Stephen is an experienced architect, embedded software engineer, and performance analysis engineer with a strong background in storage. He has over 12 years of experience in the development of disk based high end enterprise storage systems, including integrating these into OpenStack and other cloud environments. Most recently, he has been focused on cloud distributed storage platforms such as Swift, and Ceph from a performance analysis and optimization point of view. He routinely works with internal and external engineering teams who are building solutions and products around OpenStack and open source storage platforms. Technical areas of focus include enablement of current and future flash technologies, intelligent tiering, and automatic workload optimization. His goal is to bring insight from the high-end enterprise storage world to enhance distributed storage solutions based on commodity hardware.