Category: Case Studies

Podcasts Bring the Sounds of SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference to Your Car, Boat, Train, or Plane!

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SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference (SDC) offers exactly what a developer of cloud, solid state, security, analytics, or big data applications is looking  for – rich technical content delivered in a no-vendor bias manner by today’s leading technologists.  The 2016 SDC agenda is being compiled, but now yousdc podcast pic can get a “sound bite” of what to expect by downloading  SDC podcasts via iTunes, or visiting the SDC Podcast site at http://www.snia.org/podcasts to download the accompanying slides and/or listen to the MP3 version.

Each podcast has been selected by the SNIA Technical Council from the 2015 SDC event, and include topics like:

  • Preparing Applications for Persistent Memory from Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • Managing the Next Generation Memory Subsystem from Intel Corporation
  • NVDIMM Cookbook – a Soup to Nuts Primer on Using NVDIMMs to Improve Your Storage Performance from AgigA Tech and Smart Modular Systems
  • Standardizing Storage Intelligence and the Performance and Endurance Enhancements It Provides from Samsung Corporation
  • Object Drives, a New Architectural Partitioning from Toshiba Corporation
  • Shingled Magnetic Recording- the Next Generation of Storage Technology from HGST, a Western Digital Company
  • SMB 3.1.1 Update from Microsoft

Eight podcasts are now available, with new ones added each week all the way up to SDC 2016 which begins September 19 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.  Keep checking the SDC Podcast website, and remember that registration is now open for the 2016 event at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer/registration.  The SDC conference agenda will be up soon at the home page of http://www.storagedeveloper.org.

Enjoy these great technical sessions, no matter where you may be!

SNIA NVM Summit Delivers the Persistent Memory Knowledge You Need

Marty Foltyn

by Marty Foltyn

The discussion, use, and application of Non-volatile Memory (NVM) has come a long way from the first SNIA NVM Summit in 2013.  The significant improvements in persistent memory, with enormous capacity, memory-like speed and non-volatility, will make the long-awaited promise of the convergence storage and memory a reality. In this 4th annual NVM Summit, we will see how Storage and Memory have now converged, and learn that we are now faced with developing the needed ecosystem.  Register and join colleagues on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 in San Jose, CA to learn more, or follow http://www.snia.org/nvmsummit to review presentations post- event.

The Summit day begins with Rick Coulson, Senior Fellow, Intel, discussing the most recent developments in persistent memory with a presentation on All the Ways 3D XPoint Impacts Systems Architecture.

Ethan Miller, Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, will discuss Rethinking Benchmarks for Non-Volatile Memory Storage Systems. He will describe the challenges for benchmarks posed by the transition to NVM, and propose potential solutions to these challenges.

Ken Gibson, NVM SW Architecture, Intel will present Memory is the New Storage: How Next Generation NVM DIMMs will Enable New Solutions That Use Memory as the High-Performance Storage Tier . This talk reviews some of the decades-old assumptions that change for suppliers of storage and data services as solutions move to memory as the new storage

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis, and Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates will discuss Future Memories and Today’s Opportunities, exploring the role of NVM in today’s and future applications. They will give some market analysis and projections for the various NVM technologies in use today.

Matt Bryson, SVP-Research, ABR, will lead a panel on NVM Futures-Emerging Embedded Memory Technologies, exploring the current status and future opportunities for NVM technologies and in particular both embedded and standalone MRAM technologies and associated applications.

Edward Sharp, Chief, Strategy and Technology, PMC-Sierra, will present Changes Coming to Architecture with NVM. Although the IT industry has made tremendous progress innovating up and down the computing stack to enable, and take advantage of, non-volatile memory, is it sufficient, and where are the weakest links to fully unlock the potential of NVM.

Don Jeanette, VP and John Chen, VP of Trendfocus will review the Solid State Storage Market, discuss what is happening in various segments, and why, as it relates to PCIe.

Dejan Vucinc, HGST San Jose Research Center will discuss Latency in Context: Finding Room for NVMs in the Existing Software Ecosystem. HGST Research has been working diligently to find out where is there room in the existing hardware/software ecosystem for emerging NVM technology when viewed as block storage rather than main memory. Vucinc will show an update on previously published results using prototype PCI Express-attached PCM SSDs and our custom device protocol, DC Express, as well as measurements of its latency and performance through a proper device driver using several different kinds of Linux kernel block layer architecture.

Arthur Sainio, Director Marketing, SMART Modular and Co-Chair, SNIA NVDIMM SIG, will lead a panel on NVDIMM. discussing how new media types are joining NAND Flash, and enhanced controllers and networking are being developed to unlock the latency and throughput advantages of NVDIMM.

Neal Christiansen, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft, Microsoft will discuss Storage Class Memory Support in the Windows OS. Storage Class Memories (SCM) have been the topic of R&D for the last few years and with the promise of near term product delivery, the question is how will Windows be enabled for such SCM products and how can applications take advantage of these capabilities.

Jeff Moyer, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat will give an overview of the current state of Persistent Memory Support in the Linux Kernel.

Cristian Diaconu, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft will present Microsoft SQL Hekaton – Towards Large Scale Use of PM for In-memory Databases, using the example of Hekaton (Sql Server in-memory database engine) to break down the opportunity areas for non-volatile memory in the database space.

