Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University
Storage, often the slowest component of modern systems, has evolved into a complex and challenging field. Over the years, the storage stack has grown deeper, making it difficult to work on storage systems, which are unforgiving of errors. Therefore, understanding their behavior and performance under various conditions is crucial. This talk delves into my 30-year-long journey in characterizing storage and file system performance, highlighting mistakes made along the way, insights gained from benchmarking, and strategies to optimize storage system performance (hint: "it depends"). Given the ubiquitous nature of stored data, storage researchers have a diverse range of fields and areas to explore. This talk also weaves my experiences collaborating with researchers in different fields, including Formal Methods, NLP, AI/ML, Cryptography, and Visual Analytics.
Erez Zadok is a Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD degree from Columbia University. He directs the File Systems and Storage Lab (FSL) at the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University, where he joined as faculty in 2001. His current research interests include file systems and storage, operating systems, performance and benchmarking, energy efficiency, security and privacy, networking, and applied ML. He received two SUNY Chancellor's Awards for Excellence, the NSF CAREER Award, and several industry awards. Zadok's funding exceeds $25M and includes federal, state, and industry awards. Zadok published over 150 refereed journal/article papers and one book. Zadok graduated 14 PhDs and over 170 MS students, and has advised over 45 undergraduates. Zadok's service includes chairing several major conferences (FAST and USENIX ATC) and serving on several steering committees. Zadok is the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS). He is a member of the USENIX, ACM SIGOPS, and IEEE Computer Society.
author = {Erez Zadok},
title = {Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Storage Analysis (But Were Afraid to Ask)},
year = {2026},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}
