Ram Kesavan

Education

• Jun 1993: B.Tech. in Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
• Sep 1998: Ph.D. in Computer Science, The Ohio State University

Biography

Ram Kesavan is new to academia. Over his 25-year technology career, he has worked in the systems area---primarily in storage, file systems, distributed systems, and distributed databases. He most recently worked in the database organization at Google Cloud, first as the Uber-TL of the Firestore team, and then as an individual contributor in the Spanner team working on Spanner Graph and ANN search indexing. Prior to Google he worked mostly in the WAFL file system team at NetApp, initially as a developer and then eventually as a Technical Director. Over the past 9 years, he has published 13 peer-reviewed papers that describe some of his technical work while at Google Cloud and NetApp. He has delivered guest lectures at various universities in the US, and formulated and taught a module on storage systems a few times at IIT Madras and IIT Delhi. He holds 22 patents, a PhD from The Ohio State University, and a BTech from IIT Madras.

Other Professional Employment

• Nov 1998-Jun 1999: Member of Technical Staff, Tandem, Cupertino, CA
• Jun 1999-Mar 2019: Technical Director & Member of Technical Staff, NetApp, Sunnyvale
• Jun 2019-Apr 2024: Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Cloud Databases, Sunnyvale, CA

Research Interests

• Distributed systems, Storage systems, and Distributed Databases.

Selected Articles in Journals

• Ram Kesavan, Matthew Curtis-Maury, Vinay Devadas, and Kesari Mishra, " Countering Fragmentation in an Enterprise Storage System" ACM Transactions on Storage, Vol. 14, Issue 4, Article25, 1-35, Jan 2023.
• Ram Kesavan, Ravi Dronamraju, and Kesari Mishra, " WAFL and All-Flash-FAS White Paper " Internal Net App Document, Oct 2018
• Deng Zhou, Vania Fang, Tao Xie, Wen Pan, Ram Kesavan, Tony Lin, and Naresh Patel " Empirical Evaluation and Enhancement of Enterprise Storage Systems Request Scheduling" ACM Transactions on Storage, Vol. 14, Issue 2, Article 23, 1-29, Sept 2017.
• Ram Kesavan, Rohit Singh, Travis Grusecki, and Yuraj Patel, " Efficient Free Space Reclamation in WAFL " ACM Transactions on Storage, Vol. 13, Issue 3, Article 23, 1-29, Sept 2017.
• Ram Kesavan, Atul Goel, and Ravi Dronamraju, "Flash Pool Architecture and Its Evolution" NetApp Technical Journal (NATJ), Vol. 9, Num. 2, Nov 2014
• Mrinal Bhattacharjee, Matthew Curtis-Maury, Shivali Gupta, Ram Kesavan, Ganga Kondapalli, and Jayalakshmi Pattabiraman, " WhiteAlligator: Net-Generation WAFL Block Allocation" NetApp Technical Journal (NATJ), Vol. 7, Num 1, Nov 2011.
• Ram Kesavan and Robert English, " Transformer: On-The-Fly Conversion of File System Format" NetApp Technical Journal (NATJ), Vol. 4, Num. 1, Jan 2008

Articles in Conference Proceedings

• Ed Davisson, Tilo Dickopp, David Gay, Eric Karasuda, Ram Kesavan, and Vadim Yushprakh," Transparent Migration from Datastore to Firestore", 50th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), Aug 2024
• Matthew Curtis-Maury, Ram Kesavan, Bharadwaj V R, Nikhil Mattankot, Vania Fang, Yash Trivedi, Kesari Mishra, and Qin Li, "I/O in a Flash: Evolution of ONTAP to Low-Latency SSDs" 22nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), Feb 2024.
• Ram Kesavan, David Gay, Daniel Thevessen, Jimit Shah, and C. Mohan, " Firestore: The NoSQL Serverless Database for the Application Developer" IEEE 39th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Apr 2023.
• Ram Kesavan, Jason Hennessey, Richard Jernigan, Peter Macko, Keith A. Smith, Daniel Tennant, and Bharadwaj V. R, " FlexGroup Volumes: A Distributed WAFL File System" USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), Jul 2019.
• Ram Kesavan, Matthew Curtis-Maury, Vinay Devadas, and Kesari Mishra, "Storage Gardening: Using a Virtualization Layer for Efficient Defragmentation in the WAFL File System" 17th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), Feb 2019.
• Ram Kesavan, Matthew Curtis-Maury, and Mrinal K. Bhattacharjee," Efficient Search for Free Blocks in the WAFL File System" Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP), Article 86, 1–10, Aug 2018.
• Ram Kesavan, Harendra Kumar, and Sushrut Bhowmik, "WAFL Iron: Repairing Live Enterprise File Systems"16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), Feb 2018.
• Matthew Curtis-Maury, Ram Kesavan, and Mrinal K. Bhattacharjee, "Scalable Write Allocation in the WAFL File System" Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP), Aug 2017.
• Ram Kesavan, Rohit Singh, Travis Grusecki, and Yuvraj Patel, " Algorithms and Data Structures for Efficient Free Space Reclamation in WAFL" Best Paper Award, 15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), Feb 2017.
• Harendra Kumar, Yuvraj Patel, Ram Kesavan, and Sumith Makam, " High Performance Metadata Integrity in the WAFL Copy-on-Write File System" 15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), Feb 2017.

Recent Courses Taught

• CS 425 (ECE 428) - Distributed Systems