Category: Solid State Storage

NVMe Key-Value Standard Q&A

John Kim
Last month, Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair, presented a detailed update on what’s happening in the development and deployment of the NVMe Key-Value standard. Bill explained where Key Value fits within an architecture, why it’s important, and the standards work that is being done between NVM Express and SNIA. The webcast was one of our highest rated. If you missed it, it’s available on-demand along with the webcast slides. Attendees at the live event had many great questions, which Bill Martin has answered here: Q. Two of the most common KV storage mechanisms in use today are AWS S3 and RocksDB. How does NVMe KV standards align or differ from them? How difficult would it be to map between the APIs and semantics of those other technologies to NVMe KV devices? A. KV Storage is intended as a storage layer that would support these and other object storage mechanisms. There is a publicly available KVRocks: RocksDB compatible key value store and MyRocks compatible storage engine designed for KV SSDs at GitHub. There is also a Ceph Object storage design available. These are example implementations that can help an implementer get to an efficient use of NVMe KV storage. Q. At which layer will my app stack need to change to take advantage of KV storage?  Will VMware or Linux or Windows need to change at the driver level?  Or do the apps need to be changed to treat data differently?  If the apps don’t need to change doesn’t this then just take the data layout tables and move them up the stack in to the server? Read More

Answering Your Questions on EDSFF

Jonmichael Hands
We had a tremendous response to our webcast asking if we were truly at the end of the 2.5-inch disk era. SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative SSD Special Interest Group brought together experts from Dell, Facebook, HPE, JEDEC, KIOXIA, Lenovo, and Microsoft in a lively follow on to the Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) May 2020 discussions at OCP Summit,. If you missed our live webcast – watch it on demand. Webcast attendees raised a variety of questions.  Our experts provide answers to them here: Q:  SFF_TA_1006 suggests E1.S can support max 25W for 25mm asymmetric heat-sink. What are the air-flow assumptions for this estimate? Are there any thermal models and test guidelines available for EDSFF form-factors? Read More

An FAQ on RAID on the CPU

Paul Talbut Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, SNIA EMEA hosted a webcast to introduce the concept of RAID on CPU. The invited experts, Fausto Vaninetti from Cisco, and Igor Konopko from Intel, provided fascinating insights into this exciting new technology.

The webcast created a huge amount of interest and generated a host of follow-up questions which our experts have addressed below. If you missed the live event “RAID on CPU: RAID for NVMe SSDs without a RAID Controller Card” you can watch it on-demand.

Q. Why not RAID 6?

A. RAID on CPU is a new technology. Current support is for the most-used RAID levels for now, considering this is for servers not disk arrays. RAID 5 is primary parity RAID level for NVMe with 1 drive failure due to lower AFRs and faster rebuilds.

Q. Is the XOR for RAID 5 done in Software?

A.Yes, it is done in software on some cores of the Xeon CPU.

Q. Which generation of Intel CPUs support VROC?

Read More

See You (Online) at SDC!

Marty Foltyn
We’re going virtual in 2020, and Compute, Memory, and Storage are important topics at the upcoming SNIA Storage Developer Conference.  SNIA CMSI is a sponsor of SDC 2020 – so visit our booth for the latest information and a chance to chat with our experts.  With over 120 sessions available to watch live during the event and later on-demand, live Birds of a Feather chats, and a Persistent Memory Bootcamp accessing new PM systems in the cloud, we want to make sure you don’t miss anything!  Register here to see sessions live – or on demand to your schedule.  Agenda highlights include: Computational Storage Talks Deploying Computational Storage at the Edge – discussing the deployment of small form factor, asic-based, solutions, including a use case. Next Generation Datacenters require composable architecture enablers and deterministic programmable intelligence – explaining why determinism, parallel programming and ease of programming are important. Computational Storage Birds of a Feather LIVE Session – ask your questions of our experts and see live demos of computational storage production systems. Tuesday September 22, 2020 – 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm PDT (UTC-7) Persistent Memory Presentations Read More

Are We at the End of the 2.5-inch Disk Era?

