Pave the Way to 5G and AI

With 5G and AI on the horizon, Mike Yang, President of QCT, examines what QCT has done over the year and where we will be heading to pave the way for customer adoption of 5G and AI technologies. He will also address the progress of creating more synergy in the cloud ecosystem to ensure everyone stays competitive in the years ahead.

Mike Yang

With more than 25 years of IT industry experience, Mike transforms the organization from an ODM to a leading datacenter solution provider that delivers servers, storage, network switches, integrated rack systems, and cloud solutions all under one roof. Enabling customer to easily adopt cloud by offering one-stop-shop experience.

Mike leads the company to be in the driving seat of cloud computing industry. QCT and Quanta comprehend with all the capability of assisting business transition smoothly to the cloud and to achieve the vision of software define data center (SDDC), currently is the largest cloud datacenter hardware provider in the world.

Next Generation Access Network

The deep integration of verticals with the underlying new generation network is considered as one of the key differentiators between 4G and 5G systems to open truly global markets for innovative digital business models. NGCO, Telecommunication, UE and vertical industries are coming together to enable improved solutions based on the evolving 5G technology.

Steve Cheng

With 20+ years working experience in Quanta, Steve has always been a pioneer of innovation, bringing Quanta’s product diversification from notebook, to new value-added consumer electronic market such as tablet, cellular connected wearables, routers all the way to 5G development. Steve’s team has successfully deliver millions of ODM solutions for world leading customers including Blackberry, Amazon, Verizon, etc, and is working closely with Taiwan leading research institute on more future technology development.

Enabling Intelligent Clouds

This keynote will discuss emerging trends and how our industry as a whole is approaching the modern data center. As workloads change in the era of cloud computing, find out the actions that can be embraced to prepare for the new trends that push processing power forward.

James Jau

James Jau is Vice President of Research & Development at QCT. He is responsible for all the research and development management and product planning for cloud computing products, including Server, Storage and Network Switch product lines.

James has more than 25 years of experience in server-related design. He joined Quanta and established the server engineering team in 1999 and successfully delivered several leading-edge server products over the course of eight years. Those products include the first blade server from a Taiwanese ODM. As an open hardware advocator, James continues to drive innovations for next generation datacenter hardware with the focus on “optimization” and “efficiency”. James is currently serving as the member of Incubation committee for the Rack & Power group in Open Compute Project .

James previously worked in various hardware designs and leadership roles at Wang Laboratory, Digital Equipment Corp. James received Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma State University, holds 86 patents in the field(s) of Electrical , Software, Mechanical and Power.

Cloud: Trends and Opportunities

Kit Ho Chee

Kit Ho Chee is vice president of the Sales and Marketing Group (SMG) and general manager of the Global Cloud Sales Group at Intel Corporation. He leads a worldwide sales organization focused on building strategic partnerships with cloud service providers and enterprises to enable the full potential of the cloud.

Prior to assuming his current role in late 2016, Chee was vice president of SMG and general manager for new business and service provider sales for Intel China, Ltd. He was responsible for business development, key customer engagements, sales strategies, and operations for the Online Sales Group.

From 2011 to 2014, he served as general manager for business operations and product enabling for Intel SMG, China. He oversaw pricing strategies, supply allocation, customer programs, technical marketing, and product enabling for the supply chain.

From 2009 to 2011, Chee was general manager for the China Strategy Office where he developed responsive, medium and long-term strategies to best position Intel within the rapidly evolving Chinese market.

Earlier in his career, he was group finance controller and director of business operations for the Channel Platforms Group based in Shanghai. From 1996 through 2005, he held numerous finance leadership positions throughout the Asia-Pacific region. He joined Intel in 1990 as part of the Technology Manufacturing Finance Group.

Chee holds a bachelor’s degree in financial administration from the University of New England, Australia.

Samsung Memory Vision for Data-Driven Era

We are living in a data-centric world. Every day, data is increasing not only in volume, but also in velocity and variety. Big data is everywhere, and understanding the nature and properties of big data is becoming more important. Enhanced personalized services and key business insights are made based on new technologies such as data analytics and machine learning. Advanced silicon technologies will be the great tools to make these products and services possible.

Samsung has made significant investments in next generation storage technologies that future software-defined datacenters will be built on. In this session, we will describe our technologies and how these will enable the reality of a data-driven world.

Jin-Man Han

Jin-Man Han, Senior Vice President of the Semiconductor business of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., has been leading Product Planning & Application Engineering within the Memory Division since his appointment earlier this year. His responsibilities include team oversight, ecosystem build-up, and enabling of all the company’s current and future memory products such as HBM, UFS, DRAM, NAND and SSDs.

