Open Standards Featured at FMS 2023

SNIA welcomes colleagues to join them at the upcoming Flash Memory Summit, August 8-10, 2023 in Santa Clara CA. SNIA is pleased to join standards organizations CXL Consortium™ (CXL™), PCI-SIG®, and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™ (UCIe™) in an Open Standards Pavilion, Booth #725, in the Exhibit Hall.  CMSI will feature SNIA member companies in a computational storage cross industry demo by Intel, MINIO, and Solidigm and a Data Filtering demo by ScaleFlux; a software memory tiering demo by VMware; a persistent memory workshop and hackathon; and the latest on SSD form factors E1 and E3 work by SNIA SFF TA Technical work group. SMI will showcase SNIA Swordfish® management of NVMe SSDs on Linux with demos by Intel Samsung and Solidigm. CXL will discuss their advances in coherent connectivity.  PCI-SIG will feature their PCIe 5.0 architecture (32GT/s) and PCIe 6.0 (65GT/s) architectures and industry adoption and the upcoming PCIe 7.0 specification development (128GT/s).  UCIe will discuss their new open industry standard establishing a universal interconnect at the package-level. SNIA STA Forum will also be in Booth #849 – learn more about the SCSI Trade Association joining SNIA. These demonstrations and discussions will augment FMS program sessions in the SNIA-sponsored System Architecture Track on memory, computational storage, CXL, and UCIe standards.  A SNIA mainstage session on Wednesday August 9 at 2:10 pm will discuss Trends in Storage and Data: New Directions for Industry Standards. SNIA colleagues and friends can receive a $100 discount off the 1-, 2-, or 3-day full conference registration by using code SNIA23. Visit snia.org/fms to learn more about the exciting activities at FMS 2023 and join us there! The post Open Standards Featured at FMS 2023 first appeared on SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Blog.

So Just What Is An SSD?

It seems like an easy enough question, “What is an SSD?” but surprisingly, most of the search results for this get somewhat confused quickly on media, controllers, form factors, storage interfaces, performance, reliability, and different market segments.  The SNIA SSD SIG has spent time demystifying various SSD topics like endurance, form factors, and the different classifications of SSDs – from consumer to enterprise and hyperscale SSDs. “Solid state drive is a general term that covers many market segments, and the SNIA SSD SIG has developed a new overview of “What is an SSD? ,” said Jonmichael Hands, SNIA SSD Special Interest Group (SIG)Co-Chair. “We are committed to helping make storage technology topics, like endurance and form factors, much easier to understand coming straight from the industry experts defining the specifications.”   The “What is an SSD?” page offers a concise description of what SSDs do, how they perform, how they connect, and also provides a jumping off point for more in-depth clarification of the many aspects of SSDs. It joins an ever-growing category of 20 one-page “What Is?” answers that provide a clear and concise, vendor-neutral definition of often- asked technology terms, a description of what they are, and how each of these technologies work.  Check out all the “What Is?” entries at https://www.snia.org/education/what-is And don’t miss other interest topics from the SNIA SSD SIG, including  Total Cost of Ownership Model for Storage and SSD videos and presentations in the SNIA Educational Library. Your comments and feedback on this page are welcomed.  Send them to askcmsi@snia.org. The post So just what is an SSD? first appeared on SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Blog.

Your Questions Answered on Persistent Memory, CXL, and Memory Tiering

With the persistent memory ecosystem continuing to evolve with new interconnects like CXL™ and applications like memory tiering, our recent Persistent Memory, CXL, and Memory Tiering-Past, Present, and Future webinar was a big success.  If you missed it, watch it on demand HERE! Many questions were answered live during the webinar, but we did not get to all of them.  Our moderator Jim Handy from Objective Analysis, and experts Andy Rudoff and Bhushan Chithur from Intel, David McIntyre from Samsung, and Sudhir Balasubramanian and Arvind Jagannath from VMware have taken the time to answer them in this blog. Happy reading! Q: What features or support is required from a CXL capable endpoint to e.g. an accelerator to support the memory pooling? Any references? Read More

It’s A Wrap – But Networking and Education Continue From Our C+M+S Summit!