Tom Talpey, Architect File Server Team, Microsoft, will discuss Microsoft Going Remote at Low Latency: A Future Networked NVM Ecosystem. As new ultra-low latency storage such as Persistent Memory and NVM is deployed, it becomes necessary to provide remote access – for replication, availability and resiliency to errors.

Kevin Deierling, VP Marketing, Mellanox will discuss the role of the network in developing Persistent Memory over Fabrics, and what are the key goals and key fabric features requirements.

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

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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!SDC15_WebHeader3_999x188

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!

SNIA’s Solid State Storage Initiative Advances the Industry at Flash Memory Summit

Marty Foltyn

A classic case of SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) member collaboration for industry advancement was on display in the SSSI booth for NVDIMM-N demonstration at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2015. Under the direction of SSSI Chair Jim Ryan and coordinated by NVDIMM SIG co chairs Arthur Sainio and Jeff Chang and TechDev Committee chair Eden Kim, the SSSI was able to update and include NVDIMM-N storage performance in the SSSI marketing collaterals on the Summary Performance Comparison by Storage Class charts.

2015SummaryPerformanceChart.NVDIMM.1200

Five SSSI member companies – AgigA Tech, Calypso, Micron, SMART Modular, and Viking Technology – collaborated over a four week period on the introduction of a new NVDIMM-N storage performance demonstration. While it is rare to have potential competitors collaborate in such a fashion, NVDIMM-N storage represents a new paradigm for super fast, low latency, high IO/watt storage solutions. The NVDIMM-SIG has taken a leadership position by evangelizing the technology and developing the industry infrastructure necessary for large scale deployment.

This collaboration highlighted a classic blend of technical, marketing and industry association cooperation.

In the weeks leading up to FMS, the NVDIMM-SIG planned for an in-booth demonstration of the NVDIMM-N storage modules. To pave the way for universal adoption, the team worked together to dial in the Intel Open Source block IO development driver to meet the standards of the SNIA Performance Test Specification (PTS). An added goal was inclusion of NVDIMM-N modules as a new line item on the Summary Performance Comparison by Storage Class chart which lists PTS performance for various storage technologies. Under the guidance of NVDIMM-SIG, a rush project was instigated to get NVDIMM-N performance data tested to the PTS for the trade show.

Micron took the lead by lending a Supermicro server with Micron NVDIMM-N to Calypso for testing. Calypso then installed CTS test software on the server to allow full testing to the PTS. Viking and SMART Modular contributed by helping dial in the drivers, as well as sending modules from Viking and SMART Modular to cross reference with the Micron modules. The test plan was comprised of several test iterations using single, dual and finally quad modules using each of the vendor contributed modules.

The early single and dual module tests ran into repeatability and stability issues. NVDIMM-SIG consulted with Intel on the nuance of the Intel block IO driver while Calypso continued testing. The team successfully completed a test run that met the PTS steady state requirements on the quad module in time to release data for the show.

We had a solid demonstration at the SNIA SSSI Flash Memory Summit Booth on NVDIMM-N Performance complete with marketing collateral available for review and a handout. NVDIMM-SIG members responded to the many questions and interest in the NVDIMM-N storage technology.

fms booth

“Once again,” said SSSI Chair Jim Ryan, “we can see the value and benefit of SNIA SSSI to its members, the SNIA educational community and the NVDIMM industry. I believe this is a great case study in how we all can contribute and benefit from working within the SSSI for the betterment of individual companies, market development and the Solid State Storage industry at large.” SSSI provides educational and marketing materials free of charge on its public website while SNIA SSSI members may join the NVDIMM-SIG and other SSSI committees. Anyone interested to find out more about the SSSI or any of its many committees can go to the following link http://www.snia.org/sssi.

 

New SNIA SSSI Webcast May 28 on Persistent Memory Advances

Marty Foltyn

Join the NVDIMM Special Interest Group for an informative SNIA Brighttalk webcast on Persistent Memory Advances:  Solutions with Endurance, Performance & Non-Volatility on Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 12:00 noon Eastern/9:00 am Pacific.  Register at http://www.snia.org/news_events/multimedia#webcasts

Mario Martinez of Netlist, a SNIA SSSI NVDIMM SIG member, will discuss how persistent memory solutions deliver the endurance and performance of DRAM coupled with the non-volatility of Flash. This webinar will also update you on the latest solutions for enterprise server and storage designs, and provide insights into future persistent memory advances. A specific focus will be NVDIMM solutions, with examples from the member companies of the SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group.

Solid State Summit Webinar Presentations Now Available for Viewing

Marty Foltyn

The April 21/22, 2015 Solid State Storage Summit, presented by SNIA and the Evaluator Group on the SNIA Brighttalk Channel, was a great success.  Attendees raved about the high quality content and knowledgable speakers.

Did you miss it?

No worries!  Now you can listen to  SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative experts and analysts from the Evaluator Group on the latest updates on Solid State Technology.  Click on the title of each presentation to listen to this great technical information.

Day 1 – Solid State Systems – 5 different webcasts from Intel, Load Dynamix, Evaluator Group, EMC, and HP

Day 2 – Solid State Components – 5 different webcasts from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, NetApp, Micron, Toshiba, and SMART Modular