SSDs that support Zoned Namespace (ZNS) are increasingly popular for large-scale storage deployments due to their cost efficiency and performance improvements over conventional SSDs, which include 3-4x throughput increase, prolonged SSD lifetime, as well as making QLC media available to I/O heavy workloads. As the zoned storage hardware ecosystem has matured, its open-source software ecosystem has also grown. As a result, we are now emerging at a new stage that provides a solid foundation for...

The IEEE Security In Storage Work Group (SISWG) produces standards that many storage developers, storage vendors, and storage system operators care about, including: a) A family of standards on sanitization: the IEEE 2883 family b) A family of standards on encryption methods for storage components: the IEEE 1619 family c) A standard on Discovery, Authentication, and Authentication in Host Attachments of Storage Devices: the IEEE 1667 specification IEEE has a different work group (IEEE P3172)...

The introduction of CXL has significantly advanced the enablement of memory disaggregation. Along with disaggregation has risen the need for reliable and effective ways to transparently tier data in real time between local direct attached CPU memory and CXL pooled memory. While the CXL hardware level elements have advanced in definition, the OS level support, drivers and application APIs that facilitate mass adoption are still very much under development and still in discovery phase. Even...

It’s been a year since the announcement that Intel would “Wind Down” its Optane 3D XPoint memories. Has anything risen to take its place? Should it? This presentation reviews the alternatives to Optane that are now available or are in development, and evaluates the likelihood that one or more of these could fill the void that is being left behind. We will also briefly review the legacy Optane left behind to see how that legacy is likely to be used to support persistent memories in more...

One of the goals of HPE’s Spaceborne Computer program is proving the value of edge computing. Spaceborne Computer-1 (SBC-1) was launched in August of 2017 with the latest available COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) hardware, including twenty solid state disks (SSDs) for storage. The disappointing durability of those SSDs will be covered; the Failure Analysis (FA) of them upon Return To Earth (RTE) will be presented and the mitigation done in Spaceborne Computer-2 will be detailed. HPE’s...

Azure Disks provide block storage for Azure Virtual Machines and are a core pillar of the Azure IaaS platform. In this talk, we will provide an overview of Direct Drive - Azure's next-generation block storage architecture. Direct Drive forms the foundation for a new family of Azure disk offerings, starting with Ultra Disk (Azure's highest performance disks). We will describe the challenges of providing durable, highly-available, high-performance disks at cloud scale as well as the software...

For the past three decades, PCI-SIG® has delivered a succession of industry-leading PCI Express® (PCIe®) specifications that remain ahead of the increasing demand for a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect for compute-intensive systems in diverse market segments, including data centers, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), high-performance computing (HPC) and storage applications. In early 2022, PCI-SIG released the PCIe 6.0 specification to members, doubling the data...

Los Alamos is working to revolutionize how scientific data management is done, moving from large Petabyte sized files generated periodically by extreme scale simulations to a record and column based approach. Along the journey, the NVMe Computational Storage efforts became a strategic way to help accomplish this revolution. Los Alamos has been working on a series of proof of concepts with a set of data storage industry partners and these partnerships have proven to be the key to success. This...

Computational Storage is a new field that is addressing performance and scaling issues for compute with traditional server architectures. This is an active area of innovation in the industry where multiple device and solution providers are collaborating in defining this architecture while actively working to create new and exciting solutions. The SNIA Computational Storage TWG is leading the way with new interface definitions with Computational Storage APIs that work across different hardware...

Synthetic DNA-based data storage is a major attraction due to the possibility of storage over long periods. This technology is a solution for the current data centers, reducing energy consumption and physical storage space. Nowadays, the quantity of data generated has been growing exponentially, while the storage capacity does not keep up with the growth, caused by new technologies and globalization.

Data persistence on CXL is an essential enabler toward the goal of instant-on processing. DRAM class performance combined with non-volatility on CXL enables a new class of computing architectures that can exploit these features and solve real-world bottlenecks for system performance, data reliability, and recovery from power failures. New authentication methods also enhance the security of server data in a world of cyberattacks.

