Storage Developer Conference: Full Schedule

1:00pm PDT

Ramin Neshat

PCI-SIG Board Member and Marketing Chair, PCI-SIG

Dr. Ramin Neshati works at Intel Corporation as an Engineering and Technology Manager in the I/O Technology Standards group and sits on the PCI-SIG Board of Directors, where he is the Treasurer of the organization and chairs the PCIe Marketing Workgroup. In addition, Dr. Neshati chairs... Read More →

Sunday September 20, 2015 2:00pm - 2:50pm PDT
Cypress Room

Data Center Infrastructure Pre-Conference Seminar

2:00pm PDT

Understanding the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint Memory

Intel and Micron recently introduced their 3D XPoint (pronounced "crosspoint") memory technology, a new development that can serve as both system memory (RAM) and nonvolatile storage. The new technology is up to 1,000 times faster than NAND flash with 1,000 times greater endurance and is 10 times as dense as DRAM. It is said to be in production today with samples this year and shipping products starting next year.

Speakers

Jim Handy

General Director, Objective Analysis

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor... Read More →

Sunday September 20, 2015 2:00pm - 2:50pm PDT
Winchester Room

Persistent Memory Pre-Conference Seminar

3:05pm PDT

Using REST API for Management Integration

Integration is key to managing storage systems today. Customers do not want a vendor lock-in or vendor specific management tools. They want to use their best in class management tools and have various storage systems integrate into their management tools. A REST API to your storage system is an absolute must in today's market. REST is the common denominator for management integration. Fortunately it is rather simple to create a REST API. It is a little harder to get one just right and to get the documentation done in a usable form.

Learning Objectives

What is a REST API? How are they different from previous API protocols? Why are they so useful?
Technology Primer for REST
How to build a REST API
Documentation Standards
Using a REST API as a client

Speakers

Brian Mason

MTS-SW, Netapp

Brian Mason works on REST API at Netapp. He has 25 years of experience in developing software specializing in Management Software for Storage Systems. He has a Master in Computer Science from the University of IL in Springfield and has been lecturing and teaching programming for the... Read More →

Sunday September 20, 2015 3:05pm - 3:55pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Cloud and Interop Pre-Conference Seminar

3:05pm PDT

Next Generation Low Latency Storage Area Networks

In this session, we will present a current (FC, FCoE and iSCSI) and future state (iSER, RDMA, NVMe, and more) of the union of the next generation low latency Storage Area Networks (SAN's) and discuss how the future of SAN's protocols will look like for block, file and object storage.

Speakers

Rupin Mohan

Chief Technologist - Storage Networking, HP

Rupin Mohan is Chief Technologist, Storage Networking at Hewlett-Packard responsible for development of Storage Networking products, business and strategy, and product plans in HP Storage. Rupin has twenty years proven track record delivering outstanding technology products and business... Read More →

Sunday September 20, 2015 3:05pm - 3:55pm PDT
Cypress Room

Data Center Infrastructure Pre-Conference Seminar

3:05pm PDT

Nonvolatile Memory (NVM), Four Trends in the Modern Data Center, and the Implications for the Design of Next Generation Distributed Storage Platforms

There are four trends unfolding simultaneously in the modern Data Center: (i) Increasing Performance of Network Bandwidth, (ii) Storage Media approaching the performance of DRAM, (iii) OSVs optimizing the code path of their storage stacks, and (iv) single processor/core performance remains roughly flat. A direct result of these trends is that application/workloads and the storage resources they consume are increasingly distributed and virtualized. This, in turn, is making and RDMA capabilities a required feature/function of distributed storage platforms. In this talk we will discuss these trends and their implications on the design of distributed storage platforms.

Learning Objectives

Highlight the four trends unfolding in the data center
Elaborate on the implication of these trends on design of modern distributed storage platforms
Provide details on how mechanisms and RDMA become feature/function requirements for these platforms in the near-future

Speakers

David Cohen

Speakers

Karthik Kumar

Senior Application Engineer, Intel

Karthik Kumar is a Sr. Application Engineer at Intel. He works with independent software vendors to optimize their software on Intel server platforms. His areas of expertise include big data and next generation non-volatile memory solutions. He has a PhD and Master of Science from... Read More →

Dr. Thomas Willhalm

Senior Application Engineer, Intel

Dr. Thomas Willhalm is a Sr. Application Engineer at Intel who consults independent software vendors in optimizing their software for Intel architecture. His area of expertise are enterprise applications and data bases with a focus on SIMD and next-gen NVM solutions.

Sunday September 20, 2015 4:05pm - 4:55pm PDT
Winchester Room

Persistent Memory Pre-Conference Seminar

8:30am PDT

Implications of Emerging Storage Technologies on Massive Scale Simulation Based Visual Effects

As the feature film industry moves towards higher resolution frames sizes from 4K to 8K and beyond, physically based visual effects such as smoke, fire, water, explosions, etc. demand higher resolution simulation grids. A common rule of thumb for final renders is that one voxel is utilized per pixel. Thus a 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels) frame may require simulation on a massive sized grid, resulting in significant compute and I/O costs. The result leads to unacceptable turn-around times and increased production costs. This presentation will overview the tools, production pipeline and production relevant open source and proprietary physical simulation software utilized by major feature film studios to create blockbuster or “tent pole” productions.

Aclectic Systems Inc. (Acletic) is developing ColossusTM, a custom hardware / software integrated solution to dramatically speed up massive scale physically based visual effects. To achieve our performance goals, Aclectic is taking a systems approach which accelerates simulation, volume rendering and I/O. This presentation will overview the tools, production pipeline and production relevant open source software utilized by major feature film studios. Throughout, a discussion will be intertwined about how emerging storage technologies such as FLASH, NVMe and NVMe over Fabric could play a part in a future integrated solution used to lower production costs.

Speakers

Yahya H. Mirza

Aclectic Systems Inc

Yahya H. Mirza’s original background was aeronautical engineering, specializing in hypersonic aircraft design and scramjet propulsion. Yahya was initially employed by Battelle Research Labs. His experience at NASA Ames in 1989 simulating the hypersonic aerodynamics of Waveriders... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 8:30am - 9:20am PDT
Cypress Room

-etc

8:30am PDT

Using CDMI to Manage Swift, S3, and Ceph Object Repositories

The Cloud Data Management Interface is designed to provide namespace-based management functionality for the superset of object, file and block protocols. This makes it ideally suited for use with common protocols such as NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, Swift and S3. This session provides an overview of how CDMI interoperates with these protocols, and how the use of CDMI as a management protocol adds value to multi-protocol systems. Concrete examples and use cases from end-users and vendors will be highlighted.

Learning Objectives

Learn how to use CDMI to manage object repositories
Learn how to use CDMI to manage file systems
Learn how to use CDMI to manage block storage systems
Learn how CDMI works with multi-protocol systems

Speakers

David Slik

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager(SCVMM) automates the complete end to end discovery and integration to leverage replication capabilities provided by our enterprise storage partners using SMI-S. Windows Server provides native support for SMIS providers that SCVMM can utilize. Building on top of SCVMM primitives, Azure Site Recovery provides the end to end disaster recovery and orchestration solution automating the creation and management of all target objects including storage and compute. Microsoft is working with multiple storage partners to deliver this functionality: EMC, NetApp, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Huawei, Dell Compellent and Fujitsu.

Learning Objectives

Understand what ASR Disaster Recovery solution means – what is Planned Failover, Unplanned Failover, Test Failover, etc. Learn how SMIS provides the primitives in Replication Services profile
Understand how SCVMM leverages the replication discovery and management profile using the developers guide distributed to partners. This includes the changes made in the Replication Services
Deep dive into Virtual Machine Manager leveraging Pass Through service in Windows Server 2012 R2 to discover and manage replication capabilities. Capabilities include discovery, replica provisioning
Understand how ASR orchestrates the replication automation and learn how replications groups enable multiple virtual machines to be protected and replicated together

Speakers

Jeff Li

Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft

Jeff Li is a Senior Software Engineer with Microsoft Corporation, Mountain View, working on System Center Virtual Machine Manager with a focus on storage management and disaster recovery for 3 and half years. Prior to Microsoft, he worked at VMware on virtualization management for... Read More →

Amit Virmani

Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft

Amit Virmani is a Senior Software Engineer with Microsoft Corp, Mountain View, working on System Center Virtual Machine Manager. He has been working at Microsoft on server virtualization and storage management for past 9 years. Prior to Microsoft, he worked at Infosys Technologies... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 10:35am - 11:25am PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

Management

10:35am PDT

Move Objects to LTFS Tape Using HTTP Web Service Interface

Tape has always been a reliable, low-cost, green medium for long-term storage needs. However, moving objects to tape has sometimes been challenging and expensive. The DS3 protocol, which is an extension of the S3 protocol popularized by Amazon, provides easy storage to tape through HTTP web services. Additionally, DS3 uses the open Linear Tape File System (LTFS) format to store the objects on tape, making the data readable by many applications. With DS3, developers can easily create applications that move data to tape.

Learning Objectives

Understand the DS3 HTTP protocol and how it can be used to move data to tape.
Learn the difference between DS3 and S3.
Review the software development kits (SDK) available to simplify DS3 application development.
See the sample client applications that have been built using the DS3 SDKs.
Understand the different components needed for DS3 application development.

