September 2015 – SNIA on Storage

Congestion Control in New Storage Architectures Q&A

September 24, 2015September 24, 2015 Chad Hintz

We had a great response to last week’s Webcast “Controlling Congestion in New Storage Architectures” where we introduced CONGA, a new congestion control mechanism that is the result of research at Stanford University. We had many good questions at the live event and have complied answers for all of them in this blog. If you think of additional questions, please feel free to comment here and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Q. Isn’t the leaf/spine network just a Clos network? Since the network has loops, isn’t there a deadlock hazard if pause frames are sent within the network?

A. CLOS/Spine-Leaf networks are based on routing, which has its own loop prevention (TTLs/RPF checks).

Q. Why isn’t the congestion metric subject to the same delays as the rest of the data traffic?

A. It is, but since this is done in the data plane with 40/100g within a data center fabric it can be done in near real time and without the delay of sending it to a centralized control plane.

Q. Are packets dropped in certain cases?

A. Yes, there can be certain reasons why a packet might be dropped.

Q. Why is there no TCP reset? Is it because the Ethernet layer does the flowlet retransmission before TCP has to do a resend?

A. There are many reasons for a TCP reset, CONGA does not prevent them, but it can help with how the application responds to a loss. If there is a loss of the flowlet it is less detrimental to how the application performs because it will resend what it has lost versus the potential for full TCP connection to be reset.

Q. Is CONGA on an RFC standard track?

A. CONGA is based on research done at Stanford. It is not currently an RFC.

The research information can be found here.

Q. How does ECN fit into CONGA?

A. ECN can be used in conjunction with CONGA, as long as the host/networking hardware supports it.

NVM Big at Storage Developer Conference SDC Precon

September 19, 2015September 19, 2015 Jim Handy

I’ll be speaking at SNIA’s SDC Pre-Conference this Sunday, Sept 20, about the new Intel-Micron 3D XPoint memory. I was surprised to find that my talk won’t be unique. There are about 15 papers at this conference that will be discussing NVM, or persistent memory.

What’s all this fuss about?

Part of it has to do with the introduction by Micron & Intel of their 3D XPoint (pronounced “Crosspoint”) memory. This new product will bring nonvolatility, or persistence, to main memory, and that’s big!

Intel itself will present a total of seven papers to tell us all how they envision this technology being used in computing applications. Seven other companies, other than Objective Analysis (my company) will also discuss this hot new topic.

SNIA is really on top of this new trend. This organization has been developing standards for nonvolatile memory for the past couple of years, and has published an NVM Programming Model to help software developers produce code that will communicate with nonvolatile memory no matter who supplies it. Prior to SNIA’s intervention the market was wildly inconsistent, and all suppliers’ NVDIMMs differed slightly from one another, with no promise that this would become any better once new memory technologies started to make their way onto memory modules.

Now that Intel and Micron will be producing their 3D XPoint memory, and will be supplying it on industry-standard DDR4 DIMMs, it’s good to know that there will be a standard protocol to communicate with it. This will facilitate the development of standard software to harness all that nonvolatile memory has to offer.

As for me, I will be sharing information from my company’s new report on the Micron-Intel 3D XPoint memory. This is new, and it’s exciting. Will it succeed? I’ll discuss that with you there.

Outstanding Keynotes from Leading Storage Experts Make SDC Attendance a Must!

September 18, 2015September 18, 2015 khauser Leave a comment

Posted by Marty Foltyn

Tomorrow is the last day to register online for next week’s Storage Developer Conference at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. What better incentive to click www.storagedeveloper.org and register than to read about the amazing keynote and featured speakers at this event – I think they’re the best since the event began in 1998! Preview sessions here, and click on the title to download the full description.

Bev Crair, Vice President and General Manager, Storage Group, Intel will present Innovator, Disruptor or Laggard, Where Will Your Storage Applications Live? Next Generation Storage and discuss the leadership role Intel is playing in driving the open source community for software defined storage, server based storage, and upcoming technologies that will shift how storage is architected.

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis will report on The Long-Term Future of Solid State Storage, examining research of new solid state memory and storage types, and new means of integrating them into highly-optimized computing architectures. This will lead to a discussion of the way that these will impact the market for computing equipment.

Jim Pinkerton, Partner Architect Lead, Microsoft will present Concepts on Moving From SAS connected JBOD to an Ethernet Connected JBOD . This talk examines the advantages of moving to an Ethernet connected JBOD, what infrastructure has to be in place, what performance requirements are needed to be competitive, and examines technical issues in deploying and managing such a product.

Andy Rudoff, SNIA NVM Programming TWG, Intel will discuss Planning for the Next Decade of NVM Programming describing how emerging NVM technologies and related research are causing a change to the software development ecosystem. Andy will describe use cases for load/store accessible NVM, some transparent to applications, others non-transparent.

Richard McDougall, Big Data and Storage Chief Scientist, VMware will present Software Defined Storage – What Does it Look Like in 3 Years? He will survey and contrast the popular software architectural approaches and investigate the changing hardware architectures upon which these systems are built.

Laz Vekiarides, CTO and Co-founder, ClearSky Data will discuss Why the Storage You Have is Not the Storage Your Data Needs , sharing some of the questions every storage architect should ask.

Donnie Berkholz, Research Director, 451 Research will present Emerging Trends in Software Development drawing on his experience and research to discuss emerging trends in how software across the stack is created and deployed, with a particular focus on relevance to storage development and usage.

Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze will discuss Learnings from Nearly a Decade of Building Low-cost Cloud Storage. He will cover the design of the storage hardware, the cloud storage file system software, and the operations processes that currently store over 150 petabytes and 5 petabytes every month.

You could wait and register onsite at the Hyatt, but why? If you need more reasons to attend, check out SNIA on Storage previous blog entries on File Systems, Cloud, Management, New Thinking, Disruptive Technologies, and Security sessions at SDC. See the full agenda and register now for SDC at http://www.storagedeveloper.org.

Security is Strategic to Storage Developers – and a Prime Focus at SDC and SNIA Data Storage Security Summit

September 16, 2015September 16, 2015 khauser Leave a comment

Posted by Marty Foltyn

Security is critical in the storage development process – and a prime focus of sessions at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference AND the co-located SNIA Data Storage Security Summit on Thursday September 24. Admission to the Summit is complimentary – register here at http://www.snia.org/dss-summit.

The Summit agenda is packed with luminaries in the field of storage security, including keynotes from Eric Hibbard (SNIA Security Technical Work Group and Hitachi), Robert Thibadeau (Bright Plaza), Tony Cox (SNIA Storage Security Industry Forum and OASIS KMIP Technical Committee), Suzanne Widup (Verizon), Justin Corlett (Cryptsoft), and Steven Teppler (TimeCertain); and afternoon breakouts from Radia Perlman (EMC); Liz Townsend (Townsend Security); Bob Guimarin (Fornetix); and David Siles (Data Gravity). Roundtables will discuss current issues and future trends in storage security. Don’t miss this exciting event!

SDC’s “Security” sessions highlight security issues and strategies for mobile, cloud, user identity, attack prevention, key management, and encryption. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.

Geoff Gentry, Regional Director, Independent Security Evaluators Hackers, will present Attack Anatomy and Security Trends, offering practical experience from implementing the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) and from deploying and interoperability testing multiple vendor implementations of KMIP .

David Slik, Technical Director, Object Storage, NetApp will discuss Mobile and Secure: Cloud Encrypted Objects Using CDMI, introducing the Cloud Encrypted Object Extension to the CDMI standard, which permits encrypted objects to be stored, retrieved, and transferred between clouds.

Dean Hildebrand, IBM Master Inventor and Manager | Cloud Storage Software and Sasikanth Eda, Software Engineer, IBM will present OpenStack Swift On File: User Identity For Cross Protocol Access Demystified. This session will detail the various issues and nuances associated with having common ID management across Swift object access and file access ,and present an approach to solve them without changes in core Swift code by leveraging powerful SWIFT middleware framework.

Tim Hudson, CTO and Technical Director, Cryptsoft will discuss Multi-Vendor Key Management with KMIP, offering practical experience from implementing the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) and from deploying and interoperability testing multiple vendor implementations of KMIP .

Nathaniel McCallum, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat will present Network Bound Encryption for Data-at-Rest Protection, describing Petera, an open source project which implements a new technique for binding encryption keys to a network.

Finally, check out SNIA on Storage previous blog entries on File Systems, Cloud, Management, New Thinking, and Disruptive Technologies. See the agenda and register now for SDC at http://www.storagedeveloper.org.

SNIA Leads the Way with 16 Sessions on “Disruptive Technologies” at SDC!

September 15, 2015September 16, 2015 khauser Leave a comment

Posted by Marty Foltyn

In the two weeks leading up to the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference, which begins on September 21, SNIA on Storage is highlighting exciting interest areas in the SDC agenda. Our previous blog entries have covered File Systems, Cloud, Management, and New Thinking, and this week we continue with Disruptive Technologies. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit http://www.storagedeveloper.org/ to see the four day overview and sign up.

SDC’s “Disruptive Technologies” sessions highlight those new areas which are revolutionizing storage and the work of developers: Persistent Memory, Object Drives, and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SLR). Leading experts will do a deep dive with sixteen sessions spread throughout the conference agenda. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.

If you are just dipping your toes into disruptive technologies, you will want to check out the SDC Pre-Conference Primer on Sunday September 20. These sessions are included with full conference registration.

At the Primer, Thomas Coughlin, SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Governing Board and President, Coughlin Associates and Edward Grochowski, Storage Consultant, will present Advances in Non-Volatile Storage Technologies, where they will address the status of NVM device technologies and review requirements in process, equipment, and innovations.

Jim Handy, SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Member and General Director, Objective Analysis will discuss The Long-Term Future of Solid State Storage, examining research of new solid state memory and storage types and new means of integrating them into highly-optimized computing architectures. This will lead to a discussion of the way that these will impact the market for computing equipment.

David Cohen, System Architect, and Brian Hausauer, Hardware Architect, at Intel will present Nonvolatile Memory (NVM), Four Trends in the Modern Data Center, and the Implications for the Design of Next Generation Distributed Storage Platforms. They will discuss increasing performance of network bandwidth; storage media approaching the performance of DRAM; OSVs optimizing the code path of their storage stacks; and single processor/core performance and their implications on the design of distributed storage platforms.

Dr. Thomas Willhalm and Karthik Kumar, Senior Application Engineers at Intel, will present Developing Software for Persistent Memory. They will discuss how to identify which data structures that are suited for this new memory tier, and which data structures are not. They will provide developers a systematic methodology to identify how their applications can be architected to take advantage of persistence in the memory tier

And you won’t want to miss the Wednesday evening September 23 Birds-Of-a-Feather (BOF) on Enabling Persistent Memory Applications with NVDIMMs! Come to this OPEN TO ALL IN THE INDUSTRY Birds of a Feather session for an interactive discussion on what customers, storage developers, and the industry would like to see to improve and enhance NVDIMM integration and optimization.

At the SDC Conference, sessions on “Disruptive Technologies – Persistent Memory” kick off with Doug Voigt, SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group Co-Chair and Distinguished Technologist, HP who will discuss Preparing Applications for Persistent Memory, using 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.

Paul von Behren, SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group Co-Chair and Software Architect, Intel will present Managing the Next Generation Memory Subsystem, providing an overview of emerging memory device types, covering management concepts and features, and conclude with an overview of standards that drive interoperability and encourage the development of memory subsystem management tools.

SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group Co-Chairs Jeff Chang, VP Marketing and Business Development, AgigA Tech and Arthur Sainio, Senior Director Marketing, SMART Modular will present The NVDIMM Cookbook: A Soup-to-Nuts Primer on Using NVDIMMs to Improve Your Storage Performance. In this SNIA Tutorial, they will walk you through a soup-to-nuts description of integrating NVDIMMs into your system, from hardware to BIOS to application software, highlighting some of the “knobs” to turn to optimize use in your application as well as some of the “gotchas” encountered along the way.

Pete Kirkpatrick, Principal Engineer, Pure Storage will discuss Building NVRAM Subsystems in All-Flash Storage Arrays, including the hardware and software development of an NVDIMM using NVMe over PCIe-based NVRAM solutions and comparison of the performance of the NVMe-based solution to an SLC NAND Flash-based solution.

Tom Talpey, Architect, Microsoft, will discuss Remote Access to Ultra-low-latency Storage, exploring the issues and outlining a path-finding effort to make small, natural extensions to RDMA and upper layer storage protocols to reduce latencies to acceptable, minimal levels, while preserving the many advantages of the storage protocols they extend.

Sarah Jelinek, Senior SW Engineer, Intel, will present Solving the Challenges of Persistent Memory Programming, reviewing key attributes of persistent memory as well as outlining architectural and design considerations for making an application persistent memory aware.

Chet Douglas, Principal SW Architect, Intel will discuss RDMA with PM: Software Mechanisms for Enabling Persistent Memory Replication, reviewing key HW components involved in RDMA and introduce several SW mechanisms that can be utilized with RDMA with PM.

In the Disruptive Technology area of Object Drives, Mark Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba will present a SNIA Tutorial on Object Drives: A New Architectural Partitioning, discussing the current state and future prospects for object drives, including use cases, requirements, and best practices.

Abhijeet Gole, Senior Director of Engineering, Toshiba will present Beyond LBA: New Directions in the Storage Interface, exploring the paradigm shift introduced by these new interfaces and modes of operation of storage devices.

In the Disruptive Technology area of Shingled Magnetic Recording, Jorge Campello, Director of Systems – Architecture and Solutions, HGST will discuss SMR – The Next Generation of Storage Technology articulating the difference in SMR drive architectures and performance characteristics, and illustrating how the open source community has the distinct advantage of integrating a host-managed platform that leverages SMR HDDs

Albert Chen Engineering Program Director and Jim Malina, Technologist, WDC, will discuss Host Managed SMR, going over the various SW/FW paradigms that attempt to abstract away SMR behavior (e.g. user space library, device mapper, SMR aware file system, enlightened application). Along the way, they will also explore what deficiencies (e.g. ATA sense data reporting) are holding back SMR adoption in the data center.

Join your peers – register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog on Security topics at SDC!

“New Thinking” Track Delivers the Best of Academic Research and Industry Work to SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference Attendees

September 14, 2015September 14, 2015 khauser Leave a comment

Posted by Marty Foltyn

In the two weeks leading up to the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference, which begins on September 21, SNIA on Storage is highlighting exciting interest areas in the SDC agenda. Our previous blog entries have covered File Systems, Cloud, and Management, and this week we begin with New Thinking. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit http://www.storagedeveloper.org/ to see the four day overview and sign up.

SDC’s “New Thinking” track has traditionally been a highlight of the conference, bringing to attendees leading academic research and industry practices as selected by a team of renowned academic and industry leaders. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.

Satadru Pan of Facebook’s session on f4: Facebook’s Warm BLOB Storage System will examine the underlying access patterns of Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) and identify temperature zones that include hot BLOBs that are accessed frequently and warm BLOBs that are accessed far less often. He will discuss Facebook’s overall BLOB storage system designed to isolate warm BLOBs and enabling them to use a specialized warm BLOB storage system, and introduce f4, a new system that lowers the effective-replication-factor of warm BLOBs while remaining fault tolerant and able to support the lower throughput demands.

Austin Donnelly, Principal Research Software Development Engineer, Microsoft will present Pelican: A Building Block for Exascale Cold Data Storage, exploring this rack-scale design for cheap storage of data which is rarely accessed (cold data). He will evaluate Pelican both in simulation and with a full rack, and show how Pelican delivers both high throughput and acceptable latency.

Mai Zheng, Assistant Professor Computer Science Department – College of Arts and Sciences, New Mexico State University will speak on Torturing Databases for Fun and Profit, proposing a method to expose and diagnose violations of the ACID properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, and studying 8 widely-used databases ranging from open-source key-value stores to high-end commercial OLTP servers.

Peter Desnoyers, Professor College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University will discuss Skylight — A Window on Shingled Disk Operation, introducing this novel methodology that combines software and hardware techniques to reverse engineer key properties of drive-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives. He will show the generality and efficacy of their techniques by running them on top of three emulated and two real SMR drives, discovering valuable performance-relevant details of the behavior of the real SMR drives.

Join your peers at SDC – register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for our next blog on Disruptive Technologies topics at SDC!

What to Expect from OpenStack Manila Liberty

September 11, 2015September 11, 2015 AlexMcDonald

On October 7, 2015, the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum is pleased to present its next live Webcast on OpenStack Manila. Manila is the OpenStack file share service that provides the management of file shares (for example, NFS and CIFS) as a core service to OpenStack. Intended to be an open-standards, highly-available and fault-tolerant component of OpenStack, Manila also aims to provide API-compatibility with popular systems like Amazon EC2.

I will be moderating this Webcast, presented by the OpenStack Manila Project Team Lead (PTL), Ben Swartzlander, who will dive into:

An overview of Manila
New features that are being delivered for OpenStack Liberty (due October 2015)
A preview of Makita

With Liberty availability due next month, this information is extremely timely; I encourage you to register now to block your calendar. This will be a live and interactive Webcast, please bring your questions. I look forward to “seeing” you on October 7^th.

Simple, Modern, Secure Management Can Be Yours with these Sessions at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference

September 11, 2015September 12, 2015 khauser Leave a comment

Posted by Marty Foltyn

For the next two weeks leading up to the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference, SNIA on Storage will highlight exciting interest areas in the SDC agenda. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit http://www.storagedeveloper.org/ to see the four day overview and sign up.

Mastering Management is a top priority for Storage Developers, and you’ll find the answers you need at SDC. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.

Jeff Autor, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, will present a DMTF Redfish Overview, covering the design tenets, protocol and payload, expected deliverables and time frames of this open industry standard specification.

Chris Lionetti, Reference Architect at NetApp, will discuss The State of SMI-S – The Standards Based Approach for Managing Infrastructure, providing the fundamentals of the SNIA Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S) and a clear understanding of its value in a production environment. This session will also address the newly created SMI-S getting started guide.

Amit Virmani and Jeff Li, Senior Software Engineers at Microsoft Corporation, will present Enterprise-Grade Array-Based Replication and Disaster Recovery with SMI-S, Windows Server, System Center and Azure Site Recovery. Attendees will understand what ASR Disaster Recovery solution means, how the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine manager leverages a replication discovery and management profile, and take a deep dive into the Virtual Machine Manager.

Join your peers at SDC – register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for our next blog on New Thinking topics at SDC!

Embrace the Cloud at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference With These Top-Notch Speakers and Sessions!

September 10, 2015September 11, 2015 khauser Leave a comment

For the next two weeks, SNIA on Storage will highlight exciting interest areas in the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) agenda. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit www.storagedeveloper.org to see the four day overview and sign up.

Cloud storage is hot, and whether you are new to the cloud or an experienced developer, SDC has a great lineup of speakers and sessions. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.

If you are just dipping your toes into cloud technology, you will want to check out the SDC Pre-Conference Primer on Sunday September 20. These sessions are included with full conference registration.

Here, SNIA Cloud Storage TWG Co-Chairs, David Slik and Mark Carlson, will explain all you Need to Know on Cloud Storage. You will come up to speed on the concepts, conventions, and standards in this space, and even see a live demo of an operating storage cloud. And Brian Mason, MTS-SW at NetApp, will review how to use REST API for Management Integration and how developers can use their best in class management tools and have various storage systems integrate into their management tools.

At the SDC Conference, the Cloud track kicks off with David Slik, SNIA Cloud Storage TWG Co-Chair and Technical Director at NetApp, discussing how to Use SNIA’s Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) to Manage Swift, S3, and Ceph Object Repositories, and how the use of CDMI as a management protocol adds value to multi-protocol systems.

Yong Chen, Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University will speak on Unistore: A Unified Storage Architecture for Cloud Computing. He will introduce an ongoing effort from Texas Tech University and Nimboxx Inc. to build an innovative unified storage architecture (Unistore) with the co-existence and efficient integration of heterogeneous HDD and SCM devices for Cloud storage.

Luke Behnke, VP of Products at Bitcasa will present The Developer’s Dilemma: Do-It-Yourself Storage or Surrender Your Data? He’ll discuss the choice between DIY or cloud storage APIs, and how this will impact future functionality and user experience.

Sachin Goswami, Solution Architect and Storage COE Head Hi Tech, Tata Consultancy Services ((TCS), will explain How to Test CDMI Extension Features Like LTFS, Data Deduplication, and OVF, Partial – Value Copy Functionality: Challenges, Solutions and Best Practices, sharing the approach TCS will adopt to overcome the challenges in testing of LTFS integration with CDMI, Data Deduplication, partial upload on Server and Open Vitalization format (OVF) of CDMI and Non-CDMI based scenarios of the cloud.

Speaking of the CDMI standard, join the Cloud Plugfest at SDC starting on September 21^st to learn more about the CDMI Conformance Test Program and test your application for CDMI conformance.

And you won’t want to miss the Birds-Of-a-Feather (BOF) Sessions on Cloud! The first is on Tuesday evening, September 22, on Getting Started with the CDMI Conformance Test Program! Come to this OPEN TO ALL Birds of a Feather session to learn what the CTP program entails, details on the testing service that is offered, and how to get the CTP process started.

On Wednesday evening, September 23, the Moving Data Protection to the Cloud: Trends, Challenges and Strategies BOF will discuss critical cloud data protection challenges, how to use the cloud for data protection, pros and cons of various cloud data protection strategies, experiences of others (good and bad) to avoid common pitfalls, and cloud standards in use – and why you need them! This BOF is open to all!

A Deep Dive into the SNIA Storage Developer Conference – The File Systems Track

September 9, 2015September 9, 2015 khauser Leave a comment

SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) 2015 is two weeks away, and the SNIA Technical Council is finalizing a strong, comprehensive agenda of speakers and sessions. Wherever your interests lie, you’re sure to find experts and topics that will expand your knowledge and fuel your professional development!

For the next two weeks, SNIA on Storage will highlight exciting interest areas in the 2015 agenda. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit www.storagedeveloper.org to see the four day overview and sign up.

Year after year, the File Systems Track at SDC provides in depth information on the latest technologies, and 2015 is no exception. The track kicks off with Vinod Eswaraprasad, Software Architect, Wipro, on Creating Plugin Modules for OpenStack Manila Services. He’ll discuss his work on integrating a multi-protocol NAS storage device to the OpenStack Manila service, looking at the architecture principle behind the scalability and modularity of Manila services, and the analysis of interface extensions required to integrate a typical NAS head.

Ankit Agrawal and Sachin Goswami of TCS will discuss How to Enable a Reliable and Economic Cloud Storage Solution by Integrating SSD with LTFS. They will share views on how to integrate SSD as a cache with a LTFS tape system to transparently deliver the best benefits for Object Base storage, and talk about the potential challenges in their approach and best practices that can be adopted to overcome these challenges.

Jakob Homan, Distributed Systems Engineer, Microsoft, will present Apache HDFS: Latest Developments and Trends. He’ll discuss the new features of HDFS, which has rapidly developed to meet the needs of enterprise and cloud customers, and take a look at HDFS at implementations and how they address previous shortcomings of HDFS.

James Cain, Principal Software Architect, Quantel Limited, will discuss a Pausable File System, using his own implementation of an SMB3 server (running in user mode on Windows) to demonstrate the effects of marking messages as asynchronously handled and then delaying responses in order to build up a complete understanding of the semantics offered by a pausable file system.

Ulrich Fuchs, Service Manager, CERN, will talk about Storage Solutions for Tomorrow’s Physics Projects, suggesting possible architectures for tomorrow’s storage implementations in this field, and showing results of first performance tests done on various solutions (Lustre, NFS, Block Object storage, GPFS ..) for typical application access patterns.

Neal Christiansen, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft, will present Support for New Storage Technologies by the Windows Operating System, describing the changes being made to the Windows OS, its file systems, and storage stack in response to new evolving storage technologies.

Richard Morris and Peter Cudhea of Oracle will discuss ZFS Async Replication Enhancements, exploring design decisions around enhancing the ZFS send and ZFS receive commands to transfer already compressed data more efficiently and to recover from failures without re-sending data that has already been received.

J.R. Tipton, Development Lead, Microsoft, will discuss ReFS v2: Cloning, Projecting, and Moving Data File Systems, presenting new abstractions that open up greater control for applications and virtualization, covering block projection and cloning as well as in-line data tiering.

Poornima Gurusiddaiah and Soumya Koduri of Red Hat will present Achieving Coherent and Aggressive Client Caching in Gluster, a Distributed System, discussing how to implement file system notifications and leases in a distributed system and how these can be leveraged to implement a client side coherent and aggressive caching.

Sriram Rao, Partner Scientist Manager, Microsoft, will present Petabyte-scale Distributed File Systems in Open Source Land: KFS Evolution, providing an overview of OSS systems (such as HDFS and KFS) in this space, and describing how these systems have evolved to take advantage of increasing network bandwidth in data center settings to improve application performance as well as storage efficiency.

Richard Levy, CEO and President, Peer Fusion, will discuss a High Resiliency Parallel NAS Cluster, including resiliency design considerations for large clusters, the efficient use of multicast for scalability, why large clusters must administer themselves, fault injection when failures are the nominal conditions, and the next step of 64K peers.

Join your peers as well – register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog on Cloud topics at SDC!