Vault '19 Call for Participation

Overview

After a one-year hiatus, the Linux Storage and Filesystems Conference returns in 2019, under the sponsorship and organization of the USENIX Association, and will bring together practitioners, implementers, users, and researchers working on storage in open source and related projects. The Program Committee welcomes creators and users of open source storage, file systems, and related technologies to submit talk and workshop proposals.

Suggested Topics

• Object, block, and filesystem storage architectures (e.g., Ceph, Swift, Cinder, container storage)
• Distributed, clustered, and parallel storage systems (e.g., GlusterFS, Lustre, OrangeFS, HDFS)
• Persistent memory and related new hardware technologies or interfaces
• File system and storage scaling issues
• Automation and storage management (OpenLMI, Ovirt, Ansible, operators)
• Client/server file systems (e.g. NFS, Samba, pNFS)
• Big data storage
• Long-term data archiving
• Data compression and storage optimization
• Software defined storage
• Consumer storage
• Storage in entertainment and media
• Public cloud storage infrastructure

The best talks will share your or your team's experience with a new technology, a new idea, a new approach, or inspire the audience to think beyond the ways they have always done things. We are also accepting a limited number of workshop sessions, where content can be more tutorial in nature or include hands-on participation by attendees. We encourage new speakers to submit talks as some of the most insightful talks often come from people with new experiences to share.

Previous Vault events have drawn hundreds of attendees from a range of companies with backgrounds ranging from individual open source contributors, to new startups, through teams within the technology and storage giants, or storage end users.

Proposals

We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

• Talks: (Please submit your proposals via the web submission system.)
  • 25-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A
• Workshops: (Please submit your proposals via the web submission system.)
  • Speakers are invited to submit workshop or tutorial proposals ranging in length from one to three hours. Please include the level of technical expertise or background at which your workshop is targeted, as well as any equipment or hands-on requirements for participants.

The deadline for talk and workshop proposals is November 20, 2018. We will evaluate all submissions, notify accepted speakers, and publish a final program by December 16, 2018.

We will schedule practice sessions for all presenters, regardless of experience, because they help speakers adapt their message to our audience and improve the experience for attendees. Along with confirming their plan to present, speakers agree to participate in the practice sessions (details will be included in the acceptance notices).

Both presenters and organizers may withdraw or decline proposals for any reason, even after initial acceptance. Speakers must submit their own proposals; third-party submissions, even if authorized, will be rejected.

If you have questions, feel free to drop us a message at vault19chairs@usenix.org.

Guidelines To Help You Prepare Your Proposal

While it is not our intention to provide you with strict instructions on how to prepare your proposal, we hope you will take a moment to review the following guidelines to help you prepare the best submission possible. To get started, here are three things that you should consider before submitting your proposal:

1. What are you hoping to get from your presentation?
2. What do you expect the audience to gain from your presentation?
3. How will your presentation help advance the open source ecosystem?

At the heart of Linux and open source is the technology. We definitely do not expect every presentation to have code snippets and technical deep dives, but to avoid rejections, there are two things you should avoid because they take away from the integrity of our events and are rarely well received by conference attendees:

1. Sales or marketing pitches
2. Unlicensed or potentially closed-source technologies

There are plenty of ways to give a presentation about projects and technologies without focusing on company-specific efforts while still allowing you to you share your experiences, educate the community about an issue, or generate interest in a project.

First Time Submitting? Don't Feel Intimidated

We know that public speaking can be very intimidating for anybody who is interested in participating but has never presented to a large audience or "under the lights."

USENIX events are an excellent way to get to know the community and share your ideas and the work that you are doing. You do not need to be a distinguished engineer or a chief architect to submit a proposal. In fact, we strongly encourage first-time speakers to submit talks for all of our events. In the instance that you aren't sure about your submission, please reach out to us and we will be more than happy to work with you on your proposal.

Our events are participatory conferences intended for professional networking and collaboration in the storage open source community, and we work closely with our attendees, sponsors, and speakers to help keep USENIX events professional, welcoming, and friendly. If you have any questions about participating, please do not hesitate to contact us.