Data Center Dynamics

Data center dynamics affect everyone in the industry. Broadcom has a unique perspective, due to its broad product portfolio and leading customer base. Charlie Kawwas, Broadcom's Chief Sales Officer, will discuss the challenges affecting data center participants, how innovation can continue even in the face of these challenges and how collaboration between QCT and Broadcom has enabled leadership in the space and innovation and differentiation for both companies.

Charlie Kawwas

Charlie Kawwas is Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at Broadcom, responsible for global sales and marketing across all business divisions. Dr. Kawwas joined Avago, now Broadcom, through the LSI acquisition in May 2014, where he was head of worldwide sales. Previous positions at LSI include vice president of sales and marketing for the networking division, and vice president of marketing for the networking and storage products group. Before joining LSI, Dr. Kawwas was the leader of Product Line Management for the Optical Ethernet and Multi-service Edge portfolio at Nortel. Dr. Kawwas received his B.S. in Computer Engineering, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

Microsoft Azure Hardware Platform Strategy

Mark Shaw

Mark Shaw is Director of Hardware Engineering for Microsoft's Cloud and AI Division, responsible for the architecture and hardware designs of Compute & Storage platforms utilized in Azure's cloud scale services. Mark is leading the Project Olympus open source hardware development effort with the Open Compute Project to bring leading edge technology to the community. Microsoft’s Open Compute Project servers have been deployed at massive scale across a global fleet of data centers. Mark's team is responsible for delivering leading-edge technology as the AMD Naples servers and DX-88 high density storage. Before Microsoft, Mark has worked on mainframes and supercomputers and holds over 30 patents in computing systems and hardware.

Leveraging Hybrid Infrastructure at Dropbox

Akhil Gupta

Akhil Gupta is the VP of Infrastructure at Dropbox, responsible for Dropbox’s physical and technical infrastructure, technology operations, and network security. In this role, Akhil and his team ensure that the hundreds of petabytes of data stored in Dropbox are safe and available to Dropbox’s users around the world. Prior to Dropbox, Akhil oversaw Google’s search ads infrastructure and products, where he was responsible for building and scaling the infrastructure that serves ads on Google.com.

Akhil holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He is the proud father of two children.

Edge Computing, its breakthrough application and the view of its future from Cloudflare

Nitin Rao

Nitin Rao heads the Infrastructure team at Cloudflare, a web performance and security company focused on helping build a better Internet. The company currently powers 10 percent of all Internet requests and has more than 154 data centers across 75 countries, making it one of the most interconnected networks in the world. In his five years at Cloudflare, Nitin has worked on M&A, strategic partnerships, new product strategy, and currently leads the expansion of Cloudflare’s global network.

He previously founded and sold Sunglass, a 3D modeling software company, and in 2009, was selected as a TED Fellow. He attended the National Institute of Technology Karnataka and received his MBA from MIT.

Alibaba’s AI Technology, Solution, and Platform

In this session, Kam He will reveal Alibaba’s data-driven ecosystem, its AI platform – PAI and industry solutions – ET Brian for different use cases, including but not limited to smart city, smart healthcare, smart manufacturing, smart retail.

Nishant Agarwal

Nishant is currently a Solutions Architect at Alibaba Cloud, where he is engaged in assisting executives, technology evangelists, and entrepreneurs in realizing their vision to build highly scalable and resilient businesses by using cloud-based technologies. Nishant specializes in providing Digital Transformation services by helping his clients design and implement cloud native technology across core infrastructure, data platforms, narrow AI tooling and industry-specific solutions. Nishant’s main areas of focus include Retail Transformation, Agile Financial Services, and Intelligent Manufacturing. Before Alibaba, Nishant ran several technology initiatives at Goldman Sachs and worked as a management consultant at Deloitte. Nishant graduated from University of Cambridge with a MBA and received his Bachelors in Computer Engineering degree from Louisiana State University. Nishant is an Alibaba Cloud Certified Professional (Cloud Computing, Security and Big Data).

QCT x IBM = Your Growth

Sergio Saad

Sergio Saad’s mission is to drive IBM Multivendor Support Services and Offerings. Multivendor Services offers a wall-to-wall support approach, with advanced technologies to improve the client experience through automation. This integrated approach can produce big cost savings from improved IT asset management, reductions in complexity and in operating costs through outage mitigation and accelerated problem resolution. He excels at managing motivated and diverse integrated teams across the globe, as well as discovering and fulfilling the needs of many of the world’s most essential enterprises. His combination of leadership, execution and expertise is key to driving success in the Multivendor Services business.