Speakers

Jeff Braunstein

Developer Evangelist, Spectra Logic

Jeff has been with Spectra Logic for 13 years in the areas of Marketing Operations and business systems management. Jeff's background is in web development and programming. Currently, as Developer Evangelist, Jeff is responsible for ensuring that partners and customers have all necessary... Read More →

Matt Starr

Chief Technical Officer, Spectra Logic

Matt Starr’s tenure with Spectra Logic spans 24 years and includes experience in service, hardware design, software development, operating systems, electronic design and management. As CTO, he is responsible for the company’s engineering department, manufacturing operations and... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 10:35am - 11:25am PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Protocols

11:35am PDT

Integrity of In-memory Data Mirroring in Distributed Systems

Data in memory could be in a modified state than its on-disk copy. Also, unlike the on-disk copy, the in-memory data might not be checksummed, replicated or backed-up, every time it is modified. So the data must be checksummed before mirroring to avoid network corruptions. But checksumming the data in the application has other overheads: It must handle networking functionalities like retransmission, congestion, etc. Secondly, if it delays the validation of mirrored data, it might be difficult to recover the correct state of the system.

Mirrored-data integrity as transport protocol functionality leads to modular design and better performance. We propose a novel approach that utilizes TCP with MD5 signatures to handle the network integrity overhead. Thus, the application can focus on its primary task. We discuss the evaluation and use-case of this approach (NVM mirroring in Data Domain HA) to prove its advantages over conventional approach of checksumming in the application.

Learning Objectives

Designing efficient data-mirroring in backup and recovery systems, where reliability is prime
Linux kernel TCP know-how for using it with MD5 option
Analysis of conventional approach vs. the TCP MD5
Use-case: TCP MD5 option for NVM mirroring in Data Domain HA

Speakers

Tejas Wanjari

Senior Software Engineer, EMC Data Domain

Tejas Wanjari is Senior Software Engineer at EMC Data Domain where he is involved in the design and architecture of distributed systems infrastructure and Data Domain OS. Previously he was a member of Parallel Data Lab (PDL) at Carnegie Mellon University while pursuing his Master... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
Cypress Room

-etc

11:35am PDT

How to Test CDMI Extension Feature Like LTFS, Data Deduplication, and OVF, Partial – Value Copy Functionality: Challenges, Solutions and Best Practice?

The Cloud Storage space has been outperforming the industry expectations as is evident in several Industry report. SNIA provided Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) specification is increasingly being adopted as a standard across the cloud.

The popularity of the CDMI specification can be judged by the present cloud storage market being flooded with CDMI server based products offered by many big and small cloud storage vendors. The SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Workgroup has been unceasingly working to address all storage challenges that exist in the storage domain. It is striving to provide support and solution for Data Deduplication, Open virtualization format (OVF), Partial Upload, server side partial value copy and LTFS as a primary cloud storage, managing Latency as well as backup and archival solution. TCS is focusing on maturing the Conformance Test Suite by adding more enhancements. In this proposal we will share the approach TCS will adopt to overcome the challenges in testing of LTFS integration with CDMI, Data Deduplication, partial upload on Server and Open Vitalization format (OVF) of CDMI and Non-CDMI based scenarios of the cloud products. Additionally, we will also be sharing challenges faced / learnings gathered from testing of CDMI Products for conformance. These learnings will help serve as a ready reference for organizations developing LTFS, Data Deduplication, OVF and partial upload in CDMI, Non-CDMI based product suite.

Learning Objectives

Understanding to develop test specification on LTFS Export and Test.
Understanding how to develop Test Specification on Server Side Partial-Value Copy Specification and Test.
Understanding to develop test specification on OVF and Partial Upload and Test.

Speakers

Sachin Goswami

Solution Architect and Storage COE Head Hi Tech, TATA Consultancy Services

Sachin Goswami, Senior Storage Solution Architect of TCS, has over 11 years of experience as technical lead, project management, Vice Chair of Cloud Storage in CCICI and working with SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group, developed CDMI Test Specification (CTP 1.0). - See more... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
Lafayette Room

Cloud

11:35am PDT

Taxonomy of Differential Compression

Differential compression (aka, delta encoding) is a special category for data de-duplication. It can find many applications in various domains such as data backup, software revision control systems, software incremental update, file synchronization over network, to name just a few. This talk will introduce a taxonomy of how to categorize delta encoding schemes in various applications. Pros and cons of each scheme will be investigated in depth.

Learning Objectives

Why do we need differential compression?
A mathematical model for describing the differences between two files
A taxonomy for categorizing differential compression
Analysis for practical applications

Speakers

Liwei Ren

Scientific Adviser, Trend Micro

Dr. Liwei Ren is a researcher in both data compression and data security. His research interests also include cyber security and practical algorithms. He is a senior researcher and domain architect responsible for advanced security solutions and data security at Trend Micro. Prior... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

Deduplication

11:35am PDT

A Pausable File System

As storage developers we are all obsessed with speed. This talk gives a different take on speed – how slow can we go? Can we even stop? If so for how long? The talk will also analyze why this is interesting, and demonstrate that the file system interface – and the way all software depends upon it – is one of the most powerful abstractions in operating systems.

The presenter will use his own implementation of an SMB3 server (running in user mode on Windows) to demonstrate the effects of marking messages as asynchronously handled and then delaying responses – in order to build up a complete understanding of the semantics offered by a pausable file system.

This exploration of the semantics of slow responses will demonstrate that researching slowing down can bear as much fruit as speeding up!

Learning Objectives

Understanding The Inversion of Control design pattern and how it can be applied to an implementation of a file server.
Exploring how the file system interface can be seen as a contract and that the semantics of that contract can be exploited for innovative uses.
Demonstrating that implementing a fairly small subset of SMB3 as a server is enough to conduct research in file systems.

Speakers

James Cain

Principal Software Architect, Quantel Limited

Dr James Westland Cain is Principal Software Architect at Quantel Ltd, a UK based engineering firm selling specialist software and bespoke hardware into high-end Film Post Production houses and News and Sports Broadcasters, globally. The products James has helped create are in daily... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
Winchester Room

File Systems

11:35am PDT

Benefits of NVMe Over Fabrics and Demonstration of a Prototype

NVMe offers a faster way to connect to solid state storage than traditional SAS and SATA interfaces, which were designed for spinning disk. It eliminates the SCSI layer and supports better bandwidth, IOPS, and latency than 12Gb SAS. However, traditional NVMe keeps the storage devices “captive” within the server or storage box and does not scale across distance, multiple storage nodes, or hundreds of PCIe devices. NVM Express, Inc. has proposed a standard to support remote access of NVMe devices across high speed, low-latency fabrics. Mellanox will present examples and prototype performance results of running the forthcoming standard over RDMA interconnects such as InfiniBand and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet).

Learning Objectives

Understand the benefits of NVMe over SAS or SATA interfaces.
Learn how NVMe works with RDMA on InfiniBand or RoCE fabrics.
See test results from an NVMe Over Fabrics prototypes involving NVMe flash devices
Understand how NVMe Over Fabrics works with 100Gb Ethernet

Speakers

Rob Davis

VP of Storage Technology, Mellanox Technologies

Rob Davis is vice president of storage technology at Mellanox Technologies and was formerly Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic. As a key evaluator and decision-maker, Davis takes responsibility for keeping Mellanox at the forefront of emerging technologies, products... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Networking

1:30pm PDT

Design Decisions and Repercussions of Compression and Data Reduction in a Storage Array

All flash arrays incorporate a number of data reduction techniques to increase effective capacity and reduce overall storage costs. Compression and deduplication are two commonly employed techniques, each with multiple different strategies for implementation. Because compression and data reduction are only part of a greater data reduction strategy, one must also understand their codependent interactions with the rest of a storage system. This talk presents a structured overview of multiple different compression and deduplication technologies. The basics of each technique are presented alongside their benefits, drawbacks and impact on overall system design. This talk then augments that understanding by applying these various techniques to a sample real-world workload, demonstrating the impact of these decisions in practice.

Learning Objectives

Gain a deeper understanding of compression, deduplication and storage layout
Benefits and drawbacks of using data reduction techniques in a flash storage array
Examination of co-dependent interactions between various data reduction techniques and workload
Supplementing theory with practice via analysis of a sample workload

Speakers

Chris Golden

Software Engineer, Pure Storage

Chris Golden is a software engineer at Pure Storage. Prior to joining Pure Storage in 2011, he worked at IronPort Systems, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems. He graduated from USC in 2005 with a degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

Monday September 21, 2015 1:30pm - 2:20pm PDT
Winchester Room

Deduplication

1:30pm PDT

New Consistent Hashing Algorithms for Data Storage

Consistent Hashing provides a mechanism through which independent actors in a distributed system can reach an agreement about where a resource is, who is responsible for its access or storage, and even derive deterministically a prioritized list of fall-backs should the primary location be down. Moreover, consistent hashing allows aspects of the system to change dynamically while minimizing disruptions. We've recently developed a new consistent hashing algorithm, which we call the Weighted Rendezvous Hash. Its primary advantage is that it obtains provably minimum disruption during changes to a data storage system. This presentation will introduce this algorithm for the first time, and consider several of its applications.

Learning Objectives

What is Consistent Hashing
Traditional applications of consistent hashing
The implementation of the new algorithm: Weighted Rendezvous Hash
Why Weighted Rendezvous Hash is more efficient than previous algorithms
Applications of Weighted Rendezvous Hash in data storage systems

Speakers

Jason Resch

Software Architect, Cleversafe

Jason Resch is an innovative force at Cleversafe. In his nine years with the company, he has become the most prolific inventor with over a hundred issued patents. As a Software Architect Jason has specialized in developing new algorithms to support security, reliability, and scal... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 1:30pm - 2:20pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Distributed Systems

1:30pm PDT

Storage Solutions for Tomorrow's Physics Projects

The unique challenges in the field of nuclear high energy physics are already pushing the limits of storage solutions today, however, the projects planned for the next ten years call for storage capacities, performance and access patterns that exceed the limits of many of today's solutions.

