Paper Title: Incubating the Future of Storage

Paper Abstract: "Advanced storage devices hold much potential, but how can we ensure that the capabilities of these devices are properly harnessed and leveraged by organizations throughout the world who rely on them? Together, Western Digital and Samsung have committed to foster an open ecosystem around advanced storage devices so that their advantages can be utilized and made accessible to everyone. We believe that an open ecosystem for flash is the key to unlocking a successful future for customers. Find out how our two companies are working together with ecosystem partners, customers, universities, and large cloud service providers. We’re building this ecosystem to ensure that hardware manufacturers have access to open specifications for the devices, for the open software that runs on those devices, and for the certification programs that will ensure interoperability between flash manufacturers, software platforms and system integrators (SIs).

Paper Author: Wim De Wispelaere, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, Western Digital
Javier Gonzalez, Principal Software Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Author Bio: Wim De Wispelaere is Vice President of Strategic Initiatives in the Flash Business Unit at Western Digital. In this role, he is responsible for defining new business around innovative flash technologies. Previously, Wim was CEO and CTO of Amplidata, a business that Western Digital's HGST business acquired in 2015. Amplidata invented and developed a software-defined object storage system that is used in large-scale storage deployments in the hybrid cloud. Prior to working at Amplidata, Wim was Director of Product Management and Technical Sales at Data Center Technologies (DCT), a start-up that created innovative backup deduplication technology and was acquired in 2005 by Veritas. At Veritas, Wim had managed the productization of a Veritas deduplication product, and he was involved in the launch of the NetBackup PureDisk product.

Author 2 Bio: I lead Samsung Memory Solutions' Global Open-Source Team (GOST), where I take care of our open-source activities and manage a distributed team of highly talented engineers. This includes defining strategy, internal / external communication, and day-to-day execution. I am also the founder and site manager for Samsung Semiconductor Denmark Research (SSDR) - Samsung’s Memory Solutions first R&D center in Europe and fifth worldwide. I am a Ph.D in operating systems with a strong background in technical leadership, experimental research, and Linux Kernel development. My interests lay primarily in the hardware / software co-design space, where systems software, hardware architecture, and open-source meet. I am dedicated to defining safe environments for motivated software engineers to be creative and get things done. I am a contributor to a wide range of open source projects including the Linux Kernel. I am a regular speaker at several top industry and academic conferences.