Storage Developer Conference

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is the next generation storage technology for continued improvement in HDD areal density, and offers new opportunities for open compute environments. In massive, scale-out cold storage applications such as active archive, social media and long-term data storage, SMR HDD-based solutions offers the highest density, lowest TCO and leading $/TB.

This speaking session will clearly articulate the difference in SMR drive architectures and performance characteristics, and will illustrate how the open source community has the distinct advantage of integrating a host-managed platform that leverages SMR HDDs. Further, HGST will discuss how SMR presents the possibility for unprecedented storage capacities, maintains a familiar form factor, and creates a lower-power envelope so architects can create responsive cold storage data pools that can be accessed in near real-time.

Learning objectives: Demonstrate how leveraging a SMR HDD provides advantages to a host-managed platform. Show how SMR is enabling cold storage data pools on disk, by vastly increasing the amount of archive data that can be actively accessed. Provide an insight into the future of SMR – what does this mean for next steps of the data center. Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.

A number of scale out storage solutions, as part of open source and other projects, are architected to scale out by incrementally adding and removing storage nodes. Example projects include:

• Hadoop’s HDFS

• CEPH

• Swift (OpenStack object storage)

The typical storage node architecture includes inexpensive enclosures with IP networking, CPU, Memory and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). While inexpensive to deploy, these solutions become harder to manage over time. Power and space requirements of Data Centers are difficult to meet with this type of solution. Object Drives further partition these object systems allowing storage to scale up and down by single drive increments.

This talk will discuss the current state and future prospects for object drives. Use cases and requirements will be examined and best practices will be described. Learn: What are object drives? What value do they provide? Where are they best deployed? Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.

Non-Volatile DIMMs, or NVDIMMs, have emerged as a go-to technology for boosting performance for next generation storage platforms. The standardization efforts around NVDIMMs have paved the way to simple, plug-n-play adoption. If you're a storage developer who hasn't yet realized the benefits of NVDIMMs in your products, then this session is for you! We will walk you through a soup-to-nuts description of integrating NVDIMMs into your system, from hardware to BIOS to application software. We'll highlight some of the "knobs" to turn to optimize use in your application as well as some of the "gotchas" encountered along the way. Learning Objectives: Understand what an NVDIMM is, Understand why an NVDIMM can improve your system performance, Understand how to integrate an NVDIMM into your system. Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.

Storage Intelligence allows Solid State Storage to work together with applications to provide enhanced performance and endurance of storage devices. Today standardization of initial features is nearly complete in the SCSI standard and is moving forward in the NVMe standard with SATA standardization close behind that. This presentation will describe the details that Storage Intelligence is standardizing today and bringing to the standardization process in the near future. Current work involves intelligent placement of data on the storage device, intelligent management of garbage collection, and management of the over provisioning space on the storage device. Future work will add In Storage Compute in the SNIA Object Drive TWG. Each of these four features will be described in detail. Learning Objectives: Define the features of Storage Intelligence. Define the state of standards development in SCSI, NVMe, and SATA. Why are additional controls over storage necessary. Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.

New memory technologies are emerging which bring substantial performance and reliability benefits, but these benefits are only achieved with careful provisioning and on-going management of the memory subsystem. Non-volatile memory technologies in particular have unique characteristics that require rethinking memory and storage management. This talk begins with an overview of emerging memory device types with a focus on non-volatile DIMMs. We’ll cover the management concepts and features of these new technologies and put them in the context of overall memory subsystem and server management. The talk concludes with an overview of SNIA, DMTF and other standards that are being introduced to drive interoperability and encourage the development of memory subsystem management tools. Discuss the features of emerging memory technologies and the system management challenges that result from these new features. Discover the concepts, practices and tools that administrators can use to discover, provision, and manage the growing complexity of the memory subsystem. Review the standardization efforts, documentation, and open source code available to developers looking to get started with memory management development projects. Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.

New persistent memory technologies promise to revolutionize the way applications store data. Many aspects of application data access will need to be revisited in order to get full advantage of these technologies. The journey will involve several new types of libraries and ultimately programming language changes. In this session we will use the concepts of the SNIA NVM Programming Model to explore the emerging landscape of persistent memory related software from an application evolution point of view. Learn how applications can navigate the transitions created by persistent memory. Learn how additional software and services can help. Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.