This talk will present the limitations in network and storage and suggest possible architectures for tomorrow's storage implementations in this field and show results of first performance tests done on various solutions (Lustre, NFS, Block Object storage, GPFS ..) for typical application access patterns.

Learning Objectives

Shared file system and storage performance requirements in science workloads
Setup and results of performance measurements of different file systems: the LUSTRE FS, NFS, BOS, GPFS
Technology differences between several file systems and storage solutions

Speakers

Ulrich Fuchs

Manager, CERN

Ulrich Fuchs studied physics and informatics at the university of Munich, moving to CERN in 1998 for his thesis. After building the data acquisition for one big CERN experiment he joined the CERN computing department for two years as responsible for the batch computing cluster and... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 1:30pm - 2:20pm PDT
Cypress Room

File Systems

1:30pm PDT

Implementing NVMe Over Fabrics

NVMe is gaining momentum as the standard high performance disk interface that eliminates various bottlenecks in accessing PCIe SSD devices. NVMe over Fabrics extends NVMe beyond the confines of a PCIe fabric by utilizing a low latency network interconnect such as iWARP RDMA/Ethernet to attach NVMe devices. iWARP is unique in its scalability and reach, practically eliminating constraints on the architecture, size and distance of a storage network. This talk presents Chelsio’s open-source generic block device based implementation and benchmark results that illustrate the benefits in performance and efficiency of the new fabric, opening the way to unprecedented storage performance and scale.

Learning Objectives

Introduction to NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics and peer-to-peer communications
Develop a complete understanding of Chelsio block device implementation and performance results
Learn how iWARP fits well with NVMe

Speakers

Wael Noureddine

VP Technology, Chelsio Communications

Wael Noureddine leads the research and development efforts for Chelsio’s core server adapter products, and is responsible for hardware architecture and protocol design. Wael holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University.

Monday September 21, 2015 1:30pm - 2:20pm PDT
Lafayette Room

Networking

1:30pm PDT

Thousands of Users - Do You Need to Test with Them or Not?

NAS servers handling thousands of clients are becoming a common requirement in diverse environments ranging from public school systems to cancer research. The need to simulate tens of thousands of active users on SMB, NFS, and Object protocols is the first step to finding issues before the customer does.

The next level of complexity and realism is to simulate meaningful workloads from thousands of users in order to find scalability limits, lock collisions, cross-protocol limitations, performance best practices, and pre-sales configuration recommendations that are meaningful to your customer.

This presentation will outline some of the problems encountered, the tools and techniques for identifying relevant activity and economically replicating that traffic in the lab without requiring the physical aspects (ie: requiring the parents of 30,000 school children logging into the system to find out what classes Jack and Jill are enrolled in).

Learning Objectives

The importance of NAS protocol service interaction with the underlying filesystems.
Generate performance recommendations for Filesystem utilization of available disk configuration.
Different challenges testing at extremes
Methods for replicating representative client workloads

Speakers

Julian Cachua

Software Engineer, IBM

Julian is a Software Engineer at IBM's storage organization. With over 5 years experience on NAS products, he has dedicated the last couple years to simulate customer workloads on QA phases. He currently works on test automation for software defined storage products. - See more at... Read More →

Christina Lara

Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Bio Pending

Monday September 21, 2015 1:30pm - 2:20pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

Testing

2:30pm PDT

The Lightning Memory–Mapped Database

The Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB) was introduced at LDAPCon 2011 and has been enjoying tremendous success in the intervening time. LMDB was written for the OpenLDAP Project and has proved to be the world's smallest, fastest, and most reliable transactional embedded data store. It has cemented OpenLDAP's position as world's fastest directory server, and its adoption outside the OpenLDAP Project continues to grow, with a wide range of applications including big data services, crypto-currencies, machine learning, and many others.

The talk will cover highlights of the LMDB design as well as the impact of LMDB on other projects.

Learning Objectives

Highlight problems with traditional DB storage designs
Explain benefits of single-level-store
Explain corruption-proof design and implementation
Compare and contrast leading data structures: B+tree, LSM, Fractal Trees

Speakers

Howard Chu

CTO, Symas

Howard has been writing Free/Open Source software since the 1980s. His work has spanned a wide range of computing topics, including most of the GNU utilities (gcc, gdb, gmake, etc.), networking protocols and tools, kernel and filesystem drivers, and focused on maximizing the useful... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 2:30pm - 3:20pm PDT
Winchester Room

Database

2:30pm PDT

DAOS – An Architecture for Extreme Scale Storage

Three emerging trends must be considered when assessing how storage should operate at extreme scale. First, continuing expansion in the volume of data to be stored is accompanied by increasing complexity in the metadata to be stored with it and queries to be executed on it. Second, ever increasing core and node counts require corresponding scaling of application concurrency while simultaneously increasing the frequency of hardware failure. Third, new NVRAM technologies allow storage, accessible at extremely fine grain and low latency, to be distributed across the entire cluster fabric to exploit full cross-sectional bandwidth. This talk describes Distributed Application Object Storage (DAOS) – a new storage architecture that Intel is developing to address the functionality, scalability and resilience issues and exploit the performance opportunities presented by these emerging trends.

Learning Objectives

Exascale / Big Data
Scalable Distributed Storage Systems
Object Storage
Persistent Memory

Speakers

Eric Barton

General Manager, Intel

Eric received his BSc in computer science at Edinburgh University in 1979 and then studied at the California Institute of Technology, focusing on CAD and parallel processing. He joined Inmos in 1980 to build the CAD system that was used to develop the Transputer, a revolutionary new... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 2:30pm - 3:20pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Distributed Systems

2:30pm PDT

Storage Class Memory Support in the Windows Operating System

This will describe the changes being made to the Windows OS, its file systems and storage stack in response to new evolving storage technologies.

Learning Objectives

How windows is adapting to new storage technologies

Speakers

Neal Christiansen

Principal Development Lead, Microsoft

Neal Christiansen is a Principal Software Development Lead for the NTFS file system team in the Windows Storage, File Systems and Protection Group at Microsoft (Redmond, WA). Neal joined Microsoft in 1999 as a member of the Core File Systems Group working in the File System Filters... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 2:30pm - 3:20pm PDT
Cypress Room

File Systems

2:30pm PDT

A Cost Effective, High Performance, Highly Scalable, Non-RDMA NVMe Fabric

Large server count, scale out cluster applications require non-volatile storage performance well beyond the capabilities of legacy storage networking technologies. Until now the only solution has been to load SSDs directly into the cluster servers. This approach delivers excellent raw storage performance, but introduces many disadvantages including: single points of failure, severely limited configuration/provisioning flexibility and added solution cost. This presentation discusses a new, scalable, very high performance storage architecture that delivers all the simplicity and promise of DAS with the efficiency and capability of network storage, at an industry leading cost point.

Speakers

Bob Hansen

VP Systems Architecture, Apeiron Data Systems

With over 30 years of storage industry experience in both technical and managerial rolls, Bob Hansen now serves as VP of Systems Architecture for Apeiron Data Systems where he is responsible for SW, HW and scale out applications interface architecture. Bob is also the Managing Director... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 2:30pm - 3:20pm PDT
Lafayette Room

Networking

2:30pm PDT

Object and Open Source Storage Testing: Finally, a Viable Approach

Interest in object-based and software defined storage, such as CEPH, OpenStack Swift, SNIA CDMI and Amazon S3, is expanding rapidly. Is it still just for non-mission critical or archiving applications or can it really be used for more performance-sensitive production application workloads? If so, how can one prove that these newer storage approaches can handle such workloads? Where are the performance limits? What are the testing parameters that the industry should be most concerned about? This session will discuss such topics and propose a new approach to testing the performance of object-based and open source storage.

Learning Objectives

Are object-based and software defined storage, such as CEPH, OpenStack Swift, SNIA CDMI and Amazon S3t still just for non-mission critical or archiving applications
Understand their performance limits
Learn testing parameters that the industry should be most concerned about

Speakers

Tim VanAsh

VP of Product Management, Load DynamiX

With over 20 years in the industry, Tim has held executive positions at CA, Nimsoft, HP and Mercury Interactive focused on addressing the challenges of IT operations. Most recently Tim was Vice President of Product Management for CA Technologies’ Application Performance Management... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 2:30pm - 3:20pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

Testing

3:30pm PDT

Teague Algie

Software Developer, Cleversafe

Teague Algie is Software Developer at Cleversafe, where he works on the Tools team developing internal tools. - See more at: http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer/speakers#sthash.dTmKxPuL.dpuf

Monday September 21, 2015 3:30pm - 4:25pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

Testing

4:35pm PDT

iSCSI RDMA (iSER) has been the fastest available block storage protocol for several years but the number of commercially available storage targets has previously limited. Now new storage solutions from vendors such as NetApp are supporting iSER, along with iSER initiators in new environments such as FreeBSD. This makes it easier for both cloud service providers and enterprises to deploy iSER. In addition, improvements to the iSER and Linux SCSI layers allow faster iSER performance than before over both InfiniBand and 40Gb Ethernet links.