Jonmichael Hands
The SNIA Solid State Storage Special Interest Group (SIG) recently updated the Solid State Drive Form Factor page to provide detailed information on dimensions; mechanical, electrical, and connector specifications; and protocols. On our August 4, 2020 SNIA webcast, we will take a detailed look at one of these form factors – Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) – challenging an expert panel to consider if we are at the end of the 2.5-in disk era. Enterprise and Data Center Form Factor (EFSFF) is designed natively for data center NVMe SSDs to improve thermal, power, performance, and capacity scaling. EDSFF has different variants for flexible and scalable performance, dense storage configurations, general purpose servers, and improved data center TCO.  At the 2020 Open Compute Virtual Summit, OEMs, cloud service providers, hyperscale data center, and SSD vendors showcased products and their vision for how this new family of SSD form factors solves real data challenges. Read More

Your Questions Answered on CMSI and More

Marty Foltyn

The “new” SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative (CMSI) was formed at the beginning of 2020 out of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative.  The 45 companies who comprise the CMSI recognized the opportunity to combine storage, memory, and compute in new, novel, and useful ways; and to bring together technology, alliances, education, and outreach to better understand new opportunities and applications. 

To better explain this decision, and to talk about the various aspects of the Initiative, CMSI co-chair Alex McDonald invited CMSI members Eli Tiomkin, Jonmichael Hands, and Jim Fister to join him in a live SNIA webcast. 

Read More

25 Questions (and Answers) on Ethernet-attached SSDs

Ted Vojnovich
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by hosting a live webcast, “Ethernet-attached SSDs – Brilliant Idea or Storage Silliness?” Even though we didn’t serve green beer during the event, the response was impressive with hundreds of live attendees who asked many great questions – 25 to be exact. Our expert presenters have answered them all here: Q. Has a prototype drive been built today that includes the Ethernet controller inside the NVMe SSD? Read More

Are Ethernet-attached SSDs Brilliant?

Ted Vojnovich
Several solid state disk (SSD) and networking vendors have demonstrated ways to connect SSDs directly to an Ethernet network. They propose that deploying Ethernet SSDs will be more scalable, easier to manage, higher performance, and/or lower cost than traditional storage networking solutions that use a storage controller (or hyperconverged node) between the SSDs and the network. Who would want to attach SSDs directly to the network? Are these vendors brilliant or simply trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist? What are the different solutions that could benefit from Ethernet SSDs? Which protocols would one use to access them? How will orchestration be used to enable applications to find assigned Ethernet SSDs? How will Ethernet SSDs affect server subsystems such as Ethernet RAID/mirroring and affect solution management such as Ethernet SAN orchestration?  And how do Ethernet SSDs relate to computational storage? Read More

Hyperscalers Take on NVMe™ Cloud Storage Questions

J Metz
Our recent webcast on how Hyperscalers, Facebook and Microsoft are working together to merge their SSD drive requirements generated a lot of interesting questions. If you missed “How Facebook & Microsoft Leverage NVMe Cloud Storage” you can watch it on-demand. As promised at our live event. Here are answers to the questions we received. Q. How does Facebook or Microsoft see Zoned Name Spaces being used? Read More

The Blurred Lines of Memory and Storage – A Q&A

John Kim
The lines are blurring as new memory technologies are challenging the way we build and use storage to meet application demands. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a “Memory Pod” webcast is our series, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage, but were too Proud to Ask.” If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand here along with the presentation slides. We promised Q. Do tools exist to do secure data overwrite for security purposes? A. Most popular tools are cryptographic signing of the data where you can effectively erase the data by throwing away the keys. There are a number of technologies available; for example, the usual ones like BitLocker (part of Windows 10, for example) where the NVDIMM-P is tied to a specific motherboard. There are others where the data is encrypted as it is moved from NVDIMM DRAM to flash for the NVDIMM-N type. Other forms of persistent memory may offer their own solutions. SNIA is working on a security model for persistent memory, and there is a presentation on our work here. Read More