane: A Production DevOps Team
Calvin Domenico III is Scholastic's Director of Software Integration and Release and the creator of the Web Hosting department. An avid engineering hobbyist, he enjoys architecting solutions that take full advantage of all available resources, including the team member's individual strengths.

Jacob Farmer, My First Petabyte: Now What?
Jacob Farmer is an industry-recognized expert on storage networking and data protection technologies. He has authored numerous papers and is a regular speaker at major industry events such as Storage Networking World, VMWorld, Interop, and the USENIX conferences. Jacob's no-nonsense, fast-paced presentation style has won him many accolades. Most recently Jacob was honored as the top-rated speaker at Storage Networking World, the preeminent conference for the data storage industry. Jacob is a regular lecturer at many of the nation's leading colleges and universities. He has recently given invited talks at institutions such as Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Harvard, and Yale. Inside the data storage industry, Jacob is best known for having authored best practices for designing and optimizing enterprise backup systems and for his expertise in the marketplace for emerging storage networking technologies. He has served on the advisory boards of many of the most successful storage technology startups. Jacob is a graduate of Yale. Follow him on Twitter @JacobAFarmer.

Alastair Firth, Fixing the Flying Plane: A Production DevOps Team
Alastair Firth is a computer and electrical engineering graduate from Carnegie Mellon who loves to design and build solutions for unique and difficult problems, which made him an invaluable asset to Scholastic's development team.

John Goulah, Deployinator: Being Stupid to Be Smart
John Goulah has been working in New York City over the past several years for a number of Web sites in both technical and management roles, as well as the co-founding several startups. Having spent much of his youth touring in rock bands and hacking from the road, he is no stranger to crowds, be it in a smoke-filled room or presenting to the company Board. He strives for non-mundane tasks and has automated himself out of his past few endeavors, which has landed him in his current role as an engineer at Etsy, the leading marketplace for handmade goods.

Jon "maddog" Hall, Project Cauã
Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International (https://www.li.org), an association of computer users who wish to support and promote the Linux operating system. During his career in commercial computing, which started in 1969, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, system administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, author, and educator. He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and SGI. He currently works as an independent consultant and is involved with bringing environmentally friendly computing to emerging marketplaces through Project Cauã (www.projectcaua.org). Mr Hall has worked on many systems, both proprietary and open, having concentrated on UNIX systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software. He has taught at Hartford State Technical College (HSTC), Merrimack College, and Daniel Webster College. While he was at HSTC, his students gave him the nickname of "maddog." Mr. Hall is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations, and one book, Linux for Dummies. Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia, and Brazil, as well as the United Nations and many local and state governments, on the use of free and open source software. Mr. Hall serves on the boards of several companies and several nonprofit organizations. Mr. Hall has traveled the world speaking on the benefits of open source software. He received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York.

Leif Hedstrom, Apache Traffic Server: More Than Just a Proxy
Leif Hedstrom is a Principal Architect at GoDaddy.com, working on the hosting services and various open source projects. Before joining GoDaddy, Leif worked on several Akamai CDN solutions, using Apache Traffic Server. At Yahoo! Inc. he designed and implemented several CDN services used by many millions of users. As the chairperson of the Apache Traffic Server Project Management Committee (PMC), he's actively involved with development and evangelism of the project. His prior experiences include working at Infoseek, Netscape, and Propel. Leif is an avid dirt biker, alpine skier, dog person, scuba diver, and family man. And of course he's a huge computer nerd.

Marie Hetrick, Fixing the Flying Plane: A Production DevOps Team
Marie Hetrick is Scholastic's Web Hosting Department's Manager and is always looking for a more efficient way to perform complex operations. Her background is in network engineering and philosophy (which she'll argue aren't as different as you'd think).

Richard Jimmerson, IPv6, DNSSEC, RPKI, etc.: What's the Holdup and How Can We Help?
To come.

Luke Kanies, Building IronMan, Not Programming
Luke has been publishing and speaking on his work in UNIX administration since 1997. He has focused on tool development since 2001, developing and publishing multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributing to established products such as Cfengine. He founded Puppet Labs in 2005 out of fear and desperation, with the goal of producing better operations tools and changing how we manage systems. He founded and is the project lead for Puppet, an open-source automation framework written in Ruby, and he is always researching and developing new ways to make it easier to talk to computers on your own terms. He has presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in.