Learning Objectives

Understand similarities and differences between iSER and standard iSCSI over TCP
See the growth of the iSER ecosystem for both storage target and initiator support
Learn about new features supported in iSER including T10-DIF, initiator/target discovery over RDMA, and performance optimization.
See benchmark results from the latest version of iSER running over 40/56Gb Ethernet and FDR InfiniBand networks
See metrics for using iSER with the latest flash storage

Speakers

Rob Davis

VP of Storage Technology, Mellanox Technologies

Monday September 21, 2015 4:35pm - 5:25pm PDT
Lafayette Room

Networking

4:35pm PDT

Standardizing Storage Intelligence and the Performance and Endurance Enhancements it Provides

Storage Intelligence allows Solid State Storage to work together with applications to provide enhanced performance and endurance of storage devices. Today standardization of initial features is nearly complete in the SCSI standard and is moving forward in the NVMe standard with SATA standardization close behind that. This presentation will describe the details that Storage Intelligence is standardizing today and bringing to the standardization process in the near future. Current work involves intelligent placement of data on the storage device, intelligent management of garbage collection, and management of the over provisioning space on the storage device. Future work will add In Storage Compute in the SNIA Object Drive TWG. Each of these four features will be described in detail.

Learning Objectives

Define the features of Storage Intelligence
Define the state of standards development in SCSI, NVMe, and SATA
Why are additional controls over storage necessary

Speakers

Changho Choi

Principal Engineer, Samsung Semiconductor

Dr. Choi leads the Datacenter Solutions Group in Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.'s Memory Solutions Lab. He is primarily involved in the Memory Solutions Lab's Storage Intelligence initiatives including Multi-stream system development and customer engagements. He participates in standards... Read More →

Bill Martin

Principal Engineer Storage Standards, Samsung

Bill Martin has been involved in the storage industry for 30 years, starting in 1983 with the development of a proprietary optical storage interface for HP, architecting the HP Tachyon interface chip for Fibre Channel, serving on industry consortium and standards bodies for storage... Read More →

Monday September 21, 2015 4:35pm - 5:25pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

Solid State

5:30pm PDT

Cache Service In Distributed FileSystem

Cache Service is a new architecture to implement “cache” in storage system. There are two reasons to trigger this architecture, one is many products want to use same cache architecture and another reason is there are many “cache requirements” in one storage product. As an example, a scale-out NAS system and a detail cache design based on “Cache Service” for this scale-out NAS are introduced and to explain how this cache service could work for different product and different clients in one product.

Learning Objectives

New Cache Service architecture
Learn how multiple cache instances run in Cache Service
Learn NVDIMM+RAM Cache design

Speakers

Zhongbing Yang

Pending

Monday September 21, 2015 5:30pm - 6:00pm PDT
Winchester Room

5:30pm PDT

Plugfest Open House and Reception

Monday September 21, 2015 5:30pm - 7:00pm PDT
Magnolia Room

7:15pm PDT

#storagebeers

#storagebeers at Storage Developer Conference (SDC) 2015

This is the #storagebeers MeetUp for the upcoming Storage Developer Conference (SDC) 2015. You are not required to register for SDC to attend this MeetUp. We will start the MeetUp at the Firehouse Grill at 7:15pm. If you are attending SDC please meet in the main lobby of the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara at 7pm sharp to car pool to the event.

Car pool from main lobby of Hyatt Regency Santa Clara at 7pm SHARP!

At this time there is no sponsor for food and beverage.

http://www.meetup.com/storagebeers/events/223834049/

Monday September 21, 2015 7:15pm - 9:30pm PDT
Firehouse Grill and Brewery 111 S Murphy Ave, Sunnyvale, CA

9:00am PDT

Innovator, Disruptor or Laggard, Where Will Your Storage Applications Live? Next Generation Storage

With the emergence of Cloud Service Providers, new technology innovations, and elevated customer expectations, Enterprise Information Technologists continue to be faced with scalability and cost pressures. Through next-generation efficient, cost-effective scalable architectures, IT is transforming from a Cost-Center Service Provider to a valued Business Partner.

It's imperative that storage developers understand the drivers of this transition, how to leverage the open source community, embrace next generation memory storage and cloud service provider best practices in response to their infrastructure and workloads. In this session, Vice President and General Manager, Bev Crair, will discuss the leadership role Intel(r) is playing in driving the open source community for software defined storage, server based storage and upcoming technologies that will shift how storage is architected.

Learning Objectives

Understanding the role of software development in accelerating the storage transformation
Understanding of the technology trends in the storage industry
Understanding the critical role of server based storage in a software defined storage
Understanding of Intel(r) technologies for storage and the open source community

Speakers

Bev Crair

Vice President and General Manager, Storage Group, Intel

Bev Crair is vice president in the Data Center Group and general manager of the Storage Group at Intel Corporation. She leads the team responsible for delivering business strategies and products that address the existing and emerging storage needs of Intel customers across a breadth... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 9:00am - 9:45am PDT
Santa Clara Ballroom

Keynote

9:45am PDT

The Long-Term Future of Solid State Storage

Today solid-state storage is an extension of established storage technologies extended by hiding flash behind existing hardware & software protocol layers. Over time these layers will be abandoned in favor of new architectures.

This presentation will examine research of new solid state memory and storage types, and new means of integrating them into highly-optimized computing architectures. This will lead to a discussion of the way that these will impact the market for computing equipment.

Learning Objectives

Understanding how solid state storage arrived at its current state
A background on the changes in store for memory chips
How computing architectures will change to squeeze the highest performance from these chips
How the market will react to these changes

Speakers

Jim Handy

General Director, Objective Analysis

Tuesday September 22, 2015 9:45am - 10:25am PDT
Santa Clara Ballroom

Keynote

10:40am PDT

Concepts on Moving From SAS connected JBOD to an Ethernet Connected JBOD

Today’s Software Defined Storage deployments are dominated by SAS attached just-a-bunch-of-disks (JBOD), with some new drives moving to an Ethernet connected blob store interface. This talk examines the advantages of moving to an Ethernet connected JBOD, what infrastructure has to be in place, what performance requirements are needed to be competitive, and examines technical issues in deploying and managing such a product. The talk concludes with a real world example, including performance analysis.

Learning Objectives

Understand the potential advantages of moving to an Ethernet connected JBOD (EBOD)
Understand the architectural differences between a JBOD based approach and an EBOD based approach.
Understand the complexities that are solved and that need to be solved, anchored in real world data, to be able to deliver an EBOD to the market.

Speakers

Jim Pinkerton

Partner Architect Lead, Microsoft

Jim Pinkerton is currently an architect in the Windows Server division of Microsoft. His primary role is architecting private cloud solutions, including networking, storage, fabric, and management at scale. In that role, he was the lead architect for Microsoft’s “Cloud Server... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 10:40am - 11:20am PDT
Santa Clara Ballroom

Keynote

11:20am PDT

Planning for the Next Decade of NVM Programming

We imagine a future where persistent memory is common in the data center. How will enterprise-class applications leverage this resource? How will middleware, libraries, and application run-time environments change? In this talk, Andy will describe how emerging NVM technologies and related research are causing a change to the software development ecosystem. Andy will describe use cases for load/store accessible NVM, some transparent to applications, others non-transparent. Starting with current examples of NVM Programming, Andy will describe where he believes this is leading us, including the likelihood that programmers in the future must comprehend numerous types of memories with different qualities and capabilities.

Speakers

Andy Rudoff

Software Architect, Intel

Andy Rudoff is an Architect in the Datacenter Software Division at Intel Corporation. He has over 25 years experience in operating systems internals, file systems, and networking. Andy is co-author of the popular Unix Network Programming book. His recent work focuses on Non-Volatile... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 11:20am - 12:00pm PDT
Santa Clara Ballroom

Keynote

1:00pm PDT

Achieving Coherent and Aggressive Client Caching in Gluster, a Distributed System

The presentation will be about how to implement:

File system notifications
Leases
In a distributed system and how these can be leveraged to implement a client side coherent and aggressive caching.

Learning Objectives

Designing File system notification in Distributed System
Designing leases in Distributed System
Designing client caching in Distributed file system
Gluster and the benefits of xlator modeling

Speakers

SMB 3.1.1 Update

The SMB3 ecosystem continues to grow with the introduction of new clients and server products, a growing deployment base, and new generations of networking technologies. This talk covers the changes to the SMB3 protocol in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, the design considerations, and how the changes will affect both protocol implementers and customers. The challenges and performance of multi-vendor, switched dual NIC 100Gb RDMA will be presented for the first time.

Speakers

Greg Kramer

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Greg has worked at Microsoft on SMB3 / SMB Direct since 2010. His current work focuses on improving SMB performance, reliability and security for enterprise application and private cloud workloads. Prior to joining Microsoft, Greg earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Wright State... Read More →

Dan Lovinger

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Dan Lovinger is a Principal Architect in the Windows File Server team with a current focus on system performance and architecture. Since joining what was then the Windows NT Base team in 1995, he has worked across the local and remote/distributed file systems and kernel support for... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 1:00pm - 1:50pm PDT
Winchester Room

SMB

1:00pm PDT

Introduction to CoprHD: An Open Source Software Defined Storage controller

CoprHD is an open source software defined storage controller based on EMC's ViPR Controller. Software Defined Storage (SDS) has significant impact on how companies deploy and manage public and private cloud storage solutions to deliver on-demand storage services while reducing the cost. Similar to Software Defined Networking (SDN), SDS promises to simplify management of diverse provider solutions and ease of use. CoprHD open source SDS controller centralizes management and automation of multi-vendor storage systems to deliver on-demand policy driven storage services.

This presentation will cover CoprHD controller overview, architecture, driver and plug-in development that will help in jump starting your community development.

