Storage Developer Conference

Applying micro service patterns to storage giving each workload its own Container Attached Storage (CAS) system. This puts the DevOps persona within full control of the storage requirements and brings data agility to k8s persistent workloads. We will go over the concept and the implementation of CAS, as well as its orchestration.

Learning Objectives: 1) Go over the modern day apps and their storage needs; under the notion of applications have changed someone forgot to tell storage; 2) What are the problems to use technologies like user space IO, in particular using technologies like SPDK among others; 3) Looking devops and the k8s model, how can we bring the power of user space storage in developers hands? Virtio for containers? direct access from the go run time for example SPDK?; 4) We have tried both, and like to share the outcome of this with you.

Increasing proliferation of Artificial Intelligence, E-commerce, Big Data and Cloud applications is leading to highly diversified workloads and use cases in hyperscale data centers, which poses new challenges to solid state storage in terms of performance, flexibility and TCO optimizations. Moreover, there are increasing demands for software/hardware co-optimization and more control over I/O path from applications. Standard SSDs that are tuned for a few generic workloads cannot meet these challenges, resulting in suboptimal performance and TCO.

We present our Dual-Mode SSD Architecture, a new storage architecture designed for our next-generation hyperscale data centers. We define our Open Channel SSD specification and build a Dual-Mode SSD platform that supports both Open Channel mode and standard NVMe mode. We develop our Open Channel software stack in full user space as well as in kernel space. Working seamlessly with our storage engine software, we build customized FTL solutions for different business applications. Our software/hardware co-optimization solutions is leading to significant benefits in performance, Quality-of-Service and TCO.

Learning Objectives: 1) Challenges to solid storage systems in next-generation hyperscale data centers; 2) Dual-Mode SSD architecture; 3) Full user space Open Channel software stack, and software/hardware co-optimization solutions.

The talk covers (i) the characteristics of open-channel SSD management, (ii) introduces the new open-channel/Denali interface, (iii) provides background on LightNVM, the Linux subsystem that we designed and implemented for open-channel SSD management, and at last, we show the effectiveness of open-channel SSDs against state-of-art block-based SSDs.

Learning Objectives: 1) Understand Open-Channel SSDs; 2) Project status; 3) Background on storage and applications.

PCI Express® (PCIe®) 3.0 architecture has enabled Flash Storage to transition to high speed, low latency power efficient performance over the past few years. However, the hunger for additional performance in power constrained devices continues and PCI-SIG® continues its nearly three decade history of delivering performance doubling and additional features with the development of the PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 specifications.

This presentation will review the major features of PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 technology, which will continue to enable power efficient performance required as NAND capacities scale and faster SCM (Storage Class Memories) become mainstream. Session attendees will gain insight into the current status of the PCIe 4.0 technology rollout and testing and will learn about the PCIe 5.0 specification development and timeline for completion in 2019.

Learning Objectives: 1) Learn how PCIe is becoming the I/O of choice for storage; 2) Gain insight into the status of PCIe 4.0 roll-out for storage applications; 3) Understand the PCIe roadmap to 32GT/s.

Many server workloads, for example OLTP database workloads, require high I/O throughput and low latency. With the industry trend of moving high-end scale-up workloads to virtualization environment, it is essential for cloud providers and on-premises servers to achieve near native performance by reducing I/O virtualization overhead which mainly comes from two sources: DMA operations and interrupt delivery mechanism for I/O completions. The direct PCIe NVMe device assign techniques allow a VM to interact with HW devices directly and avoid using traditional Hyper-V para-virtualized I/O path.

To improve interrupt handling in the virtualization environment, Intel introduces Posted Interrupts (PI) as an enhanced method to mitigate interrupt delivery overhead in a virtualized environment, bypassing hypervisor involvement completely. In this talk, we will present Microsoft implementation and optimization of Intel PI and Hyper-V direct PCIe NVMe access on Windows platform. The results showed that we were able to achieve more than 10-Million IOPS from a single VM for the first time in the industry using an Intel Skylake based HPE commodity server with these techniques.

