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Join us for Dinner #30 sponsored by VMWare on Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012 @ VMWare’s Palo Alto Campus!

Please join us for fun, food, drinks, and schwag while you meet and hear from some of the women of VMware R&D who are working on innovative solutions to interesting problems.

 

VMWare Girl Geek Dinner Agenda:

5:30pm – 6:30pm : Registration, Appetizers and Networking
6:30pm – 7:30pm: Lightning Talks by VMware Engineers
7:30pm – 8:30pm: Speaker Q & A and More Networking

Speakers Bios:

Talk Topic: Welcome & Keynote
Julia will share VMware’s vision for continued growth of women in engineering at VMware and beyond. She will also provide an overview of VMware’s innovation programs and share her thoughts on how women can establish themselves as innovators and thought leaders.

Speaker Bio: Julia has over 20 years of extensive experience managing technology teams in both mature and start-up organizations. Prior to VMware in 2004, Julia was the Vice President of Engineering at Akamai Technologies. Julia received her BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is a graduate of Boston University’s School of Business where she received her Master of Science degree in Management Information Systems.

 

Melina McLarty (Sr. User Experience Engineer)

Talk Topic: Case Study: Designing a Simplified Calendaring System Using Location Awareness
How to focus on the user early in the design process.
How machine learning can improve location-finding algorithms.

Speaker Bio: Melina joined VMware as an intern in 2008 and returned in 2009 after completing her degree is Systems Design Engineering for the University of Waterloo in Canada. At VMware, she takes complex virtualization and cloud computing concepts and creates simplified models in the vSphere and vCloud UI. Prior to joining VMware Melina designed user experiences in many different industries including IBM, UPS, and Ford.

Anne Holler (Principal Engineer, Distributed Resource Management team)

Talk Topic: Talk Topic: Workload-based Power Management
According to a recent Gartner report, datacenter server racks are typically 40% underutilized, due to issues around the provisioning of power to the racks.  This talk will describe an advanced development project, leveraging server hardware support for host power caps, to have vSphere software manage the rack power budget by allocating the power to hosts in the rack according to their VM workload.

Speaker Bio: Anne has recently been working on running Hadoop on virtual infrastructure and has worked on Storage DRS, Server DRS, and Distributed Power Management. She previously did performance analysis for VMware’s hypervisor and hosted products. Prior to joining VMware in 2002, she worked at Omnishift, Transmeta, and HP.

 

Talk Topic: Possibilities of Network Virtualization

Natasha will be talking about Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP), which she continues to work on now at VMware. NVP acts as the network’s hypervisor, implementing a multi-tenant network abstraction across shared infrastructure. Her talk will focus on the possibilities network virtualization brings, and the challenges of designing a controller platform that can scale to networks of tens of thousands of hosts.

Speaker Bio: Natasha joined VMware’s networking unit as an engineer earlier this year. She was previously a founding employee at Nicira where she started her career in SDN and network virtualization, contributing significantly to both the NOX and Onix network controller platforms. Natasha graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science.

 

Talk Topic: Talk Topic: A data-driven approach to performance troubleshooting in the cloud
At VMware, we have built a research prototype called vPerfGuard that aims to make performance troubleshooting more automated, scalable, and data-driven, by leveraging the power of statistical learning and the rich telemetry collected from applications and systems in the cloud. It automatically identifies system metrics that are most predictive of application performance, and adaptively detects potential shifts in such predictive metrics as system conditions change. The metrics can point to potential causes that can guide a cloud service provider to zero in on the root cause of a performance problem.

Speaker Bio: Xiaoyun is focusing on developing automated resource and performance management solutions for virtualized datacenters and applications. She has co-authored over 50 refereed papers in journals and conference proceedings, and holds 17 patents. Xiaoyun received her dual B.S. in Automation and Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 2000.