Storage Developer Conference

NVMe and SNIA are both working on standards related to Computational Storage. The question that is continually asked is are these efforts are compatible or at odds with each other. The truth is that many of the same people are working on both of these standards efforts and are very interested in ensuring that they work together as opposed to conflicting with each other. This presentation will discuss how the two standards efforts go hand in hand, the aspects of the SNIA API that support the NVMe efforts, and the NVMe efforts to share common architectural structures with those defined in SNIA. As part of this discussion, a lexicon of terminology used in both organizations will be presented and the decoder ring that allows you to understand one document in terms of the other in spite of some differences in names used.

With the ongoing work in the SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work Group, the chairs will present the latest updates from the membership of the working group. In addition, the latest release will be reviewed at a high level to provide attendees a view into next steps and implementation of the specification in progress. Use cases, Security considerations, and other key topics with also be addressed.

Software memory copies have been the gold standard for applications performing memory data movement or operations in system memory. With new accelerators and memory types enriching the system architecture, accelerator-assisted memory data movement and transformation needs much-needed standardization. SNIA's SDXI (Smart Data Accelerator Interface) TWG is at the forefront of standardizing this and has been working towards a v1.0 since its formation in June 2020. In this talk, SNIA SDXI TWG members will summarize the SNIA SDXI specification’s development journey, its various use cases, and features leading to SNIA SDXI v1.0. Further, this talk will shed some light on future directions for the specification.

Learning Objectives: 1) Learn from the experts designing a standard for memory to memory data movement and acceleration; 2) SDXI specification v1.0 internals; 3) SDXI Usecases; 4) Applicability to Accelerators, Persistent Memory, Computational Storage, CXL, and other industry trends.

2022 has been an interesting and challenging year for storage security. The cyber threat landscape has witnessed large numbers of attacks impacting data and increased nation state activities directed at critical infrastructure. The regulatory landscape is undergoing change as well (e.g., EU Directive 2009/125/EC also known as LOT 9) and potentially imposing requirements that necessitate adjustments to security capabilities, controls, and practices to reflect new realities. By the end of 2022 there will be significant changes to security standards and specifications relevant to storage. New technologies could increase the storage security options. Lastly, new practices and deployment strategies could add further data protections. This session concentrates on the new and emerging storage security elements and issues rather than covering storage security from a general perspective. In addition, the session homes in on those aspects that are potentially relevant to developers and architects.

Learning Objectives: 1) Understand key threat and regulatory landscape issues that could affect storage development; 2) Identify important security standards and specifications that should be considered in the development of storage products; 3) Recognize the implications and challenges associated with new practices and deployment strategies.

The Key Per IO (KPIO) project is a joint initiative between NVM Express® and the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Storage Work Group to define a new KPIO Security Subsystem Class (SSC) under TCG Opal SSC for NVMe® class of Storage Devices. Self-Encrypting Drives (SED) perform continuous encryption on user accessible data based on contiguous LBA ranges per namespace. This is done at interface speeds using a small number of keys generated/held in persistent media by the storage device. KPIO will allow large number of encryption keys to be managed and securely downloaded into the NVM subsystem. Encryption of user data then occurs on a per command basis (each command may request to use a different key). This provides a finer granularity of data encryption that enables a granular encryption scheme in order to support use cases: Support of EU - GDPR Support of data erasure when data is spread over many disks, support of data erasure of data that is mixed with other data needing to be preserved (multitenancy), assigning an encryption key to a single sensitive file or host object. The presentation will introduce the architectural differences between traditional SEDs and the KPIO SSC, provide an overview of the proposed TCG KPIO SSC spec and the features in the NVMe commands to allow use of KPIO, and conclude by summarizing the current state of the standardization proposals in NVM Express and the TCG Storage WG.

Learning Objectives: 1) Understand how encryption of data at rest protects that data today; 2) Understand how fine grain encryption (KPIO) will be used to protect data at rest in the future; 3) Understand possible use cases for KPIO (multi-tenant use of a common device, EU GDP use cases, others).