Learning Objectives

Learn Software Defined Storage framework for managing cloud wide storage services
Understand how to get engaged in CoprHD community for code contributions
Understand CoprHD controller internals and integration with Orchestration frameworks (e.g., OpenStack, VMWare)
Gain in-depth exposure to tools and techniques to write custom plug-ins using REST APIs
Learn how to write drivers that will expose storage system advanced features using driver interfaces and controller extensions

Speakers

Host Managed SMR

Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. Shingle magnetic recording is no different – the only “difficulty” is to determine where to add the additional layer of indirection/abstraction to enable maximum flexibility and efficiency. Let's go over the various SW/FW paradigms that attempt to abstract away SMR behavior (e.g. user space library, device mapper, SMR aware file system, enlightened application). Along the way, we will also explore what deficiencies are holding back SMR adoption in (e.g. ATA sense data reporting) the data center.

Learning Objectives

Host managed SMR support in Linux
Linux host managed SMR simulator
Linux host managed SMR device mapper
What deficiencies are holding back SMR adoption in (e.g. ATA sense data reporting) the data center
Various SW/FW paradigms that attempts to abstract away SMR behavior

Speakers

Albert Chen

Engineering Program Director, WDC

Albert works on software solutions at Western Digital. Prior to WD, he worked as program manager at Microsoft and software/firmware development manager at various startups in the bay area. Albert received BS in Computer Science from Cornell University and is currently pursing MS in... Read More →

Jim Malina

Technologist, WDC

Jim Malina is a Technologist of System Architecture at Western Digital. I’ve made a career finding simple solutions for complex problems. Currently evangelizing “storage stack” solutions for next generation of recording media for public and private cloud applications. Previously... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 2:00pm - 2:50pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR)

2:00pm PDT

Samba and SMB3: Are We There Yet?

Like passengers on a long car ride, the one question on everyone's mind regarding Samba and SMB3 is, "Are we there yet?"

This talk will take you on a tour of how Samba will go from its current nominal support of SMB3 to more comprehensive support of SMB3. You will be given an overview of Samba's architecture, design, and the implementation status of key SMB3 features including Witness, Multichannel, SMB Direct, and Persistent Handles.

By the end, you will know exactly where we are and how far we have to go.

Learning Objectives

Current status of SMB3 support in Samba
Architecture and design of SMB3 features in Samba
Challenges faced during the implementation of SMB3 in Samba so far
The roadmap for SMB3 support in Samba going forward

Speakers

Ira Cooper

Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Ira Cooper is a Principal Software Engineer and Architect at Red Hat, the technical lead for the Red Hat Storage SMB Team, and a member of the Samba Team. His technical interests include storage, networking, virtualization, containers, systems engineering, and systems programming... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 2:00pm - 2:50pm PDT
Winchester Room

SMB

2:00pm PDT

Software Defined Storage Based on Direct Attached Storage

Software defined storage solutions can (and should) be based on industry-standard hardware! This talk will cover the technical architecture of the solution from the lead developer’s viewpoint, with design decisions explained, and optimization evaluated. We will also enumerate the wire protocol. We will demonstrate the end-to-end solution, scale and performance.

Speakers

Slava Kuznetsov

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Slava Kuznetsov is a Principal Software engineer at Microsoft with 20 years of software development experience on Windows. He joined Microsoft in 2005 and four years later he Joined Cluster team. At Cluster team he was working on fault tolerant networking, file server and distributed... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 2:00pm - 2:50pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

Software Defined Storage

3:05pm PDT

GlusterFS - The Thrilla in Manila

With an estimated 15 billion devices connected to internet in 2015 generating exabytes of data, there is a huge influx in the amount of data generated, that puts a severe stress on the underlying storage. This explosion in data growth along with corresponding expenditure on infrastructure has catalyzed the need for a fundamental shift in the way we look at storage. The solution to this problem is Software Defined Storage (SDS), which is also the natural fit for the cloud model. OpenStack is fairly mature for block storage (Cinder) and object storage (Swift), but many current business applications require file storage. Enter Manila - the new service that provides an automated, on-demand and scalable service for delivering shared and distributed file systems all using a standardized API native to OpenStack. From the set of available Manila drivers, we’ll focus today on GlusterFS, the founding SDS in the Manila project and an open, and proven distributed storage system. In this presentation, we’ll review Manila backed by the GlusterFS scale-out storage system and explore the value of RDMA in SDS system like GlusterFS in certain use cases.

Speakers

Ramnath Sai Sagar

Cloud Technical Marketing Manager, Mellanox

Ramnath Sai Sagar is a Technical Marketing Manager at Mellanox Technologies, where he primarily focuses on Cloud and BigData related technologies. He has a strong background in both R&D and marketing. Prior to joining Mellanox, he had worked as RDMA Performance and Solution Architect... Read More →

Veda Shankar

Technical Marketing Manager, RedHat

Veda Shankar is a Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat and has extensive experience with Red Hat Storage, he joined the company through the Gluster acquisition. He is a customer oriented IT specialist with a unique combination of experience in product development, marketing and... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 3:05pm - 3:50pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

Cloud and Files

3:05pm PDT

High Resiliency Parallel NAS Cluster

The PFFS is a POSIX compliant parallel file system capable of high resiliency and scalability. The user data is dispersed across the cluster with no replication thus providing significant savings.The resiliency level is selected by the user. Peer failures do not disrupt applications as the cluster automatically performs on the fly repairs as required for read and write operations to complete successfully (applications can read and write data from failed peers). There are two main protocols for communication between peers: the CLI protocol for namespace type commands (e.g. link, unlink, symlink, mkdir, rmdir, etc.) and the MBP protocol for file I/O. Both protocols are highly efficient and produce very little chatter. They rely on multicast and inference to preserve efficient scalability as the peer count grows large. The software is highly threaded to parallelize network I/O, disk I/O and computation. Gateways provide access to the cluster by exporting VFS semantics and are accessible to both NFS and CIFS. Gateways have no persistent user data as the peers are the only persistent repository. The configuration and administration of the cluster (both gateways and peers) is very simple and consist of a small text file of a few lines. Healing the cluster is highly efficient as they walk the file system and so only process occupied data blocks.

Learning Objectives

Resiliency design considerations for large clusters
The efficient use of multicast for scalability
Large clusters must administer themselves
Fault injection when failures are the nominal condition
Next step: 64K peers

Speakers

Richard Levy

CEO and President, Peer Fusion

Richard Levy is the founder of Peer Fusion Inc. Prior to Peer Fusion Richard was a founder of SunUp Digital systems (acquired by Motorola), a maker of software for large TV NOCs. Richard's work focuses on large scale data ingestion, processing and storage. Richard is a graduate of... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 3:05pm - 3:50pm PDT
Lafayette Room

File Systems

3:05pm PDT

The NVDIMM Cookbook: A Soup-to-Nuts Primer on Using NVDIMMs to Improve Your Storage Performance

Non-Volatile DIMMs, or NVDIMMs, have emerged as a go-to technology for boosting performance for next generation storage platforms. The standardization efforts around NVDIMMs have paved the way to simple, plug-n-play adoption. If you're a storage developer who hasn't yet realized the benefits of NVDIMMs in your products, then this session is for you! We will walk you through a soup-to-nuts description of integrating NVDIMMs into your system, from hardware to BIOS to application software. We'll highlight some of the "knobs" to turn to optimize use in your application as well as some of the "gotchas" encountered along the way.

Learning Objectives

Understand what an NVDIMM is
Understand why an NVDIMM can improve your system performance
Understand how to integrate an NVDIMM into your system

Speakers

Jeff Chang

VP Marketing and Business Development, AgigA Tech

At AgigA Tech, Jeff has focused on the promotion and evangelization of NVDIMM technology to the industry at-large. He has been instrumental in driving NVDIMMs to where they are today, with broad market acceptance and industry standardization. In addition to his role at AgigA Tech... Read More →

Arthur Sainio

Senior Director Marketing, Smart Modular

Arthur Sainio is a Director of Product Marketing at SMART Modular Technologies. Arthur has been driving new product launch and business development activities at SMART since 1998. Prior to SMART, Arthur worked as a product marketing manager at Hitachi Semiconductor America. While... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 3:05pm - 3:50pm PDT
Cypress Room

Persistent Memory, SNIA Tutorial

3:05pm PDT

The advent of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is bringing significant changes to modern file system design. Update-in-place data structures are no longer practicable; log structuring is becoming the de facto game. We report on simulations of a new SMR aware file system for append-only or circular write-only environments that merges log-structured design with traditional journaling to the advantage of both techniques. For example, sequential read performance should be better with SAFS than with a pure LFS because with SAFS, compaction moves blocks of data to contiguous zones. And, like a pure LFS, write performance should be high because writes are converted to appends to a single zone at a time. In this talk, we discuss the effects that SMR is having on basic file system design, how we arrived at our hybrid design, simulations of the design, and results we’ve obtained to date, especially a comparison of the performance of a simulation of SAFS, a traditional journaling file system, and an LFS, all under Linux.

Learning Objectives

SMR Disk Technology Overview and its Effect on File Systems
SMR Disk Technology and Log-structuring File Systems
SMR Disk Technology and Append-only File Systems

Speakers

Chi-Young Ku

Senior Software Engineer, EMC

Nick Principe is a Senior Software Engineer at EMC working on customer-focused performance engineering. Nick has worked in the performance engineering field for over 10 years, focusing on the performance measurement and analysis of NAS systems. Nick has also contributed to the development... Read More →

Tuesday September 22, 2015 8:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Birds of a Feather

8:00pm PDT

BoF - Storage Architectures for IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to produce massive amounts of data streaming in from sensors. This data needs to be stored and analyzed, sometimes in real time. What are the best storage architectures for this use case? Is Hyper-Converged an answer? What about In-Storage Compute? Come to this BoF to learn what ideas are out there and contribute your own.