Erik Kastner, Deployinator: Being Stupid to Be Smart
Erik Kastner has given presentations large and small, from the international Rails conference to informal company brown-bags. He strives to find the laziest way to get things done, even if it ends up being a lot more work. Automation, exploration, and the simple joy of building underpin just about everything he does. Other than a strange, dream-filled few years in San Francisco, Erik has lived in New Jersey his whole life. He works at Etsy in Brooklyn hand-crafting code, crafts, and tools.

Susan Landau, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
Susan Landau is spending 2011–2012 as a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard University Computer Science Department; in 2010–2011 she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her book Surveillance, or, The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies was just published by MIT Press. From 1999 to 2010, Landau was employed at Sun Microsystems as Senior Staff Engineer and then Distinguished Engineer, where she worked on security, cryptography, and policy, including digital-rights management issues. Landau is co-author, with Whitfield Diffie, of Privacy on the Line: Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press, 1998; rev. 2007), and she is the author of numerous computer science and public papers, as well as op-eds on cybersecurity and encryption policy for various leading newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. She has spoken frequently on these issues on NPR. Prior to her time at Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and at Wesleyan University. She is a member of the National Research Council Computer Science Telecommunications Board, serves on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Science and Engineering, and is on the CSIS Commission on Cyber for the 44th Presidency. Landau is a recipient of the 2008 Women Vision Social Impact Award, an AAAS Fellow, and an ACM Engineer. She received her BA from Princeton and her PhD from MIT.

Dru Lavigne, Playing the Certification Game (No Straitjacket Required), a.k.a How to Become Certified Without Becoming Certifiable
Dru Lavigne is a network and system administrator, IT instructor, curriculum developer, and author. She has over a decade of experience administering and teaching Netware, Microsoft, Cisco, Checkpoint, SCO, Solaris, Linux, and BSD systems. She is the author of BSD Hacks, The Best of FreeBSD Basics, and The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD. She is the founder and current Chair of the BSD Certification Group Inc., a nonprofit organization with a mission to create the standard for certifying BSD system administrators, and she serves on the Board of the FreeBSD Foundation.

Thomas A. Limoncelli, SRE@Google: Thousands of DevOps Since 2004
Tom Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His best-known books include Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley). He received the SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He works at Google in NYC and blogs at https://EverythingSysadmin.com/. He also happens to be co-chair of LISA '11.

Patrick McAndrew, Fixing the Flying Plane: A Production DevOps Team
Patrick McAndrew worked as a storage engineer and designer for several large companies before taking on the challenge of designing and implementing the infrastructure for Scholastic Hosting's new datacenters, where his expertise has proven invaluable.

H. Wade Minter, Customer Service for Sysadmins
H. Wade Minter is the Chief Architect for TeamSnap, a Web application for managing youth and adult sports teams and groups. At TeamSnap, he is responsible for all of the technology infrastructure, new technology testing, and some Ruby development. He also takes regular turns as front-line customer support.

Erik Nygren, Implementing IPv6 on a Global Scale: Experiences at Akamai
Erik Nygren is Chief Architect in Akamai's Platform Systems Engineering organization and has been with Akamai since June of 1999. Erik is leading the platform architecture for Akamai's IPv6 initiative, in addition to wearing other hats. During his time at Akamai, Erik has held various engineering and operations positions. Prior to working at Akamai, Erik was a graduate student in MIT's Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group and also worked in the Intelligent Mechanisms group at NASA Ames Research Center.

Andy Palmer, One Size Does Not Fit All in DB Systems
Andy Palmer specializes in founding and accelerating the growth of world-class technology organizations. Andy has a particular interest in projects at the intersection of computer science and the life sciences and a particular passion for cancer drug discovery and development. In 2005, Andy and Dr. Michael Stonebraker co-founded Vertica Systems, a company that developed an innovative database engine specifically designed for peta-scale data warehousing and cloud computing. Previously, Andy served as a key member of the startup team and the Senior Vice President of Operations and CIO at Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) as the company raised over $130M, treated its first cancer patient, and filed the company's first IND. Additionally, Andy has held executive positions and served as a member of the core startup team at Bowstreet (acquired by IBM), as well as pcOrder.com (NASDAQ: PCOR) and Trilogy. Andy currently serves as a Founding Board Member of world-class innovative startups, including Recorded Future, Goby, and CloudSwitch. Over the past fifteen years, Andy has served as founding Board member, seed investor, and/or advisor to more than twenty startups.