The AI Data Center

Ian Buck

Ian Buck is vice president of NVIDIA's Accelerated Computing business unit, which includes all hardware and software product lines, third-party enablement and marketing activities for GPU computing. Ian joined NVIDIA in 2004 and created CUDA, which remains the leading platform for accelerated-based parallel computing. Before joining NVIDIA, Ian was the development lead on Brook, which was the forerunner to generalized computing on GPUs. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and a B.S.E from Princeton University.

Track 1 - Session 1
The Artificial Intelligence Revolution

Accelerating resource-hungry AI applications call for a demand in performance beyond what could be delivered in the past. In this session, QCT, NVIDIA, and Intel discuss how they have collaborated to produce optimized AI platforms that meet the needs of various markets.

Richard Liu

Richard Liu is a Senior Director, in charge of the product planning and execution for QCT server, storage, and rack products. Richard has been in the IT industry and playing the PM role for over 20 years. He started his professional career with a global company in Taiwan, handling both ODM/OEM and own-brand projects. Apart from the product marketing role, Richard has been a venture capitalist, helping to fund and incubate startup companies across various industries like: IC design, LED, consumer electronics, software, etc. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA degree from National Taiwan University.

Tingwei Huang

Nishant Agarwal

Nishant is currently a Solutions Architect at Alibaba Cloud, where he is engaged in assisting executives, technology evangelists, and entrepreneurs in realizing their vision to build highly scalable and resilient businesses by using cloud-based technologies. Nishant specializes in providing Digital Transformation services by helping his clients design and implement cloud native technology across core infrastructure, data platforms, narrow AI tooling and industry-specific solutions. Nishant’s main areas of focus include Retail Transformation, Agile Financial Services, and Intelligent Manufacturing. Before Alibaba, Nishant ran several technology initiatives at Goldman Sachs and worked as a management consultant at Deloitte. Nishant graduated from University of Cambridge with a MBA and received his Bachelors in Computer Engineering degree from Louisiana State University. Nishant is an Alibaba Cloud Certified Professional (Cloud Computing, Security and Big Data).

Fraser Gardiner

Mr Gardiner is the Solutions Architecture Director that supports NVIDIA’s Major Cloud Service Provider Partners. He has over 25 years of experience in Unix/Linux systems to support both Mission Critical Enterprise Applications as well as Industrial/Hyperscale use cases. He has held senior technical or technical leadership roles at Apple, HP and Oracle/Sun Microsystems.

Track 1 - Session 2
400G Switch and 100G Router Introduction

• The bandwidth demanding in the clouds keep driving the networking speed from 100G to the 400G.
• The deep buffer 100G router with large scale of L3 table plays a key role of edge and core routing in Telecom landscape.
• Base on Broadcom’s latest merchant silicon, QCT and Broadcom will introduce 400G switch solution for data centre and 100G router solution for carrier.

Paul Chang

Paul Chang is experienced in product management and marketing from LAN, MAN to WAN solutions. He leads the product management and marketing team of networking product line in QCT for more than 5 years.

Robin Grindley

* PLM for Data Center switch products at Broadcom, including the recently released 12.8 Tbps Tomahawk 3
* Previously PLM for PON products at Broadcom
* PhD Computer Engineering

Track 1 - Session 3
Disaggregated Data Center at Scale

QCT has been a pioneer in Intel Rack Scale Design (RSD) In this session, Intel will disclose their RSD roadmap and use cases, while QCT showcases their latest developments on RSD version 2.3. This presentation will also feature Telco examples and a Pooled NVMe over Fabrics storage solution to complement the QCT Rackgo R rack-level product line.

Chris Buerger

Chris Buerger leads the customer success team for Intel Rack Scale Design within the Software Defined Datacenter Solutions Group at Intel. He joined Intel from Wind River Systems, where he was a Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing responsible for leading the company’s various open source and SDN portfolio initiatives. Chris was previously the Senior Director of Product Realization at Virgin Mobile USA leading engineering, QA and project management teams. Prior to Virgin, he spent more than 10 years in various product management and engineering roles in the network operator and equipment manufacturer markets. Chris has an Executive MBA from the Merage School of Business at the University of California in Irvine, a BA (Hons) in European Business from Ashcroft Business School in Cambridge/England and a Diplom Kaufmann degree from the Berlin School of Economics and Law in Germany.