Tuesday September 22, 2015 8:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
Winchester Room

Birds of a Feather

9:00pm PDT

Using SPEC SFS with the SNIA Emerald Program for EPA Energy Star Data Center Storage Program

The next storage platform category to be added into the EPA Data Center Storage program is NAS. Come learn what it takes in setting up a SNIA Emerald NAS testing environment with the SPEC SFS tools , the additional energy related instrumentation and data collection tools. Become involved in SNIA technical work to validate the test methodologies in prep for 2016. Don’t wait to be kicked in the “NAS” when an Energy Star rating gates selling your NAS solutions.

Speakers

Wayne Adams

Tom Talpey is an Architect in the File Server Team at Microsoft. His responsibilities include SMB 3, SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), and all the protocols and technologies that support the SMB ecosystem. Tom has worked for many years in the areas of network filesystems, network transports... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 1:00pm - 1:50pm PDT
Cypress Room

Persistent Memory

1:00pm PDT

Data wants to live in the cloud, and move freely between enterprises, phones, homes and clouds, but one major obstacle remains: How can your data be protected against alteration and disclosure? This session introduces the Cloud Encrypted Object Extension to the CDMI standard, which permits encrypted objects to be stored, retrieved, and transferred between clouds. Originating out of work to make CDMI usable for Electric Medical Records (EMR) application, Cloud Encrypted Objects are a standards-based way to encrypt data, verify integrity, and provide access to secured content, such that objects can freely move between clouds in a cross-protocol manner.

Learning Objectives

Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects are used by a client
Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects can move between clouds
Learn about access control and delegation for Cloud Encrypted Objects
Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects can be stored and accessed from file systems, CDMI, S3, Swift and other repositories

Speakers

Software Engineer, IBM

Sasikanth Eda is a Software Engineer with the IBM Spectrum Scale development team. He works for the integration of OpenStack with Spectrum Scale, focusing on Swift object, Cinder block and Manila file storage components of OpenStack. Sasi holds a Masters degree in Microelectronics... Read More →

Dean Hildebrand

IBM Master Inventor and Manager | Cloud Storage Software, IBM

Dean Hildebrand is a Master Inventor and the Manager of the Cloud Storage Software Research group at the IBM Almaden Research Center and a recognized expert in the field of object storage as well as distributed and parallel file systems. He has authored numerous scientific publications... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 3:05pm - 3:55pm PDT
Lafayette Room

Security

3:05pm PDT

Integrating Cooperative Flash Management with SMR Technology for Optimized Tiering in Hybrid Systems

Integrating Cooperative Flash Management (CFM) with SMR drives can achieve unprecedented efficiencies for data tiering in hybrid systems. As an alternative to Flash-Translation-Layers (FTLs) found in conventional SSDs, Cooperative Flash Management (CFM) can provide dramatic improvements in latency, IOPS, bandwidth, and endurance, including an order of magnitude advantage in Quality-of-Service, the most critical metric for Flash storage applications. CFM enables optimizing garbage collection and segment cleaning policies at the system level, opening up a new design space for data center applications. Because CFM and SMR host-managed drives are based upon a similar premise, concepts from the ZBC standard can map to either technology, and be utilized to integrate the two technologies to extend this new system design space into highly optimized data tiering.

Learning Objectives

Understanding Cooperative Flash Management: what is it, advantages and limitations
Why Flash FTL strategies don't readily apply to SMR drives
Mapping ZBC concepts to Flash
Leveraging host-managed SMR efforts into Cooperative Flash Management
System design for integrating SMR and Cooperative Flash Management

Speakers

Alan Chen

Principal Software Architect, Radian Memory Systems

As Principal Software Architect, Alan has led design efforts for Radian’s Symphonic Cooperative Flash Management software that involve both host-side functionality and SSD firmware. This type of top to bottom system expertise came naturally for Alan who had previously worked at... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 3:05pm - 3:55pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR)

3:05pm PDT

Calling the Witness: SMB3 Failover with Samba/CTDB

An SMB3 File Server is not complete without the Witness service. Samba is currently developing support for this DCE/RPC service that allows for Continuous Availability (CA), a much more robust, fine-grained and seamless mechanism for client failover in clustered environments. This talk will outline the current implementation within Samba, the relationship with CTDB, challenges faced in development, and the planned integration with other projects like the CIFS kernel client and Pacemaker. This talk will also include a live demonstration showcasing the Witness infrastructure, it's role in CA, and how it can be controlled from a remote application.

Learning Objectives

How Witness works and what it does
How to achieve a seamless file sharing experience for SMB3 clients
How to deal programmatically with failover in clustered Samba environments

Speakers

José Rivera

Software Engineer, Red Hat / Samba Team

José Rivera spends his time at Red Hat working on improving clustered Samba and integrating Samba with distributed filesystems and clustered resource managers. Prior to Red Hat he was part of the team responsible for creating and overhauling the official SMB1 specifications ([MS-CIFS... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 3:05pm - 3:55pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

SMB

4:05pm PDT

Skylight — A Window on Shingled Disk Operation

We introduce Skylight, a novel methodology that combines software and hardware techniques to reverse engineer key properties of drive-managed ShingledMagnetic Recording (SMR) drives. The software part of Skylight measures the latency of controlled I/O operations to infer important properties of drive-managed SMR, including type, structure, and size of the persistent cache; type of cleaning algorithm; type of block mapping; and size of bands. The hardware part of Skylight tracks drive head movements during these tests, using a high-speed camera through an observation window drilled through the cover of the drive. These observations not only confirm inferences from measurements, but resolve ambiguities that arise from the use of latency measurements alone.We show the generality and efficacy of our techniques by running them on top of three emulated and two real SMR drives, discovering valuable performance-relevant details of the behavior of the real SMR drives.

Speakers

Peter Desnoyers

Professor College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University

Peter received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2008. Prior to that he spent fifteen years as an engineer in industry, at Apple, Motorola, and a number of start-ups, after receiving the BS and MS degrees in EECS from MIT in 1988. Peter's... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 4:05pm - 4:55pm PDT
Winchester Room

New Thinking

4:05pm PDT

Object Drives: A New Architectural Partitioning

A number of scale out storage solutions, as part of open source and other projects, are architected to scale out by incrementally adding and removing storage nodes. Example projects include:

Hadoop’s HDFS
CEPH
Swift (OpenStack object storage)
The typical storage node architecture includes inexpensive enclosures with IP networking, CPU, Memory and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). While inexpensive to deploy, these solutions become harder to manage over time. Power and space requirements of Data Centers are difficult to meet with this type of solution. Object Drives further partition these object systems allowing storage to scale up and down by single drive increments.

This talk will discuss the current state and future prospects for object drives. Use cases and requirements will be examined and best practices will be described.

Learning Objectives

What are object drives?
What value do they provide?
Where are they best deployed?

Speakers

Mark Carlson

John Gemignani is a Senior Consultant SWE in the Isilon Storage Division of EMC in Seattle, WA. He manages the Enterprise File Services team, which is responsible for the NFS and SMB server protocol support within the OneFS operating system, which powers Isilon’s scale-out NAS appliance... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 4:05pm - 4:55pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

SMB

5:05pm PDT

Donard: NVM Express for Peer-2-Peer between SSDs and other PCIe Devices

In this paper we extend previous work to include p2p transfers between NVMe devices and RDMA capable NICs running protocols like Infiniband, RoCE and iWARP.

We present experimental results using both 10Gbe iWARP and 56G Infiniband NICs that show how the latency associated with remote transfer of data can be reduced whilst also offloading the CPU allowing it to focus on other tasks.

We show how this work can act as a precursor for the NVMe over Fabrics work currently being standardized. We also show how the Controller Memory Buffer (CMB) feature introduced in NVMe 1.2 be utilized in a novel fashion to aid this work.

Learning Objectives

What are the benefits of NVM Express
How can NVM Express and RDMA be utilized prior to NVMe over Fabrics
How Donard code builds on open-source code
How latency, bandwidth and CPU offload can all be improved using peer-2-peer

Speakers

Stephen Bates

Technical Director, PMC

Stephen Bates is a Technical Director at PMC-Sierra Inc. He works on next-generation storage systems and is an architect for PMC’s family of SSD controllers. Prior to PMC he taught at the University of Alberta, Canada where his research focused on Low-Density Parity Check codes... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 5:05pm - 5:55pm PDT
Winchester Room

NVMe Fabric

5:05pm PDT

Beyond LBA: New Directions in the Storage Interface

New storage devices are emerging that go beyond the traditional block interface and support key value protocol interfaces. In addition some of the emerging devices include capabilities to run applications on the device itself. This talk will explore the paradigm shift introduced by these new interfaces and modes of operation of storage devices.

Learning Objectives

The developer will learn the key technical details of the OpenKinetic protocol as an example
Learn how key value protocols map to the semantics that modern days developers are familiar with
Learn how your software can be modified to take advantage of these new interfaces and the impact of running storage applications on the devices
Leave with an in depth understanding of the new interfaces and how they apply to your project
Leave with an understanding of the current adoption by customers and other developers

Speakers

Abhijeet Gole

Senior Director of Engineering, Toshiba

Abhijeet is a Sr. Director of Engineering and has over 20 years of experience in storage, software and systems. Before Toshiba, Abhijeet was at Marvell, NetApp and Sun Microsystems. During his spare time he likes to hang glide.

Wednesday September 23, 2015 5:05pm - 5:55pm PDT
Cypress Room

Object Drives

5:05pm PDT

Load-Sto-Meter: Generating Workloads for Persistent Memory

New persistent memory technologies allow IO to be replaced with memory mapped files where the primary operations are load, store, flush and fence instructions executed by CPU’s. This creates a new need for software generate well understood workloads made up of those operations to characterize implementations of persistent memory related functionality. This session describes a proposal for such a workload generator which could play a role for PM solutions similar to IOMeter for IO.

