Storage Developer Conference

Attacks against enterprises and their technology vendors are facilitated by the current rapid adoption of embedded systems, cloud solutions, and web based platforms. These attacks often undermine the very monetization, scalability and user experience goals for which these systems were designed and deployed. As malicious hackers advance their techniques at a staggering pace, often rendering current defense tactics obsolete, so too must security practitioners obsess over deploying progressive techniques. Pre-sented by the elite organization of white hat hackers most widely known for being first to break the iPhone, this session will analyze the anatomies of real world attacks against high profile systems, ranging from the well known Target breach, to Texas In-struments RFID, to Apple products, and more. It will extract lessons from these attack anatomies to provide a framework to account for these modern attackers, articulate industry context, and supply attendees with key takeaways, including immediately actionable guidance.

Learning Objectives: 1) Discipline Division: Security Separated from Functionality. 2) Perspective Matters: White Box vs. Black Box. 3) Defense Priorities: Secure Assets, not Just Perimeters. 4) Timing Security: Build It In, Not Bolt It On. 5) Procedural Duration: Security as an Ongoing Process.

This presentation will describe the changes being made to the Windows OS, its file systems and storage stack in response to new evolving storage technologies. Learn how windows is adaptaing to new storage technologies.

Intel Design environment heavily depends on a large scale NFS infrastructure with 10s of PBs of data. Global Name space helps to navigate this large environment in a uniform way from 60,000 compute servers.

But what if a user doesn't know where the piece of data he is looking for is located?

Our customers used to spend hours waiting for recursive "grep" commands' completion - or preferred not to bother with some less critical queries.

In this talk, we'll cover how Intel IT has identified an opportunity to provide a faster way to look for an information within this large-scale NFS environment. We'll review various open source solutions which were considered, and how we've decided to implement a mix of home-grown scalable NFS crawler with open source ElasticSearch engine to index parts of our NFS environment.

As part of this talk we'll discuss various challenges and our ways to mitigate them, including:

# Crawler scalability required to index large amounts of dynamically changing data within pre-defined indexing SLA

# Index scalability and performance requirements

# Relevancy of the results presented in search queries by customers

# User interface considerations

# Security aspects of the index access control

This might be an interesting conversation for both storage vendors - covering a useful feature which might be implemented as a part of NFS environment, and for storage customers who may benefit from such capability.

Learning Objectives:

1) How to implement scalable indexing and search on top of large scale NFS

2) Scalable crawling with controlled performance impact on shared file servers

3) Security aspects of data index and search representation

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: 1) Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects are used by a client, 2) Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects can move between clouds, 3) Learn about access control and delegation for Cloud Encrypted Objects, 4) Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects can be stored and accessed from file systems, CDMI, S3, Swift and other repositories.

Microsoft Azure has provided REST endpoints for blobs, tables, and queues since its inception. This is an efficient and simple stateless storage API for new applications. However, there is a very large installed base of mature applications, especially enterprise and vertical, which are written to a conventional file API such as Win32 or the C runtimes. Azure File Service provides [MS-SMB2] compliant file shares with the same high availability as Azure’s REST endpoints since the backing store for both transient handle state and files data is, under the hood, Azure tables and blobs. As a bonus, the file share namespace is also exposed via REST, allowing simultaneous and coherent access to file data from both endpoints. This talk will relate the experience and challenges of designing and implementing a wire compliant continuously available SMB server where the backing store is not even a conventional file system, let alone NTFS.

Learning Objectives:

1) Learn how an SMB sever can be built on top of something other than a conventional file system.

2) Gain an appreciation of the complexities involved in durably committing what is usually considered volatile handle state which must be both highly available and high performance.

3) Be inspired by the possibilities of immediately running existing applications unmodified against the cloud while simultaneously leveraging REST access to the application’s data.

A new class of ultra-low latency storage is emerging, including Persistent Memory (PM), as well as advanced nonvolatile storage technologies such as NVMe. The SNIA NVM TWG has been exploring these technologies and has more recently prepared a white paper for requirements of remotely utilizing such devices. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), arbitrated by file and block storage protocols, is a clear choice for this access, but existing RDMA and storage protocol implementations incur latency overheads which impact the performance of the solution. And while raw fabric block protocols can address latency overheads, they do not address data integrity, management and sharing.

This talk explores the issues, and outlines a pathfinding effort to make small, natural extensions to RDMA and upper layer storage protocols to reduce these latencies to acceptable, minimal levels, while preserving the many advantages of the storage protocols they extend.

Learning Objectives: 1) Learn key technologies enabling remote access to new storage media, such as NVM and PM. 2) Understand the issues in making full use of PM technologies remotely, with today’s protocols. 3) Explore a path to fully access the benefits of remote access to PM devices in the future.

Network File Systems, needed for accessing everything from low end storage, to Windows and Mac servers, to high end NAS, continue to evolve. NFS and SMB, the two dominant network storage protocols, also continue to improve with exciting new features in their most recent dialects. And the Linux clients continue to improve their implementation of these protocols, recently adding security and performance enhancements for SMB3 and new pNFS layout types along with the NFSv4.2 support in the NFS client.

This presentation will discuss some of the recent changes in network file system support in Linux including enhanced CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 support in the kernel client, and also new developments in the NFS client. It will also discuss in progress work on new protocol features for improved performance, clustering scalability, reliability and availability. It will also compare and contrast some of the key features of the SMB3 and NFS Linux clients. Learning Objectives: 1)Understanding key features and limitations of the SMB3 support in Linux client, 2)Understanding key features and limitations of the NFS client in Linux client, 3)Understanding which protocol (and dialect) is better for common use cases, 4)Understanding key differences between NFSv4.2 and SMB3.1, 5)Understanding common SMB3 client configuration choices and why they are useful.

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

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 100Gb Ethernet and RDMA solutions on the next-generation Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) will be presented for the first time.

SMR is a gamechanger drive technology, embraced by all major manufacturers. SMR changes fundamental assumptions of filesystem management. This long-help abandonment of Random-Writes now makes drives behave as sequential-access tape.

Seagate is leading the way in providing a standards compliant IO stack for use with the new drives. Using the new ZAC/ZBC commands to make and maintain a filesystem is essential for performant operation. Seagate is sharing lessons learned from modifiying EXT4 for use with SMR. This effort is called the SMR Friendly File System (SMRFFS).

Learning objectives: 1) Forward-write only considerations for the block allocation scheme

,

2) Zones/BlockGroup/AllocationGroup alignment and use

, 3) Superblock, and other required write-in-place management schemes.

Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.