Our 2023 SNIA Compute+Memory+Storage Summit was a success! The event featured 50 speakers in 40 sessions over two days. Over 25 SNIA member companies and alliance partners participated in creating content on computational storage, CXL™ memory, storage, security, and UCIe™. All presentations and videos are free to view at www.snia.org/cms-summit. “For 2023, the Summit scope expanded to examine how the latest advances within and across compute, memory and storage technologies should be optimized and configured to meet the requirements of end customer applications and the developers that create them,” said David McIntyre, Co-Chair of the Summit.  “We invited our SNIA Alliance Partners Compute Express Link™ and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™ to contribute to a holistic view of application requirements and the infrastructure resources that are required to support them,” McIntyre continued.  “Their panel on the CXL device ecosystem and usage models and presentation on UCIe innovations at the package level along with three other sessions on CXL added great value to the event.” Read More

50 Speakers Featured at the 2023 SNIA Compute+Memory+Storage Summit

SNIA’s Compute+Memory+Storage Summit is where architectures, solutions, and community come together. Our 2023 Summit – taking place virtually on April 11-12, 2023 – is the best example to date, featuring a stellar lineup of 50 speakers in 40 sessions covering topics including computational storage real-world applications, the future of memory, critical storage security issues, and the latest on SSD form factors, CXL™, and UCIe™. “We’re excited to welcome executives, architects, developers, implementers, and users to our 11th annual Summit,” said David McIntyre, C+M+S Summit Co-Chair, and member of the SNIA Board of Directors.  “We’ve gathered the technology leaders to bring us the latest developments in compute, memory, storage, and security in our free online event.  We hope you will watch live to ask questions of our experts as they present, and check out those sessions you miss on-demand.” Read More

“Year of the Summit” Kicks Off with Live and Virtual Events

For 11 years, SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Initiative (CMSI) has presented a Summit featuring industry leaders speaking on the key topics of the day.  In the early years, it was persistent memory-focused, educating audiences on the benefits and uses of persistent memory.  In 2020 it expanded to a Persistent Memory+Computational Storage Summit, examining that new technology, its architecture, and use cases. Now in 2023, the Summit is expanding again to focus on compute, memory, and storage. Read More

Our Storage Life on the Edge Webcast Series Continues….

The second webcast in our Storage Life on the Edge series is coming up on March 22, 2022 at 10:00 am Pacific time.  This panel, moderated by Bill Martin, SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative Chair, takes a deeper dive to focus on edge use cases in the computational storage space. Our panelists Mayank Saxena from Sansung, Stephen Bates from Eideticom, and Tong Zhang from ScaleFlux will discuss edge to cloud use cases where storage and compute resources need to be deployed in practical topologies that deliver the very best in application performance. They’ll examine high performance edge data needs, database acceleration solutions, meeting retail chain challenges, and more. You won’t want to miss their panel discussion and the chance to ask your questions live. Register here to attend. We’ll look forward to seeing you! The post Our Storage Life on the Edge Webcast Series Continues…. first appeared on SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Blog.

Why Cryptocurrency and Computational Storage?

Our new SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage webcast focuses on a hot topic – storage-based cryptocurrency. Blockchains, cryptocurrency, and the internet of markets are working to transform finance, wealth, safety, digital security, and trust. Storage-based cryptocurrencies had a breakout year in 2021. Proof of Space and Time is a new blockchain consensus that uses storage capacity to secure the blockchain. Decentralized file storage will enable alternatives to hyperscale data centers for hosting files and objects. Understanding the TCO of a storage system and optimizing the utilization of the storage hardware is critical in scaling these systems. Join our speakers, Jonmichael Hands of Chia Network and Eli Tiomkin of NGD Systems, for this discussion on how a new approach of auto-plotting SSDs combined with computational storage can lower the total TCO. Registration is free for this webcast on Tuesday, February 15 at 10:00 am Pacific time. Click on the link to register and see you there! https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/526154 The post Why Cryptocurrency and Computational Storage? first appeared on SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Blog.

What is eBPF, and Why Does it Matter for Computational Storage?

Recently, a question came up in the SNIA Computational Storage Special Interest Group on new developments in a technology called eBPF and how they might relate to computational storage. To learn more, SNIA on Storage sat down with Eli Tiomkin, SNIA CS SIG Chair with NGD Systems; Matias Bjørling of Western Digital; Jim Harris of Intel; Dave Landsman of Western Digital; and Oscar Pinto of Samsung. SNIA On Storage (SOS):  The eBPF.io website defines eBPF, extended Berkeley Packet Filter, as a revolutionary technology that can run sandboxed programs in the Linux kernel without changing kernel source code or loading kernel modules. Why is it important? Dave Landsman (DL): eBPF emerged in Linux as a way to do network filtering, and enables the Linux kernel to be programmed.  Intelligence and features can be added to existing layers, and there is no need to add additional layers of complexity. SNIA On Storage (SOS):  What are the elements of eBPF that would be key to computational storage?  Read More

Q&A on Data Movement and Computational Storage

Recently, the SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative hosted a live webcast “Data Movement and Computational Storage”, moderated by Jim Fister of The Decision Place with Nidish Kamath of KIOXIA, David McIntyre of Samsung, and Eli Tiomkin of NGD Systems as panelists. We had a great discussion on new ways to look at storage, flexible computer systems, and how to put on your security hat. During our conversation, we answered audience questions, and raised a few of our own!  Check out some of the back-and-forth, and tune in to the entire video for customer use cases and thoughts for the future. Read More