Storage Developer Conference

Synthetic DNA-based data storage is a major attraction due to the possibility of storage over long periods. This technology is a solution for the current data centers, reducing energy consumption and physical storage space. Nowadays, the quantity of data generated has been growing exponentially, while the storage capacity does not keep up with the growth, caused by new technologies and globalization.

Data persistence on CXL is an essential enabler toward the goal of instant-on processing. DRAM class performance combined with non-volatility on CXL enables a new class of computing architectures that can exploit these features and solve real-world bottlenecks for system performance, data reliability, and recovery from power failures. New authentication methods also enhance the security of server data in a world of cyberattacks.

Large-scale data analytics, machine learning, and big data applications often require the storage of a massive amount of data. For cost-effective high bandwidth, many data centers have used tiered storage with warmer tiers made of flashes or persistent memory modules and cooler tiers provisioned with high-density rotational drives. While ultra fast data insertion and retrieval rates have been increasingly demonstrated by research communities and industry at warm storage, complex queries with predicates on multiple columns tend to still experience excessive delays when unordered, unindexed (or potentially only lightly indexed) data written in log-structured formats for high write bandwidth is subsequently read for ad-hoc analysis at row level. Queries run slowly because an entire dataset may have to be scanned in the absence of a full set of indexes on all columns. In the worst case, significant delays are experienced even when data is read from warm storage. A user sees even higher delays when data must be streamed from cool storage before analysis takes place. In this presentation, we present C2, a research collaboration between Seagate and Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) for the lab's next-generation campaign storage. Campaign is a scalable cool storage tier at LANL managed by MarFS that currently provides 60 PBs of storage space for longer-term data storage. Cost-effective data protection is done through multi-level erasure coding at both node level and rack level. To prevent users from always having to read back all data for complex queries, C2 enables direct data analytics at the storage layer by leveraging Seagate Kinetic Drives to asynchronously add indexes to data at per-drive level after data lands on the drives. Asynchronously constructed indexes cover all data columns and are read at query time by the drives to drastically reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent back to the querying client for result aggregation. Combining computational storage technologies with erasure coding based data protection schemes for rapid data analytics over cool storage presents unique challenges in which individual drives may not be able to see complete data records and may not deliver performance required by high-level data insertion, access, and protection workflows. We discuss those challenges in the talk, share our designs, and report early results.

Azure Block Storage, also referred to as Azure Disks, is the persistent block storage for Azure Virtual Machines and a core pillar for Azure IaaS infrastructure. Azure offer unique block storage capabilities that differentiate it from other Cloud Block Storage offerings. In this talk, we will use a few of these capabilities as examples to reveal the technical designs behind and how they are tied to our XStore storage architecture. Starting with fast restore from snapshot, we will share the CoR technology built to orchestrate instant Disk recovery from snapshots stored in different storage medias. In addition, we will highlight how multi-protocol support is enabled on block storage for SCSI and REST access leveraging our 3-layer XStore architecture. We will conclude with recent enhancements to XStore architecture and upcoming innovations.

If you haven’t caught the new wave in storage management, it’s time to dive in. This presentation provides a broad look at the Redfish and Swordfish ReSTful hierarchies, maps these to some common applications, and provides an overview of the Swordfish tools and documentation ecosystem developed by SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) and the Redfish Forum. It will also provide an overview of what’s new in ’22, including enhancements to NVMe support, storage fabric management, and capacity and performance metric management.

With Amazon S3 celebrating its sixteenth birthday this year, it's easy to forget just how revolutionary it was at its release. S3's buckets and objects were profoundly different from the directories and files that developers had been manipulating through filesystem APIs. What drove this innovation, and how does cloud object storage actually work? In this session, Pat Patterson, Chief Developer Evangelist at Backblaze, will trace the evolution of cloud object storage, explain the trade-offs in implementing secure, reliable, scalable online data storage, and give a detailed technical explanation of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage’s implementation.

Data bytes stored continues to grow at about 40% annually. This trend now exceeds the device capacity growth rate of all existing commercial scale media types including HDD, Flash, Tape and Optical, and the gap between growth rates is about 20%. That implies that the datacenter footprint for storage will be approximately doubling every 3.5 years just to keep up. However, the roadmaps for ongoing density improvement makes the situation much more stark. Past 2030, growth in device capacities may slow substantially leading to a need for 40x or more datacenter space and power by 2040 to keep up with data growth. Although the methods we have used to store data with magnetized materials or corralling electrons are true technological wonders, it is becoming apparent that if we don't want to impinge data growth we may need a substantial paradigm shift in storage technology. Molecular storage is the panacea of storage density and DNA is the leading contender for the championship of storage density, but we will also need to invest in technologies that allow for high speed molecular storage. This is going to be a heavy lift, but if we want to intercept the coming storage capacity crunch we need to start work now.

SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. In this iteration of the talk, we’ll update the audience on SMB protocol changes as well as improvements to the Windows implementation of the SMB server and client. Added to the SMB protocol is a new server-to-client notification mechanism, which enables a variety of novel use cases. We’ll present the details of protocol messaging (new message types, etc) as well as the one scenario which leverages this new mechanism (server-triggered graceful session closure). In addition to the protocol changes, we’ll provide an overview of the latest feature additions to the Windows SMB server and client: authentication rate limiting to protect against password spray attacks, and upcoming improvements to SMB over QUIC.

DNA data storage will dramatically effect the way organizations think about data retention, data protection, and archival by providing capacity density and longevity several orders of magnitude beyond anything available today, while reducing requirements for both power, cooling, and fixity checks. One of challenges of any long term archival storage is being able to recover the data after possibly decades or longer. To do this, the reader must be able to bootstrap the archive, akin to how an OS is loaded after the master boot record is loaded. This talk will describe our initial work to define a standard schema for a self-describing DNA data archive sector zero, which will be as generic as possible, exploiting the format immutability of the natural DNA molecule to assure the archive can be bootstrapped by sequencers decades in the future, all while enabling archive writers to continue innovation in how the balance of the archive is synthesized. We call this the “DNA Rosetta Stone” project.

The industry needs a new storage medium that is more dense, durable, sustainable, and cost effective to cope with the expected future growth of archival data. DNA, nature’s data storage medium, enters this picture at a time when synthesis and sequencing technologies for advanced medical and scientific applications are enabling the manipulation of synthetic DNA in ways previously unimagined. This session will provide and overview of why DNA data storage is compelling and what the DNA Data Storage Alliance is doing to help build an interoperable DNA Data Storage ecosystem.