Have you heard of non-volatile/persistent memory but don’t know how to get started with this disruptive technology? Memory is the new Storage. Next generation storage tiered architectures are evolving with persistent memory and hardware delivering NVDIMMs. Are you a Linux or Windows application developer familiar with C, C++, Java, or Python, keen to develop the next revolutionary application or modify an existing application, but not sure where to start? Do you know what performance and analysis tools can be used to identify optimizations in your app to take advantage of persistent memory? Are you a software, server, or cloud architect that wants to get a jump start on this disruptive technology? This presentation will get you started on the persistent memory solution path. The future is in your hands. The future is now!

Learning Objectives: 1) We’ll deliver an introductory understanding of persistent memory, introduce the SNIA Programming Model, Direct Access (DAX) filesystems, and show where persistent memory fits in the storage hierarchy; 2) We’ll provide several options for creating development environments (you don’t need physical modules to get started!); 3) We’ll introduce application programming using the Persistent Memory Developers Kit (PMDK); 4) We’ll introduce and describe how to create and manage Persistent Memory Regions, Namespaces, and Labels; 5) Describe existing analysis tools to identify applications that are good candidates for persistent memory.

In-situ processing, in-storage processing, smart SSD, computational storage… Many names to define the same concept: a closer integration of computing capabilities and data storage in order to reduce data movement leading to better performance and lower power consumption. This is a new trend in storage and computing architectures. How can we define this new type of products: storage with embedded processing, or processing with embedded storage?

This talk presents an analysis of the in-storage processing trend, including a comparison of different architectures, the presentation of a computing and storage technologies roadmap, and a list of applications use cases.

Learning Objectives: 1) In-storage processing architectures; 2) Technology roadmap for integration; 3) Application use cases.

The SNIA NVMP Technical Workgroup (TWG) continues to make significant progress on defining the architecture for interfacing applications to PM. In this talk, we will focus on the important Remote Persistent Memory scenario, and how the NVMP TWG’s programming model applies. Application use of these interfaces, along with fabric support such as RDMA and platform extensions, are part of this, and the talk will describe how the larger ecosystem fits together to support PM as low-latency remote storage.

Learning Objectives: 1) Persistent Memory programming; 2) RDMA extensions; 3) SNIA PM initiatives.

Ceph protects data by making 2-3 copies of the same data but that means 2-3x more storage servers and related costs. It also means higher write latencies as data hops between OSD nodes. Customers are now starting to deploy Ceph using SSDs for high-performance workloads and for data lakes supporting real-time analytics. We describe a novel approach that eliminates the added server cost by creating Containerized, stateless OSDs and leveraging NVMe-over-fabrics to replicate data in server-less storage nodes. We propose redefining the boundaries of separation within SDS architectures to address disaggregation overheads. Specifically, we decouple control and data plane operations and transfer block ownership to execute on remote storage targets. It also dramatically reduces write latency to enable Ceph to be used for databases and to speed up large file writes. As part of the solution, we also describe how OSD node failover is preserved via a novel mechanism using standby stateless OSD nodes.

Learning Objectives: 1) Storage disaggregation; 2) NVMe over fabrics; 3) Ceph architecture.

NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) protocols provide a highly efficient access to flash storage inside a server and over the network respectively. Current generation of distributed storage software stacks use proprietary protocols which are sub-optimal to deliver end to end low latency. Moreover it increases operational complexity to manage NVMe-oF managed flash storage and distributed flash storage in private cloud infrastructure. In this session, we present NVMe over Fabrics based high performance distributed block storage that combines the best of both worlds to deliver performance, elasticity and rich data services.

Learning Objectives: 1) NVMe, NVMe-oF for flash data path IO architecture; 2) Programming, architecture and optimization for flash; 3) Distributed storage, data services.