Storage Developer Conference

Samba is used on a wide variety of local file systems, but it can also be used on cluster filesystems and now on NFS. This presentation will describe our experiences running Samba on NFS, with Samba as a gateway to pNFS storage, and the ways to best integrate the two protocols on Linux when run in this configuration.

The presentation will discuss how ACLs and SMB3 specific metadata can be handled, as well as some performance considerations.

A new class of ultra low latency remote storage is emerging - nonvolatile memory technology can be accessed remotely via high performance storage protocols such as SMB3, over high performance interconnects such as RDMA. A new ecosystem is emerging to "light up" this access end-to-end. This presentation will explore one path to achieve it, with performance data on current approaches, analysis of the overheads, and finally the expectation with simple extensions to well-established protocols.

Learning Objectives: 1) Understand the potential for low latency remote storage; 2) Survey the protocols and interfaces in use today; 3) See current performance data, and future performance expectations; 4) See a view of the future of the end-to-end storage revolution.

NVMe SSDs are becoming increasingly popular choice in scale out storage for latency sensitive workloads like databases, real time analytics, video streaming. NVMe SSDs provide significant performance throughput and lower latency compared to SATA, SAS SSDs. It is not unrealistic to expect these devices providing close to million random IOs per second. However scale out software stacks have significant amount of software overhead limiting the immense potential of NVMe SSDs. In this session, we present all flash scale out cluster performance, analysis on data path I/O overhead and programming techniques to systemically address software performance barriers.

Learning Objectives: 1) Scale out storage software data path flows; 2) Performance profiling with NVMe SSDs; 3) User mode v/s kernel mode NVMe SSD integration; 4) Optimization techniques.

Designed to meet the expectations of end users for simple, modern and secure management of scalable platform hardware, the DMTF’s Redfish is an open industry standard specification and schema that specifies a RESTful interface and utilizes JSON and OData to help customers integrate solutions within their existing tool chains.

This session provides an overview of the Redfish specification, including the base storage models and infrastructure that are used by the SNIA Swordfish extensions (see separate sessions for details). We will cover details of the Redfish approach, as well as information about the new PCIe and memory models added to support storage use cases.

Learning Objectives: 1) Introduction to Redfish concepts; 2) Application of REST APIs to standards management.

While originally designed for disk drives, the read/write I/O model has provided a common storage abstraction for decades, regardless of the type of storage medium.

Devices are becoming increasingly complex, however, and the constraints of the old model have compelled the standards bodies to develop specialized interfaces such as the Object Storage Device and the Zoned Block Commands protocols to effectively manage the storage.

While these protocols have their place for certain workloads, there are thousands of filesystems and applications that depend heavily on the old model. It is therefore compelling to explore how the read/write mechanism can be augmented using hints and stream identifiers to communicate additional information that enables the storage to make better decisions.

The proposed model is applicable to all types of storage devices and alleviates some of the common deficiencies with NAND flash and Shingled Magnetic Recording which both require careful staging of writes to media.

Cloud block storage implementations, such as Ceph RADOS Block Device (RBD) and Microsoft Azure Page Blobs, are considered flexible, reliable and relatively performant.

Exposing these implementations for access via an embedded USB storage gadget can solve a number of factors limiting adoption, namely:

Interoperability - Cloud storage can now be consumed by almost any system with a USB port

Ease of use - Configure once, then plug and play

Security - Encryption can be performed on the USB device itself, reducing reliance on cloud storage providers

This presentation will introduce and demonstrate a USB cloud storage gateway prototype developed during SUSE Hack Week, running on an embedded Linux ARM board.

Learning Objectives: 1) Knowledge of existing Ceph and Azure block storage implementations; 2) Awareness of problems limiting cloud storage adoption; 3) Evaluate a USB cloud storage gateway device as a solution for factors limiting adoption.

The SPEC SFS subcommittee is currently finalizing an industry-standard workload that simulates the storage access patterns of large-scale EDA environments. This workload is based upon dozens of traces from production environments at dozens of companies, and it will be available as an addition to the SPEC SFS benchmark suite. Join us to learn more about the storage characteristics of real EDA environments, how we implemented the EDA workload in the SPEC SFS benchmark, and how this workload can help you evaluate the performance of storage solutions.

Cloud computing frameworks like Kubernetes are designed to address containerized application management using "service" level abstraction for delivering smart data center manageability. Storage management intelligence and interfaces need to evolve to support "service" oriented abstraction. Having every computing framework reinvent the storage integration makes the storage management more complex from end user perspective. Moreover it adds significant burden on storage vendors to write drivers and certify for every orchestration stack which is least desirable. In this session, we present industry wide effort to develop unified storage management interfaces that work across traditional and cloud computing frameworks and eliminate the need to reinvent storage integration.

Learning Objectives: 1) Storage integration in container frameworks; 2) Unified storage management interface; 3) Open source community work.

BetrFS is a new file system that outperforms conventional file systems by orders of magnitude on several fundamental operations, such as random writes, recursive directory traversals, and metadata updates, while matching them on other operations, such as sequential I/O, file and directory renames, and deletions. BetrFS overcomes the classic trade-off between random-write performance and sequential-scan performance by using new "write-optimized" data structures.

This talk explains how BetrFS's design overcomes multiple file-system design trade-offs and how it exploits the performance strengths of write-optimized data structures.

NVMe is catching fire in the market and after years of incubation it is poised to become a major player in server, storage and networking implementations. In this session, G2M Research will discuss the development, deployment models, uses cases and market opportunity for NVMe across enterprise, Telco, Cloud, IoT and embedded applications. NVMe will be used for more than just accelerating SSD, it will become a major player in new computing models for compute, fabrics, analytics, application acceleration, systems management and more. Come see how NVMe will evolve and be used in more ways than you ever thought possible.