Large-scale data analytics, machine learning, and big data applications often require the storage of a massive amount of data. For cost-effective high bandwidth, many data centers have used tiered storage with warmer tiers made of flashes or persistent memory modules and cooler tiers provisioned with high-density rotational drives. While ultra fast data insertion and retrieval rates have been increasingly demonstrated by research communities and industry at warm storage, complex queries with...

Azure Block Storage, also referred to as Azure Disks, is the persistent block storage for Azure Virtual Machines and a core pillar for Azure IaaS infrastructure. Azure offer unique block storage capabilities that differentiate it from other Cloud Block Storage offerings. In this talk, we will use a few of these capabilities as examples to reveal the technical designs behind and how they are tied to our XStore storage architecture. Starting with fast restore from snapshot, we will share the...

If you haven’t caught the new wave in storage management, it’s time to dive in. This presentation provides a broad look at the Redfish and Swordfish ReSTful hierarchies, maps these to some common applications, and provides an overview of the Swordfish tools and documentation ecosystem developed by SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) and the Redfish Forum. It will also provide an overview of what’s new in ’22, including enhancements to NVMe support, storage fabric...

With Amazon S3 celebrating its sixteenth birthday this year, it's easy to forget just how revolutionary it was at its release. S3's buckets and objects were profoundly different from the directories and files that developers had been manipulating through filesystem APIs. What drove this innovation, and how does cloud object storage actually work? In this session, Pat Patterson, Chief Developer Evangelist at Backblaze, will trace the evolution of cloud object storage, explain the trade-offs in...

Data bytes stored continues to grow at about 40% annually. This trend now exceeds the device capacity growth rate of all existing commercial scale media types including HDD, Flash, Tape and Optical, and the gap between growth rates is about 20%. That implies that the datacenter footprint for storage will be approximately doubling every 3.5 years just to keep up. However, the roadmaps for ongoing density improvement makes the situation much more stark. Past 2030, growth in device capacities...

SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. In this iteration of the talk, we’ll update the audience on SMB protocol changes as well as improvements to the Windows implementation of the SMB server and client. Added to the SMB protocol is a new server-to-client notification mechanism, which enables a variety of novel use cases. We’ll present the details of protocol messaging (new message types, etc) as well as the one scenario...

DNA data storage will dramatically effect the way organizations think about data retention, data protection, and archival by providing capacity density and longevity several orders of magnitude beyond anything available today, while reducing requirements for both power, cooling, and fixity checks. One of challenges of any long term archival storage is being able to recover the data after possibly decades or longer. To do this, the reader must be able to bootstrap the archive, akin to how an...

The industry needs a new storage medium that is more dense, durable, sustainable, and cost effective to cope with the expected future growth of archival data. DNA, nature’s data storage medium, enters this picture at a time when synthesis and sequencing technologies for advanced medical and scientific applications are enabling the manipulation of synthetic DNA in ways previously unimagined. This session will provide and overview of why DNA data storage is compelling and what the DNA Data...

NVMe and SNIA are both working on standards related to Computational Storage. The question that is continually asked is are these efforts are compatible or at odds with each other. The truth is that many of the same people are working on both of these standards efforts and are very interested in ensuring that they work together as opposed to conflicting with each other. This presentation will discuss how the two standards efforts go hand in hand, the aspects of the SNIA API that support the...

With the ongoing work in the SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work Group, the chairs will present the latest updates from the membership of the working group. In addition, the latest release will be reviewed at a high level to provide attendees a view into next steps and implementation of the specification in progress. Use cases, Security considerations, and other key topics with also be addressed.

Software memory copies have been the gold standard for applications performing memory data movement or operations in system memory. With new accelerators and memory types enriching the system architecture, accelerator-assisted memory data movement and transformation needs much-needed standardization. SNIA's SDXI (Smart Data Accelerator Interface) TWG is at the forefront of standardizing this and has been working towards a v1.0 since its formation in June 2020. In this talk, SNIA SDXI TWG...