Winslow Han

Winslow leads the rack product development at QCT.

Ulysses Lu

Ulysses is leading telco solution business development at QCT, including solution partner alliances and Open community involvement

Track 2 - Session 1
The Most Advanced JBOD from Project Olympus

Microsoft and QCT joined hands to develop a 4U, 88 HDD JBOD for next-generation Azure services under Project Olympus. Both companies will share insights into designing for highest performance and reliability in this presentation. Join this session for full details of the system, including its capacities and capabilities.

Winslow Han

Winslow leads the rack product development at QCT.

Mark Shaw

Mark Shaw is Director of Hardware Engineering for Microsoft's Cloud and AI Division, responsible for the architecture and hardware designs of Compute & Storage platforms utilized in Azure's cloud scale services. Mark is leading the Project Olympus open source hardware development effort with the Open Compute Project to bring leading edge technology to the community. Microsoft’s Open Compute Project servers have been deployed at massive scale across a global fleet of data centers. Mark's team is responsible for delivering leading-edge technology as the AMD Naples servers and DX-88 high density storage. Before Microsoft, Mark has worked on mainframes and supercomputers and holds over 30 patents in computing systems and hardware.

Track 2 - Session 2
SDS use case Panel: Data protection in SDDC

Experts from Microsoft, Veeam, and Acuutech will discuss, in a panel format, about how they help customers balance data protection requirements and goals for the SDDC environment.

Jen-Yao Chung

Dr. Jen-Yao Chung is an Associate VP, Research and Development within Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT). He works with global cloud virtualization software providers, global processional service companies and hardware manufactures to create hyper converged cloud solution. He leads the design and development for Software Defined Storage and Big Data Solutions. He manages QCT worldwide cloud solution centers (US, Taiwan, Germany) design and deployment. His current focus is in the design and development of Azure hybrid cloud and hardware as a service. Dr. Chung received his Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Engineer of ACM, and Member of IBM Academy of Technology.

Cosmos Darwin

Cosmos Darwin is a Senior Program Manager on the Core OS team at Microsoft responsible for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and Storage Spaces Direct. He is a frequent speaker at Microsoft events. Cosmos holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from MIT and lives in Bellevue, WA.

Philip Moss

Philip Moss is Chief Product Officer at Acuutech; a service provider delivering cutting edge private, public and hybrid cloud solutions. As an early pioneer in the service provider market he has over 20 years of experience in designing, building, and delivering multi-tenant and hosted solutions, combined with his deep passion for breaking into new business paradigms to deliver customer benefit focused services . This has given him a deep understanding of the unique challenges service providers face, when delivering highly flexible, scalable, and modular platforms suitable for paying customers. Coupled with meeting the challenges inherent in constantly improving operational efficiency and cost reduction to dive a service providers bottom line. As a specialist in the Microsoft technology stack, Philip has a deep understanding of the Windows Server platform and is well respected as a leading global expert on end-to-end system design.

Chris Henley

Chris Henley is a fun and energetic Sr. Manager at Veeam Software. He is focused on availability, and cloud solutions from Microsoft. He is a popular and entertaining speaker. He is an accomplished technical author with 3 books, hundreds of technical articles, blog posts, interviews, webcasts, and recorded speeches. He has a talent for making difficult technical concepts easy to understand. He has spent more than 2 decades working in technology, including an 8-year stint with Microsoft and a 7-year stint with Veeam. He loves the amazing things that technology can do to make our lives better. Chris holds a B.S. in Business Management and a M.S. in Management and Leadership. He loves to highlight the intersection of business and technology, and loves to share the stories of success and failure of businesses and technology. Chris has spent the last 15 years working on the craft of “Evangelism,” (If you are wondering “What exactly is that?” you are not alone.) Chris worked on the team that built Microsoft’s ITPro Evangelism program in the early 2000’s and continues to do Evangelism as the Sr. Manager of Global Alliances at Veeam. When he’s not having fun working with technology he enjoys spending time outdoors, camping, fishing, hunting, hiking, riding his horse “Thunder”, and bicycling with his wife and their 3 great kids. He is currently on a quest to find the best chocolate cake on planet Earth!

Track 2 - Session 3
Big Data Analytics on Ceph-based Data Lake

Following the presentation shared by Red Hat last year regarding the architecture transformation in few companies to deploy a common Ceph lake for multiple on-demand Hadoop and Spark clusters, we are going to have extension session from QCT, Red Hat and a user this year.
Comprehensive tests for diverse analytics jobs were done by the parties to prove and answer following questions:

• What are the core challenges we see in the real world?
• Does it work? Can the analytics jobs run on Ceph?
• How does it perform? Compared to native HDFS, how much costs you can save with how much performance you have to scarify?