Learning Objectives

Learn how pure load/store workloads can be generated
Learn about parameters that should govern the creation of pure load/store workloads

Speakers

Damini Ashok Chopra

Software Intern - Office of Chief Technologist, HP

Damini Ashok Chopra is a Software Engineer Intern in the Chief Technologist’s office of HP Storage, where she is working under the mentorship of Doug Voigt, Distinguished Technologist at HP. At HP, she is involved in designing a workload generator for performance characterization... Read More →

Doug Voigt

Distinguished Technologist, HP

Wednesday September 23, 2015 5:05pm - 5:55pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Performance

5:05pm PDT

Network Bound Encryption for Data-at-Rest Protection

Setting up a system to store sensitive data is the easy part. Protecting that data from prying eyes is much harder. Warranty repair? Retiring old disks? Sure, you can store your data on encrypted disks. But now you get to manage all the disk encryption keys, creating a high-risk target for active attackers.

In this talk we will introduce Petera, an open source project which implements a new technique for binding encryption keys to a network. This technique provides secure decentralized storage and management of decryption keys so that disk encryption can become entirely transparent and automatic.

Learning Objectives

Outline a disk's full life-cycle
Identify data vulnerability points
Demonstrate how to use encryption to protect data-at-rest
Survey encryption key management
Use asymmetric cryptography to reduce management complexities Objective5

Speakers

Nathaniel McCallum

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Nathaniel McCallum is a Sr. Software Engineer at Red Hat. He lives in Kentucky with his wife and five children. When not working or trying to retain parental sanity, Nathaniel enjoys reading classic literature in Greek or Latin, particularly the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 5:05pm - 5:55pm PDT
Lafayette Room

Security

5:05pm PDT

The Future is Cloudy - Samba Gateways to a Cloud Storage World

Samba is becoming the product of choice to gateway local SMB file-based access to cloud storage. This talk will cover how this can be achieved, and the potential problems, pitfalls and solutions in designing such a product. I will present a design for architecting such a solution inside Samba.

Speakers

Jeremy Allison

Engineer, Google Samba Team

Jeremy Allison is the co-creator of the Samba project and a lead developer on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing a Free Software Windows compatible authentication, file and print server product for Linux and UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2015 5:05pm - 5:55pm PDT
San Tomas / Lawrence Room

SMB

6:00pm PDT

BoF - Moving Data Protection to the Cloud: Trends, Challenges and Strategies

There are various new ways and advantages to perform data protection using the Cloud. However, Developers need to carefully study all the alternative approaches and the experiences of others (good and bad) to avoid the pitfalls, especially during the transition from strictly local resources to cloud resources. At this BoF we will discuss:

Learning Objectives

Critical cloud data protection challenges
How to use the cloud for data protection
Pros and cons of various cloud data protection strategies
Experiences of others (good and bad) to avoid common pitfalls
Cloud standards in use – and why you need them

Wednesday September 23, 2015 6:00pm - 7:00pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Birds of a Feather

6:00pm PDT

BoF - NVMe Over Fabrics

This one hour session with panel of experts from the industry will focus on explaining a need for new storage networking protocols for both NAND and emerging Non-volatile memory devices. The pressure to reduce network latency to scale comparable with new solid state devices requires rethinking and reengineering of storage networking protocols. We will discuss the benefits of NVMe over fabrics protocol that utilizes RDMA networking, and present recent measured prototyping data. Panel of experts will be available to answer questions from attendees.

Speakers

Idan Burstein

Christoph Helllwig

Dave Minturn

Wednesday September 23, 2015 6:00pm - 7:00pm PDT
Cypress Room

Birds of a Feather

6:00pm PDT

BoF - Storage for Containers

This talk explores the essential requirements to host mission critical database applications in containers. Specifically, it focuses on the following capabilities that the container ecosystem needs to provide to host such databases:

Scalable and persistent data volumes
High Availability for containers
Migration of containers across hosts
Disaster Recovery capability
This talk will demonstrate a case study on how the above goals can be met for Docker ecosystem. Docker ecosystem is not completely evolved to meet the needs of mission critical databases to be run in Docker containers. As a result, there is hesitation in moving enterprise class and mission critical databases from physical/virtual machine platforms to containers. Elaborating on each of the above objectives, the talk intends to inspire confidence to deploy mission critical databases in Docker containers.

Speakers

Abhishek Kane

Wednesday September 23, 2015 6:00pm - 7:00pm PDT
Winchester Room

Birds of a Feather

7:00pm PDT

BoF - Container Data Management Using Flocker

Containerized micro services call for state be sticky when the application relocates across compute nodes. State associated with a container might involve secret keys used for trusted communication, log files that user wants to data mine at a later point, or data files that are part of application logic. System administrator who sets application relocate policy has no insight into possible state associated within an application running inside a container.

Flocker solves the problem of container data loss when an application relocates, voluntarily or involuntarily, across compute nodes as part of initial placement, maintenance mode, or load balancing workflows performed by orchestrators like Docker Swarm, Mesosphere Marathon, or Kubernetes.

This session includes an overview of Flocker, and a demonstration of Flocker in action using Docker Swarm as the orchestrator of choice.

Moderators

Madhuri Yechuri

Software Engineer, ClusterHQ

Wednesday September 23, 2015 7:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
Winchester Room

Birds of a Feather

7:00pm PDT

BoF - SNIA and OpenStack: Standards and Open Source

The SNIA has created a number of educational materials for OpenStack Storage, which have become some of the most popular content produced. The SNIA has now created a Task Force to investigate a new focused set of activities around OpenStack which may result in a new group targeted at the adoption of storage industry standards in this open source project. Come join the members of this new task force in discussing the requirements and needs in this space.

Speakers

Mark Carlson

Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba

Wednesday September 23, 2015 7:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
Stevens Creek Room

Birds of a Feather

8:30am PDT

FCoE Direct End-Node to End-Node (aka FCoE VN2VN)

A new concept has just been accepted for standardized in the Fibre Channel (T11) standards committee; it is called FCoE VN2VN (aka Direct End-Node to End-Node).

The FCoE standard which specifies the encapsulation of Fibre Channel frames into Ethernet Frames is being extended to permit FCoE connections Directly between FC/FCoE End-Nodes.

The tutorial will show the Fundamentals of the extended FCoE concept that permits it to operate without FC switches or FCoE Switches (aka FCF) and will describe how it might be exploited in Small, Medium or Enterprise Data Center environments -- including the "Cloud" IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider environments.

Learning Objectives

The audience will gain a general understanding of the concept of using a Data Center type Ethernet for the transmission of Fibre Channel protocols without the need for an FCoE Forwarder (FCF).
The audience will gain an understanding of the benefits of converged I/O and how a Fibre Channel protocol can share an Ethernet network with other Ethernet based protocols, directly between End Nodes
The audience will gain understanding of potential business value and config.s that are useful for gaining maximum value, including the value to the "Cloud" IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) providers

Speakers

John Hufferd

A new concept has just been accepted for standardized in the Fibre Channel (T11) standards committee; it is called FCoE VN2VN (aka Direct End-Node to End-Node).The FCoE standard which specifies the encapsulation of Fibre Channel frames into Ethernet Frames is being extended to permit... Read More →

Thursday September 24, 2015 8:30am - 9:20am PDT
Cypress Room

Networking

8:30am PDT

Introduction to Highly Available NFS Server on Scale-Out Storage Systems Based on GlusterFS

Many enterprises still heavily depend on NFS to access their data from different operating systems and applications. NFS-Ganesha is a user-space file server that supports NFSv3, NFSv4, NFSv4.1 as well as pNFS.

GlusterFS has now added NFS-Ganesha server to its NFS stack to eventually replace native Gluster-NFS server which supports only NFSv3. The integration with NFS-Ganesha now means additional protocol support w.r.t. NFSv4, better security and authentication mechanisms for enterprise use. The upcoming release of GlusterFS (3.7) introduces Clustered or multi-head active/active NFS support using Pacemaker and Corosync for better availability. There is also tighter integration with Gluster CLI to manage NFS-Ganesha exports. This presentation is aimed at providing a basic overview of the entire solution and step-by-step configuration.

Learning Objectives

Basic architecture walk-through of nfs-ganesha and what the integration with GlusterFS means.
Architecture overview of the multi-head active/active highly available NFS solution.
Step-by-step guide to configure NFS-Ganesha on GlusterFS using newly introduced CLI options.
Requirements and best practice recommendations for HA configuration for NFSGanesha with GlusterFS

Speakers

Soumya Koduri

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat India

Soumya Koduri is an open-source enthusiast, currently working as Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, contributing to GlusterFS and NFS-Ganesha open-source communities.

Meghana Madhusudhan

Software Engineer, Red Hat

Meghana Madhusudhan is a Software Engineer at Red Hat, contributing to GlusterFS and NFS-Ganesha open-source communities.

Thursday September 24, 2015 8:30am - 9:20am PDT
Lafayette Room

NFS

8:30am PDT

The NVM Revolution

This presentation provides an introduction to the current activities leading to software architectures and methodologies for new NVM technologies, including the activities of the SNIA Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Technical Working Group. This session includes a review and discussion of the impacts of the SNIA NVM Programming Model (NPM). We will preview the current work on new technologies, including remote access, high availability, clustering, atomic transactions, error management, and current methodologies for dealing with NVM.

