Storage Developer Conference

With the onset of the Computational Storage TWG and growth of interest in the market for these new and emerging solutions, it is imperative to understand how to develop, deploy and scale these new technologies. This session will walk through the new definitions, how each can be deployed and show use cases of NGD Systems Computational Storage Devices (CSD).

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn the different kinds of Computational Storage

2. Understand the use cases for each type of solutions

3. Determine the ease of deployment and the value of these solutions

SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. With the recent advances in persistent memory technologies, we will take a look at how we can leverage the SMB3 protocol in conjunction with SMBDirect/RDMA to provide very low latency access to persistent memory devices across the network.

With the increasing popularity of cloud storage - technologies like Azure Files which provide seamless access to cloud stored data via the standard SMB3 protocol is seeing significant interest. One of the key requirements in this space is to be able to run SMB3 over a secure / firewall friendly internet protocol. We will take a quick look at some work we are doing to enable SMB3 over QUIC - which is a recent UDP based transport with strong security and interop properties. We will also explore some work we have done to enable on-the-wire compression for SMB3.

Learning Objectives: 1) Learn how we can use SMB3 to setup direct RDMA access to remote persistent memory; 2) Using QUIC as a transport for SMB3; 3) How can we use data compression algorithms to optimize SMB data transfer?

This talk describes work going on in three different organizations to enable scale out management of NVMe SSDs. The soon to be released NVME-MI 1.1 standard will allow management from host based agents as well as BMCs. This might be extended to allow support for Binary Encoded JSON (BEJ) in support of host agents and BMCs that want to support the Redfish Standard. We will also cover work going on in SNIA (Object Drive TWG) and DMTF in support.

Learning Objectives: 1) Principles and limitations of scale out datacenter management; 2) An understanding of the NVMe-MI standard; 3) A Redfish profile for NVMe drives; 4) Inside the box management networks and outside the box management networks; 5) Platform Layer Data Model (PLDM).

As NVDIMMs enter the realm of standard equipment on servers and storage arrays and NVMe is standard equipment for servers and consumer devices alike, what is the actual performance advantage of using NVDIMM over NVMe, or NVMe over SAS or SATA SSDs? First, we’ll review some purely synthetic benchmarks of single devices using different storage technologies and see how they differ. Then, we’ll enter a more real world environment and see what performance gains can be had.

One use of NVDIMMs is as a transaction log to allow quick acknowledgement of write operations. In our real-world scenario, we discuss the performance differences of using NVDIMMs, NVMe Flash, or SAS/SATA Flash as the SLOG or “write-cache” for an OpenZFS pool.

Learning Objectives: 1) Performance differences between different storage media and storage transports for transactional workloads; 2) Basic overview of OpenZFS and how a SLOG works; 3) Impact of low latency NVDIMM and NVMe storage for application and user latency.

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) open source project is gaining momentum in the storage industry for its drivers and libraries for building userspace, polled mode storage applications and appliances. The SPDK NVMe driver was SPDK’s first released building block and is its most well-known. The driver’s design and architecture is heavily influenced by SPDK’s userspace polled-mode framework which has resulted in some significant differences compared to traditional kernel NVMe drivers. This presentation will present an overview of the SPDK NVMe driver’s architecture and design, a historical perspective on key design decisions and a discussion on the driver’s advantages and limitations.

Learning Objectives: 1) Gain a deeper understanding of the architecture and design of the SPDK NVMe driver; 2) Identify the key design differences between a userspace polled-mode driver and a traditional kernel-mode driver; 3) Describe the key advantages and limitations of SPDK and its polled mode NVMe driver.

Persistent Memory is getting a lot of attention. SNIA has released a programming standard, NVDIMM makers, with the help of JEDEC, have created standardized hardware to develop & test PM, and chip makers continue to promote upcoming devices, although few are currently available.

In this talk two industry analysts, Jim Handy & Tom Coughlin, will provide the state of Persistent Memory and show a realistic roadmap of what the industry can expect to see and when they can expect to see it. The presentation, based on three critical reports covering New Memory Technologies, NVDIMMs, and Intel’s 3D XPoint Memory (also known as Optane) will illustrate the Persistent Memory market, the technologies that vie to play a role, and the critical economic obstacles that continue to impede these technologies’ progress. We will also explore how advanced logic process technologies are likely to cause persistent memories to become a standard ingredient in embedded applications, such as IoT nodes long before they make sense in servers.

Learning Objectives: 1) What is the state of emerging memory technologies; 2) What technologies will be used in future NVDIMMS; 3) Emerging memory use in embedded and enterprise applications; 4) What are the costs for making emerging memories.

Applying micro service patterns to storage giving each workload its own Container Attached Storage (CAS) system. This puts the DevOps persona within full control of the storage requirements and brings data agility to k8s persistent workloads. We will go over the concept and the implementation of CAS, as well as its orchestration.

Learning Objectives: 1) Go over the modern day apps and their storage needs; under the notion of applications have changed someone forgot to tell storage; 2) What are the problems to use technologies like user space IO, in particular using technologies like SPDK among others; 3) Looking devops and the k8s model, how can we bring the power of user space storage in developers hands? Virtio for containers? direct access from the go run time for example SPDK?; 4) We have tried both, and like to share the outcome of this with you.

Increasing proliferation of Artificial Intelligence, E-commerce, Big Data and Cloud applications is leading to highly diversified workloads and use cases in hyperscale data centers, which poses new challenges to solid state storage in terms of performance, flexibility and TCO optimizations. Moreover, there are increasing demands for software/hardware co-optimization and more control over I/O path from applications. Standard SSDs that are tuned for a few generic workloads cannot meet these challenges, resulting in suboptimal performance and TCO.

We present our Dual-Mode SSD Architecture, a new storage architecture designed for our next-generation hyperscale data centers. We define our Open Channel SSD specification and build a Dual-Mode SSD platform that supports both Open Channel mode and standard NVMe mode. We develop our Open Channel software stack in full user space as well as in kernel space. Working seamlessly with our storage engine software, we build customized FTL solutions for different business applications. Our software/hardware co-optimization solutions is leading to significant benefits in performance, Quality-of-Service and TCO.

Learning Objectives: 1) Challenges to solid storage systems in next-generation hyperscale data centers; 2) Dual-Mode SSD architecture; 3) Full user space Open Channel software stack, and software/hardware co-optimization solutions.

The talk covers (i) the characteristics of open-channel SSD management, (ii) introduces the new open-channel/Denali interface, (iii) provides background on LightNVM, the Linux subsystem that we designed and implemented for open-channel SSD management, and at last, we show the effectiveness of open-channel SSDs against state-of-art block-based SSDs.

Learning Objectives: 1) Understand Open-Channel SSDs; 2) Project status; 3) Background on storage and applications.

PCI Express® (PCIe®) 3.0 architecture has enabled Flash Storage to transition to high speed, low latency power efficient performance over the past few years. However, the hunger for additional performance in power constrained devices continues and PCI-SIG® continues its nearly three decade history of delivering performance doubling and additional features with the development of the PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 specifications.

This presentation will review the major features of PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 technology, which will continue to enable power efficient performance required as NAND capacities scale and faster SCM (Storage Class Memories) become mainstream. Session attendees will gain insight into the current status of the PCIe 4.0 technology rollout and testing and will learn about the PCIe 5.0 specification development and timeline for completion in 2019.

Learning Objectives: 1) Learn how PCIe is becoming the I/O of choice for storage; 2) Gain insight into the status of PCIe 4.0 roll-out for storage applications; 3) Understand the PCIe roadmap to 32GT/s.