Gary Lee

Gary Lee is the associate vice president of Quanta Cloud Technology, he leads the engineer team to develop the Telco and SDDC technologies, and focuses on cloud-related software defined solutions as well as the network function virtualized technologies to satisfy the demands of diverse segments of business customers. Gary Lee has more than 25 years’ experience in the IT industry and 5 years of experience as a business consultant.

Brent Compton

Brent Compton is Senior Director Storage Solution Architectures at Red Hat, leading the team responsible for building Ceph and Gluster reference architectures with hardware and software partners across the industry. Before Red Hat, Brent was responsible for emerging non-volatile memory software technologies at Fusion-io. Previous enterprise software leadership roles include VP Product Management at Micromuse (now IBM Tivoli Netcool) and Product Marketing Director within HP’s OpenView software division. Within enterprise IT, Brent also served as Director Middleware Development Platforms at the LDS Church and as CIO at Joint Commission International.

Clips from a recent conference presentation
Brent has a tight-knit family, and can be found on skis or a mountain bike whenever possible.

Kyle Bader

Kyle Bader is a Senior Solution Architect working in the Storage Solutions Team at Red Hat, lending his design and operational skills with Ceph to help develop tested solutions that ensure repeatable success when deploying distributed, fault-tolerent, multi-petabyte storage systems. Prior to Red Hat, Kyle had architectural roles at both Inktank and DreamHost. Kyle was part of the team that brought the first production Ceph clusters to the world, supporting DreamHost's DreamObjects and DreamCompute services.

Track 2 - Session 4
SDS use case Panel: object storage in SDDC

Experts from IBM (Cleversafe), NetApp (StorageGRID), Cloudian (HyperStore), and Red Hat (Ceph) will discuss the following topics:

1. Object storage industry trends, adoption, and TCO
2. Popular use cases
3. Large deployments
4. Future directions

Jen-Yao Chung

Dr. Jen-Yao Chung is an Associate VP, Research and Development within Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT). He works with global cloud virtualization software providers, global processional service companies and hardware manufactures to create hyper converged cloud solution. He leads the design and development for Software Defined Storage and Big Data Solutions. He manages QCT worldwide cloud solution centers (US, Taiwan, Germany) design and deployment. His current focus is in the design and development of Azure hybrid cloud and hardware as a service. Dr. Chung received his Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Engineer of ACM, and Member of IBM Academy of Technology.

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 solution integration. Currently, he is technical leader on IBM Storage technology for AI, cloud storage and software defined storage infrastructure. Mr. Hsu has devoted his entire 27 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 AN MBA degree. He is also a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

Duncan Moore

Duncan has spent the last 19 years at NetApp working to build solutions to solve customer problems in the areas of: Backup & Recovery, Disaster Recovery, Object Storage and Storage Security. He joined NetApp in 1999 to work on NetApp's first, and still industry leading, replication product SnapMirror and since then has been involved with many other industry firsts including: Unified primary/secondary storage deduplication, near-line storage appliances as well as integrations with leading data protection software vendors. Duncan’s current focus is in the area of Object Storage, where he leads teams building NetApp’s StorageGRID enterprise object storage system. Duncan holds a BS in Computer Science from California State University at San Jose as well as an MBA from the University of Kansas. He is based at the NetApp Technology Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Sanjay Jadag

Sanjay Jagad has worked in the storage industry for nearly 20 years helping customers build dynamic IT infrastructures that better align with business challenged, using the latest technologies around Flash Big Data, OpenStack, and Hybrid Cloud. He brings with him the industry knowledge and diverse experience in Product Marketing, Product Management, Sales and Channel enablement, Business Development, Developing GTM strategies and Development engineer (writing firmware in his early engineering days).

Brent Compton

Brent Compton is Senior Director Storage Solution Architectures at Red Hat, leading the team responsible for building Ceph and Gluster reference architectures with hardware and software partners across the industry. Before Red Hat, Brent was responsible for emerging non-volatile memory software technologies at Fusion-io. Previous enterprise software leadership roles include VP Product Management at Micromuse (now IBM Tivoli Netcool) and Product Marketing Director within HP’s OpenView software division. Within enterprise IT, Brent also served as Director Middleware Development Platforms at the LDS Church and as CIO at Joint Commission International.

Clips from a recent conference presentation
Brent has a tight-knit family, and can be found on skis or a mountain bike whenever possible.