Category: NVMe

Innovating File System Architectures with NVMe

Marty Foltyn

It’s exciting to see the recent formation of the Solid State Drive Special Interest Group (SIG) here in the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative.  After all, everyone appreciates the ability to totally geek out about the latest drive technology and software for file systems.  Right? Hey, where’s everyone going? We have vacation pictures with the dog we stored that we want to show…

Solid state storage has long found its place with those seeking greater performance in systems, especially where smaller or more random block/file transfers are prevalent.  Single-system opportunity with NVMe drives is broad, and pretty much unquestioned by those building systems for the modern IT environments. Cloud, likewise, has found use of the technology where single-node performance makes a broader deployment relevant. Read More

Scale-Out File Systems FAQ

John Kim
On February 28th, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) took at look at what’s happening in Scale-Out File Systems. We discussed general principles, design considerations, challenges, benchmarks and more. If you missed the live webcast, it’s now available on-demand. We did not have time to answer all the questions we received at the live event, so here are answers to them all. Q. Can scale-out file systems do Erasure coding? A. Indeed, Erasure coding is a common method to improve resilience. Q. How does one address the problem of a specific disk going down? Where does scale-out architecture provide redundancy? A. Disk failures typically are covered by RAID software. Some of scale-out software also use multiple replicators to mitigate the impact of disk failures. Read More

When NVMe™ over Fabrics Meets TCP

Tom Reu
In the storage world, NVMe™ is arguably the hottest thing going right now. Go to any storage conference – either vendor-related or vendor-neutral, and you’ll see NVMe as the latest and greatest innovation. It stands to reason, then, that when you want to run NVMe over a network, you must understand NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). Meanwhile, TCP is by far the most popular networking transport protocol both for storage and non-storage traffic. TCP – the long-standing mainstay of networking – is the newest transport technology to be approved by the NVM Express® organization, enabling NVMe/TCP. This can mean really good things for storage and storage networking – but what are the tradeoffs? Read More

Introducing the Networking Storage Forum

John Kim

At SNIA, we are dedicated to staying on top of storage trends and technologies to fulfill our mission as a globally recognized and trusted authority for storage leadership, standards, and technology expertise. For the last several years, the Ethernet Storage Forum has been working hard to provide high quality educational and informational material related to all kinds of storage.

From our “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” series, to the absolutely phenomenal (and required viewing) “Storage Performance Benchmarking” series to the “Great Storage Debates” series, we’ve produced dozens of hours of material.

Technologies have evolved and we’ve come to a point where there’s a need to understand how these systems and architectures work – beyond just the type of wire that is used. Today, there are new systems that are bringing storage to completely new audiences. From scale-up to scale-out, from disaggregated to hyperconverged, RDMA, and NVMe-oF – there is more to storage networking than just your favorite transport. Read More

Dive into NVMe at Storage Developer Conference – a Chat with SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair Bill Martin

khauser Leave a comment

The SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is coming up September 24-27, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara CA.  The agenda is now live!

SNIA on Storage is teaming up with the SNIA Technical Council to dive into major themes of the 2018 conference.  The SNIA Technical Council takes a leadership role to develop the content for each SDC, so SNIA on Storage spoke with Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and SSD I/O Standards at Samsung Electronics, to understand why SDC is bringing NVMe and NVMe-oF to conference attendees.

SNIA On Storage (SOS): What is NVMe and why is SNIA emphasizing it as one of their key areas of focus for SDC?

Bill Martin (BM):  NVMeTM, also known as NVM ExpressR, is an open collection of standards and information to fully expose the benefits of non-volatile memory (NVM) in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center.

SNIA is very supportive of NVMe.  In fact, earlier this year, SNIA, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and the NVM Express organizations formed a new alliance to coordinate standards for managing solid state drive (SSD) storage devices. This alliance brings together multiple standards for managing the issue of scale-out management of SSDs.  It’s designed to enable an all-inclusive management experience by improving the interoperable management of information technologies.

With interest both from within and outside of SNIA from architects, developers, and implementers on how these standards work, the SNIA Technical Council decided to bring even more sessions on this important area to the SDC audience this year. We are proud to include 16 sessions on NVMe topics over the four days of the conference.

SOS:  What will I learn about NVMe at SDC? Read More

Storage Controllers – Your Questions Answered

J Metz
The term controller is used constantly, but often has very different meanings. When you have a controller that manages hardware, there are very different requirements than a controller that manages an entire system-wide control plane. You can even have controllers managing other controllers. It can all get pretty confusing very quickly. That’s why the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) hosted our 9th “Too Proud to Ask” webcast. This time it was “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage but were Too Proud to Ask: Part Aqua – Storage Controllers.” Our experts from Microsemi, Cavium, Mellanox and Cisco did a great job explaining the differences between the many types of controllers, but of course there were still questions. Here are answers to all that we received during the live event which you can now view on-demand.  Read More

The Alphabet Soup of Storage Networking Acronyms Explained

Chad Hintz
At our most recent webcast, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Part Turquoise – Where Does My Data Go?, our panel of experts dove into what really happens when you hit “save” and send your data off. It was an alphabet soup of acronyms as they explained the nuances of and the differences between:
  • Volatile v Non-Volatile v Persistent Memory
  • NVDIMM v RAM v DRAM v SLC v MLC v TLC v NAND v 3D NAND v Flash v SSDs v NVMe
  • NVMe (the protocol)
As promised during the live event, here are answers to all the questions we received. Q. Is SRAM still used today? A. SRAM is still in use today as embedded CACHE (Level 1/2/3) within a CPU and very limited in external standalone packaging… This is due to cost and size/capacity. Read More

Q&A – When Compute, Networking and Storage Intersect

J Metz
In Part Vermillion of our SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcast series – we examined the terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. That’s why we called it “What if Programming and Networking Had a Storage Baby” If you missed the live webcast, you can watch it on-demand. The discussion from our panel of experts generated a lot of good questions. As promised, here are answers to them all.  Read More

The Too Proud to Ask Train Makes Another Stop: Where Does My Data Go?

Chad Hintz
By now, we at the SNIA Storage Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) hope you are familiar with (perhaps even a loyal fan of) the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series. On August 1st, the “Too Proud to Ask” train will make another stop. In this seventh session, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Turquoise – Where Does My Data Go?, we will take a look into the mysticism and magic of what happens when you send your data off into the wilderness. Once you click “save,” for example, where does it actually go? Read More

Attend Live – or Live Stream – SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit January 18

khauser Leave a comment

by Marty Foltyn

SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit makes its fifth annual appearance in Silicon Valley next Wednesday, January 18, and if you are in the vicinity of the Westin San Jose, you owe it to yourself to check it out. PMSummitLogo (2)

SNIA is well known for its technology-focused, no vendor-hype conferences, and this one-day event will feature 12 presentations and two panels that will “level set” the discussion, review persistent memory usage, describe applications incorporating PM available today, discuss the infrastructure and implementation, and provide a vision of the “next generation” of persistent memory.

You’ll meet speakers from SNIA member companies Intel, Micron, Microsemi, VMware, Red Hat, Microsoft, AgigA Tech, Western Digital, and Spin Transfer.  Live demonstrations of persistent memory solutions will be featured from Summit underwriters Intel and the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, and Summit sponsors Microsemi, VMware, AgigA Tech, SMART Modular, and Spin Transfer.

Registration is complimentary but limited  -visit http://www.snia.org/pm-summit for the complete agenda and how to sign up.  And, if your travels don’t permit you to attend in person, the Persistent Memory Summit will be live-streamed on the SNIAvideo channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/SNIAVideo.