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

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.

Updated Client Solid State Performance Test Specification Now Available

SNIA’s Solid State Storage Initiative has just released a revised Client SSS Performance Test Specification (PTS-Client) which adds a new write saturation test and refines existing tests.

The Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (PTS) is a device-level performance test suite for benchmarking and comparing performance among SAS, SATA and PCI Express SSDs

Revision 1.1 of the PTS-Client updates tests for IOPS, throughput and latency to more accurately reflect the workload conditions under which Client SSDs are used.  The PTS-Client v1.1 also adds a Write Saturation test that measures the initial Fresh-Out-of-Box state of SSDs and their performance evolution as data is randomly written to the device.

Eden Kim, Chair of SNIA’s SSS Technical Working Group, describes the primary updates to PTS-Client v1.1 as adjustments to preconditioning ranges and test boundaries.   Taken together, these parameters create a repeatable test stimulus that more accurately reflects the workload characteristics of SSDs used in a single user environment The PTS-Client v1.1 also adds an easily understandable description of each test, which helps the user to understand the purpose of the test, the test flow, and guidance on how to interpret the test results.

Sample test results using the PTS-Client v1.1 have been posted to the SNIA SSSI Understanding PTS Performance webpage.