Michael P. Perrone, What Is Watson?
Dr. Perrone is an IBM Master Inventor with over twenty years of experience in computer science, including seven years in high performance computing and five years in seismic imaging. He is the manager of the IBM Research Multicore Computing Department, which has the mission of exploring the strengths and weaknesses of multicore processors to help guide supercomputing architectural design and to aid customers in designing novel supercomputing algorithms. His recent projects cover a variety of HPC workloads, including Watson, seismic imaging, reservoir modeling, computational fluid dynamics, business analytics, graph algorithms, network intrusion detection, financial data stream processing, high-speed text indexing, image processing, carbon sequestration, and bioinformatics. His research includes algorithmic optimization for a variety of multicore processors, parallel computing, and statistical machine learning. He received his PhD in Physics from Brown University.

David Pullman, Releasing 9/11 Data to Satisfy FOIA: It's Just a Simple Web Site, Right?
David Pullman is a system administrator at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). David has reinvented himself several times in his career, from being an electronics technician in the Navy to a field engineer to his current role as a Linux/UNIX and Mac sysadmin. David specializes in learning new things, automation and standardization, and systems integration.

Jesse Robbins, GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction
Jesse Robbins is co-founder of Opscode, leader in cloud infrastructure automation, and served as Opscode's founding CEO. Jesse is an internationally recognized innovator and expert in infrastructure, Web operations, and emergency management. Jesse was co-creator and founding chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and editor of the book Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time, and he contributes to the O'Reilly Radar. Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com as "Master of Disaster," with responsibility for Website availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand. Robbins is a former firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager; he led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in the service of both.

Ben Rockwood, The DevOps Transformation
Ben Rockwood is the Director of Systems Engineering at Joyent, which 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. He is the father of 5 and does not have pink hair.

Carolyn Rowland, Releasing 9/11 Data to Satisfy FOIA: It's Just a Simple Web Site, Right?
Carolyn Rowland began her UNIX system administration career in 1991. She currently leads a team of sysadmins at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Her tireless efforts succeeded in changing the perception of her team from yet another overhead cost to a highly respected part of the organization. Her team has distinguished itself as a leader in the development of new technology solutions that solve business and research problems across the NIST campus.

Larissa Shapiro, Can Vulnerability Disclosure Processes Be Responsible, Rational, and Effective?
Larissa Shapiro is Product Manager at Internet Systems Consortium, which makes Internet infrastructure software and runs critical internet infrastructure. ISC's DNS implementation, BIND, runs on approximately 85% of the world's nameservers. Larissa also serves as one of ISC's security officers and has been deeply involved in the evolution of ISC's security and vulnerability disclosure process. Prior to joining ISC in 2009, Larissa was a program manager for Solaris Beta programs at Sun Microsystems and Release Manager for the Steps to Success Reseller Content Portal at Cisco Systems.

Michael Stonebraker, NewSQL vs. NoSQL for New OLTP
Dr. Stonebraker has been a pioneer of database research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS and of the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley, where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty-five years. More recently, at MIT he was a co-architect of the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store column-oriented DBMS, and the H-Store transaction processing engine. Currently, he is working on science-oriented DBMSes, OLTP DBMSes, and search engines for accessing the deep Web. He is the founder of eight venture-capital-backed startups, which commercialized his prototypes. Presently he serves as Chief Technology Officer of VoltDB, Paradigm4, and Goby.com.

Avleen Vig, The Operational Impact of Continuous Deployment
Avleen is a senior system administrator at Etsy, where he spends much of his time growing the infrastructure for selling knitted gloves and cross-stitch periodic tables. Before joining Etsy he worked at several large tech companies, including EarthLink and Google, as well as a number of small successful startups.

Michael Wei, Issues and Trends in Reliably Sanitizing Solid State Disks
Michael Wei is a PhD student at the University of California, San Diego. His current research interests involve embedded systems, non-volatile systems, computer architecture, security, and energy. Presently he is working on reliably erasing solid state disks (SSDs) at the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory.