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

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.SDC15_WebHeader3_999x188

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!

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