Reviews are in for the 20th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) and they are thumbs up! The 2017 SDC was the largest ever- expanding to four full days with seven keynotes, five SNIA Tutorials, and 92 sessions. The SNIA Technical Council, who oversees conference content, compiled a rich agenda of 18 topic categories 
focused on technology growth markets of physical storage, storage management, data, object storage, and cloud storage. Storage Architecture led the way with 20 individual sessions, followed by 15 Solid State/Non-Volatile Memory, eight SMB, and six NVMe sessions. Storage management, including SMI and SNIA Swordfish® presentations, had an entire track with eight sessions on Thursday.
Attendees called out a number of sessions as their favorites – and the ratings proved it. But don’t be alarmed if you missed out – SNIA has recordings and downloads of the presentations at your fingertips. Check out these top-rated sessions and more:
- Remote Persistent Memory With Nothing But Net by Tom Talpey of Microsoft, discussing RDMA NIC as a Persistent Memory storage adapter and the steps to get there
- Programming the Path by James Cain of Snell Advanced Media, on virtual file systems
- Self-Optimizing Caches by Irfan Ahmad of CachePhysics, on how you can work towards a self-optimizing data path
- SoftFlash by Jae Do of Microsoft Research, on programmable storage in future data centers
Attendees were also treated to NVMe and Persistent Memory demonstrations by SDC sponsors, 
three Plugfests, and a host of networking conversations happening up and down the hallways. The “high caliber speakers and presentation content”, learning about “recent developments in the industry”, and “connecting directly with other developers who are tackling the same problems” were cited by attendees as some of the most beneficial aspects of the conference.
Whether you participated in person or virtually by viewing videos, downloading presentations, or listening to podcasts, let us know what you would like to see for future SDCs. Is it Modern Storage for Modern Data Centers? NVMe and NVMe-oF? Persistent Memory and PM-oF? Artificial intelligence? New directions? We want to know! Watch for our Post Event Survey to be sent out shortly. And thank you for contributing to a great 2017 SDC!