NVM Express® (NVMe®) has become synonymous with high-performance storage with widespread adoption in client, cloud, and enterprise applications. The NVMe 2.0 family of specifications, released in June 2021, allow for faster and simpler development of NVMe solutions to support increasingly diverse environments, now including Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). The extensibility of the specifications encourages the development of independent command sets like Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) and Key Value (KV) while enabling support for the various underlying transport protocols common to NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) technologies. This presentation provides an overview of the latest NVMe technologies, summarizes the NVMe standards roadmap, and describes new NVMe standardization initiatives.

Learning Objectives: 1) Gain an overview of the latest NVMe technologies; 2) Summarize the NVMe standards roadmap; 3) Describe new NVMe standardization initiatives.

Emerging memory technologies have gotten a couple of big boosts over the past few years, one in the form of Intel’s Optane products, and the other from the migration of CMOS logic to nodes that NOR flash, and now SRAM, cannot practically support. Although these appear to be two very different spheres, a lot of the work that has been undertaken to support Intel’s Optane products (also known as 3D XPoint) will lead to improved use of persistent memories on processors of all kinds: “xPUs”. In this presentation we will review emerging memory technologies and their roles in replacing other on-chip memories, the developments through SNIA and other organizations fostered by Optane, but usable in other aspects of computing, the emergence of new Near/Far Memory paradigms that have spawned interface protocols like CXL and OMI, and the emergence of “Chiplets,” and their potential role in the evolution of persistent processor caches.

Learning Objectives: 1) New memories and their impact on computing architecture; 2) Near & Far Memory and how it interacts with new persistent memory technologies; 3) How the adoption of chiplets impacts these changes.

Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) is a proposed standard for a memory to memory data movement and acceleration interface. Software memcpy is the current data movement standard for software implementation due to stable CPU ISA. However, this takes away from application performance and incurs software overhead to provide context isolation. Offload DMA engines and their interface are vendor-specific and not standardized for user-level software. SNIA’s SDXI TWG is tasked with developing and standardizing an extensible, forward-compatible memory to memory data mover and acceleration interface that is independent of actual data mover implementations and underlying I/O interconnect technology. In this panel discussion, experts and representatives of SDXI TWG member companies will talk about their motivations in joining this industry-standard effort.

Learning Objectives: 1) Learn from the experts desigining a standard for memory to memory data movement and acceleration; 2) Learn about the use cases of interest to SDXI TWG member companies; 3) Learn about the ecosystem being developed by SDXI member companies for data movers and accelerators.

In this presentation the Co-Chairs of the Computational Storage Technical Working Group (CS TWG) will provide a status update from the work having been done over the last year, including the release of the new Public Review materials around Architecture and APIs. We will update the status of the definition work and address the growing market and adoption of the technology with contributions from the 47+ member organizations participating in the efforts. We will show use cases, customer case studies, and efforts to continue to drove output from the Technical efforts.

Learning Objectives: 1) Learn the Latest of the work done by CS TWG; 2) Computational Storage Architectures API Deployment; 3) Customer Case Studies; 4) Market Update and Overview.

For the last eight years Backblaze has collected daily operational data from the hard drives in our data centers. This includes daily SMART statistics from over 250,000 hard drives, and SSDs, totaling nearly two exabytes of storage, and totaling over 200 million data points. We'll use this data to examine the following: - the lifetime failure statistics for all the hard drives we have ever used. - how has temperature effects the failure rate of hard drives. - a comparison the failure rates of helium filled hard drives versus air-filled hard drives. - the SMART stats we use to indicate whether a Hard Drive may fail and if you can use SMART stats to predict hard drive failure. - how SSD failure rates compare to HDD failure rates. The data we use is available for anyone to download and use for their own experimentation and education.

Learning Objectives 1) How have the hard drives we have under management performed over time; 2) How you can use SMART stats at scale to determine patterns in hard drive behavior; 3) A look at real word data comparing the failure rates of HDD and SSD devices; 4) How anyone can download and use the data set we have collected.