Prasanna Venkatesh

Firmware Engineer

Micron Technology•  November 2020 - Present

Working on SSD Firmware for next-generation enterprise SSDs, pre-tape out validation and product firmware development. Design, develop, implement and test Enterprise SSD FW for PCIe Gen5 platform and conforming to NVMe 2.0 specification. Involved in pre-tape out scoping and validation efforts for the Controller FW including admin command framework and support, 4k aligned I/O support, validation at Physical Function and Virtual Function levels, I/O path validations for read, write, write zeroes commands, CC-HIT, LBAT-MISS, SMART counters and timers initialization and validation, validating E2E FW for NVMe 2.0 compliance. Bring up ZEBU platform for FW, validating admin commands, 4k aligned and also 512B unaligned I/Os in the ZEBU platform. Validating RAMDISKFE and E2E FW using nvme driver, PCIe analyzer, Functional Test Engineering (FTE) test scripts on the single/dual HAPS platforms. Also, extensive validation using nvme driver and nvme-cli utility for the NVMe 2.0 conformance. Work with cross-functional teams including FTE, ASIC and ZEBU teams to collaborate and deliver products efficiently and effectively. Deliver high-quality code and highly impactful products under tight deadlines.

Senior Software Engineer

Stellus Technologies •  October 2019 - September 2020

 Working in an agile environment to design and develop software for the Stellus Data Platform, based on Key-Value over Fabrics technology, which efficiently stores and accesses unstructured data and improves performance, manageability and scalability challenges of next-generation data centers.  Worked on integrating/porting the latest version of Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK v20.04) and its corresponding Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) with Stellus Data Platform code to improve read/write performance.  Fixed critical bugs in SPDK, DPDK and Stellus data platform for NVMe over RDMA and NVMe over TCP/IP and ensured timely delivery of features and enhancements every sprint.

Software Engineer

NetApp•  October 2017 - September 2019

 Coded and developed NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) device driver to productize end to end NVMe solutions, providing cloud infrastructure and highly scalable data storage solutions.  Implemented admin command support and passthru commands over the fabric using Intel’s Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), admin and I/O performance counters to aggregate stats at the RDMA/NVMe-oF layer.  Implemented multi namespace attachment and namespace management command support over the fabric for the latest class of Samsung SSDs that can support multiple namespaces.  Implemented admin passthru commands at the NVMf layer for drive firmware image download, firmware activation without a controller reset, security send and receive commands, sanitize command, namespace creation, attachment and management, background disk firmware update.  Implemented Asynchronous event configuration support and asynchronous event notifications (AENs) from disk to host for critical events like drive firmware download and activation without a reset, drive health/smart log related events.  Developed a Command Line Interface utility to issue commands over the fabric targeted to multiple domains like NVMe, NVMe-oF, PCIe, etc. to control, query and manage them through user-initiated commands.  Worked closely with test teams in an agile environment to test my changes and add more robustness to existing test suites by adding more corner case test points.  Assisted in sustaining the existing SAS enterprise products and helped in fixing critical field issues.  Worked on a command line utility to aggregate admin, I/O and histogram statistics at the RDMA/NVMe-oF layer.

Software Engineer

Oracle•  January 2016 - September 2017

 Developed new features in Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) driver software for the ZFS Storage Appliance team including admin command support for drive firmware related commands, sanitize, multi namespace related commands.  Carried out namespace reservation support and feature development for dual port NVMe driver developed for oracle public cloud products and the ZFS Storage Appliance.  Implemented kernel log for the NVMe driver and kernel statistics v2 implementation for the blkdev block device driver.  Ensured backward compatibility with the version 1 of kernel stats to support the old existing customers.  Verified the performance enhancements for newly added features using benchmarking tools like iostat and vdbench.  Responsible for unit testing the developed features on both x86 and SPARC platforms.

Senior Firmware Engineer

Western Digital Technologies•  February 2014 - January 2016

 Developed controller firmware for the SATA/SAS HDDs used in data centers and WD personal cloud storage solutions.  Resolved controller firmware issues in SATA/SAS drives on time for critical build release.  Designed, developed and executed test scripts to identify, analyze and fix failures.  Played a key role in the product deployment team, integrating various controller features into the datacenter products.  Handled and resolved the customer raised issues and was an active member of the product sustenance team.  Integrated builds for enterprise storage products in a fast-paced environment.  Coordinated with cross functional teams, firmware, servo team, media manager teams to enhance the various products.  As a part of Sandisk, was working in the Enterprise Storage Solutions Team working on Solid State Drives and path breaking NAND FLASH Technology for the final three months during the merger with Western Digital Corporation.

Intern

Qualcomm•  June 2013 - September 2013

 Designed fingertip detection & tracking android application using augmented reality for a head mounted display system.  Developed a background tracking android application to track background and augment an object on top of it.  Worked on Haptics and gesture recognition and integrated some useful features for the head mounted display.