Dan Van Der Ster
Chief Technology Officer at Ceph
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDan Van Der Ster is a seasoned CTO and distributed systems expert with 13 years of professional experience, currently leading technology at Clyso and serving on the Ceph Executive Council. He brings deep production expertise from a decade at CERN, where he designed and operated multi-petabyte Ceph clusters, managed CVMFS, and shaped IT architecture and data governance. A long-time contributor to the flagship open-source Ceph project, he has improved stability and performance in core storage subsystems such as BlueStore and addressed complex issues like OSD maps, MDS sessions, and PG peering. He pairs academic rigor—a PhD in Distributed Computing—with hands-on engineering and governance experience, uniquely bridging research, large-scale operations, and community stewardship. Based in Vancouver, he is known for solving subtle reliability problems in distributed storage systems and for translating those fixes into operational improvements at national-scale research infrastructure.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Distributed Computing, PhD, Distributed Computing at University of Victoria
French, English
Github Skills (10)
data-storage10
storage10
debug10
filesystem10
distributed-systems10
c-language10
distributed-file-system10
cprogramming-language10
testing10
python3
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
ceph/ceph
Jul 2013 - Mar 2022
Ceph is a distributed object, block, and file storage platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:62 reviews, 157 commits, 101 PRs in 8 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Dan primarily contributed to the Ceph storage platform by fixing bugs and improving its stability. Their work included addressing issues related to incremental OSD maps, MDS session handling, and PG merging. Additionally, the user added debug outputs to improve monitoring and troubleshooting and implemented a test case for a flap peering bug. They also refactored some code in the process, addressing performance and stability problems with the BlueStore backend.
fusefile-storagecephstorageopenebs
dvanders/ceph
Mar 2018 - Mar 2025
Ceph is a distributed object, block, and file storage platform
Contributions:104 pushes, 106 branches in 7 years 2 months
zeroblob-storagefile-storagentfsazure-blob-storage
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