Speakers

Paul vonBehren

Software Architect, Intel

Thursday September 24, 2015 8:30am - 9:20am PDT
San Tomas Room

NVM Programming, SNIA Tutorial

8:30am PDT

Application-Level Benchmarking with SPEC SFS 2014

A technical deep-dive into the four SPEC SFS 2014 workloads at different levels of the storage stack, and how client performance and configuration can affect benchmark results. Multiple storage protocols will be addressed, including NFS, SMB, and FC – yes, you CAN test a block storage array with a file-level benchmark!

Learning Objectives

Deep analysis of storage solution performance
Effects of protocol and operating system on storage performance measurement
Observe workload changes as traffic flows from client through storage to disk

Speakers

Vernon Miller

Performance Engineer, IBM

Vernon is a performance engineer at IBM working on Spectrum Scale software and solutions. Vernon has been involved with performance evaluation of various block, file, NAS, and cloud based products for over 10 years. Vernon contributed to the SPEC SFS2014 benchmark suite. Vernon has... Read More →

Product Evangelist, Load DynamiX

Peter Murray is an expert with more than 25 years of experience in testing, implementing and maintaining secure, fast and highly-available networks and applications. Prior to joining Load DynamiX, Peter worked with leading vendors including F5 Networks and Spirent Communications... Read More →

Thursday September 24, 2015 10:35am - 11:25am PDT
Cypress Room

Hardware

10:35am PDT

pNFS/RDMA: Possibilities

Speakers

Chuck Lever

Linux Kernel Architect, Oracle

Chuck Lever is a long-standing member of the Linux NFS community, having contributed IPv6 support and support for NFSv4 migration among other features. He maintains FedFS for Linux, and has recently become a lead developer of the Linux NFS/RDMA implementation.

Thursday September 24, 2015 10:35am - 11:25am PDT
Lafayette Room

NFS

10:35am PDT

NVDIMM-SSDs Tested to the SNIA SSD Performance Test Specification

NVDIMM-N modules are being introduced as a fast tier storage option in the Memory Channel. Learn how to evaluate and test NVDIMM-N modules to the SNIA Solid State Performance Specification Enterprise Version 1.1 (PTS-E v1.1) using the Intel open source block IO driver for Linux. Find out what test settings and variables affect NVDIMM-N performance and how to apply the SNIA PTS-E to NVDIMM block IO performance testing.

Speakers

Eden Kim

CEO, Calypso Systems

Eden is CEO of Calypso Systems, Inc. and chair of the SNIA SSS Technical Working Group and the SSSI Technical Development Committee. Eden has published several papers on SSD performance testing and various SSD product architectures.

Thursday September 24, 2015 10:35am - 11:25am PDT
Lawrence Room

Performance, SNIA Tutorial

10:35am PDT

Seamless Live Virtual Machine Migration by Mitigating Shared Storage Resource Constraint

Virtual Machine(VM) Migration is a widely acknowledged feature of most top-selling virtualization solutions; helping businesses tackle the hardware maintenance and server consolidation challenges without the need to affect solution availability. To reap the advantages of this flexibility, businesses have to plan their server networking and storage infrastructure, which includes cabling layout, well in advance. Providing connectivity and sharing of same storage resources across servers is a daunting task and often proves to be a bottleneck for the ability to migrate a VM, to a not planned destination server. The objective of this paper is to provide efficient workable solution for migrating VMs across different servers; in different kinds of data center layout, where storage may not be shared and/or have heterogeneous( i.e. FC / iSCSI / SAS / FCoE) connectivity. We are showcasing enhanced VM migration solution.

We were able to successfully extend existing VM Migration solution to achieve VM migration across servers with multiple kinds of storage connectivity and/or servers without common shared storage.

This implementation provides flexibility to businesses in migrating a VM anywhere in their data center irrespective of storage connectivity type and/or shared storage. This will provide big savings for businesses and enhances their flexibility for better management of data center and cloud based services.

Learning Objectives

Live Machine Migration without shared storage

Speakers

Prasanth Jose

Senior Staff Software Engineer, IBM

Prasanth Jose is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in IBM with specialization in file systems, virtualization and Network Attached Storage. Extensive expertise with Architecture, Design and development of distributed File Systems.

Sangeeth Keeriyadath

Senior Staff Software Engineer, IBM

Sangeeth Keeriyadath works for IBM and is proficient in various storage virtualization technologies. He has provided significant contributions to IBM's PowerVM offering; including device drivers for virtual adapters( vSCSI / NPIV ), Shared Storage Pools and Live Partition Migration... Read More →

Thursday September 24, 2015 10:35am - 11:25am PDT
San Tomas Room

Virtualization

11:35am PDT

Where Moore's Law Meets the Speed of Light: Optimizing Exabyte-Scale Network

Scalability is critically important to distributed storage systems. Exabyte-scale storage is already on the horizon and such systems involve tens of thousands of nodes. But today’s Internet protocols were never designed to handle such cases. In systems this big it's impossible to maintain connections and sessions with every storage device. However, multiple round trip connection setups, TLS handshakes, and authentication mechanisms, compounded with the unyielding speed of light and geo-dispersed topologies create a perfect storm for high latency and bad performance. In this presentation we explore the available options to achieve security, performance, and low latency in a system where persistent sessions are an unaffordable luxury.

Learning Objectives

Limitations of today’s Internet protocols in large distributed systems
How to implement a secure, connectionless, single-round-trip network protocol
What the network topology will look like in an exabyte-scale globally dispersed storage system

Speakers

Yogesh Vedpathak

Software Developer, Cleversafe

As a software developer at Cleversafe, Yogesh’s main focus is on development of high throughput highly scalable networks for distributing data in highly scalable storage systems. During his 5 years at Cleversafe he has invented techniques to detect and recover from faulty networks... Read More →

Thursday September 24, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
Lafayette Room

Distributed Systems

11:35am PDT

RAIDShield: Characterizing, Monitoring, and Pro-actively Protecting Against Disk Failures

Modern storage systems orchestrate a group of disks to achieve their performance and reliability goals. Even though such systems are designed to withstand the failure of individual disks, failure of multiple disks poses a unique set of challenges. We empirically investigate disk failure data from a large number of production systems, specifically focusing on the impact of disk failures on RAID storage systems. Our data covers about one million SATA disks from 6 disk models for periods up to 5 years. We show how observed disk failures weaken the protection provided by RAID. The count of reallocated sectors correlates strongly with impending failures.

Learning Objectives

Empirical investigation of hard disk failures in production systems
Proactive protection of individual disk drives
Proactive protection of RAID storage system
Deployment results of the proactive protection in production system

Speakers

Ao Ma

Principal Engineer, EMC

Ao Ma is a principal engineer at the Advanced Development Group of EMC Core Technology Division, part of the CTO office, where he works on innovations in file system and storage technologies. He published papers on top storage system conferences and journals. Ao also has 1 patent... Read More →

Thursday September 24, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
Cypress Room

Hardware

11:35am PDT

Storage Performance Analysis for Big Data Processing

End to end big data benchmarking has become an extreme attention of ICT industry, the related techniques are being investigated by numerous hardware and software vendors. Storages, as one of the core components of a data center system, need specially designed approaches to measure, evaluate and analyze their performance. This talk introduces our methods to create the storage performance model based on workload characterization, algorithm level behavior tracing and capture, and software platform management. The functionality and capability of our methodology for quantitative analysis of big data storage have been validated through benchmarks and measurements performed on real data center system.

Learning Objectives

Storage Performance Measurement and Evaluation
Scalable and Distributed Storage Systems
Best practices architecture for Big Data
Performance analysis

Speakers

Da Qi Ren

Staff Research Engineer, Huawei

Dr. Ren, a staff research engineer of Futurewei Technologies in Santa Clara, CA, USA, has more than 12 years of experience in high performance computing and architectures. His research focus has been in the areas of formal methods, parallel and distributed processing, big data analytics... Read More →

Zane Wei

Director, Huawei

Mr. Zane Wei has been the head of the Shannon Lab, the head of the IT Research Lab of Central Research Institute, and the head of strategy and planning of corporate hardware technology in Huawei Technologies. He received his master degree from HKUST (Hongkong University of Science... Read More →

Thursday September 24, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
Lawrence Room

Performance

11:35am PDT

I/O Virtualization in Enterprise SSDs

As PCIe-based SSDs become more and more powerful, they are increasingly being used in a virtualized server environment. IO virtualization is an efficient method for VMs to share the resources of the SSD as it allows VMs to directly communicate with the SSD virtual functions instead of going through the hyper-visor layer, thus improving throughput and reducing latency.

In this talk, the author will present methods to manage resource sharing within an IO virtualization-enabled PCIe SSD, with an NVMe front end. The goal is to achieve maximum utilization of SSD internal resources with minimum overhead, while providing customers the flexibility to configure the number of virtual functions and the capabilities associated with each virtual function. More specifically, the presenter will discuss unified architecture that allows both structurally separable and structurally non-separable resources to be shared by virtual functions within an IOV-enabled PCIe SSD.

Learning Objectives

IO Virtualization is important for enterprise SSD
Managing shared resource in SSD controller contributes to better IO virtualization performance
There is an unified architecture to manage different types of shared resources in IO virtualized SSD

Speakers

Zhimin Ding

Principle Engineer Design, Toshiba

Zhimin Ding is a principle design engineer at Toshiba. He is involved with Toshiba’s new generation PCIe-based enterprise SSD products. Prior to Toshiba, Zhimin worked as Chief Architect at Silicon Storage Technology where he helps created various flash storage solutions for mobile... Read More →

Thursday September 24, 2015 11:35am - 12:25pm PDT
San Tomas Room

Virtualization