Storage Developer Conference

In July 2012 the SNIA NVM Programming Model TWG was formed with just 10 participating companies who set out to create specifications to provide guidance for operating system, device driver, and application developers on a consistent programming model for next generation non-volatile memory technologies. To date, membership in the TWG has grown to over 50 companies and the group has published multiple revisions of The NVM Programming Model. Intel and Microsoft have been long time key contributors in the TWG and we are now seeing both Linux and Windows adopt this model in their latest storage stacks. Building the complete ecosystem requires more than just core OS enablement though; Intel has put considerable time and effort into a Linux based library, NVML, that adds value in multiple dimensions for applications wanting to take advantage of persistent byte addressable memory from user space. Now, along with Intel and HPE, Microsoft is moving forward with its efforts to further promote this library by providing

Data retention and preservation is rapidly becoming the most impacting requirement to data storage. Regulatory and corporate guidelines are causing stress on storage requirements. Cloud and Big Data environments are stressed even more by the growth of rarely touched data due to the need to improve margins in storage. There are many choices in the market for data retention, managing the data for decades must be as automated as possible. This presentation will outline the most effective storage for Long term data preservation, emphasizing Total Cost of Ownership, ease of use and management, and lowering the carbon footprint of the storage environment.

Over the past 3 years we’ve been collecting daily SMART stats from the 60,000+ hard drives in our data center. These drives have over one billion hours of operation on them. We have data from over 20 drive models from all major hard drive manufacturers and we’d like to share what we’ve learned. We’ll start with annual failure rates of the different drive models. Then we’ll look at the failure curve over time, does it follow the “bathtub curve” as we expect. We’ll finish by looking a couple of SMART stats to see if they can reliably predict drive failure. Learning Objectives: 1) What is the annual failure rate of commonly used hard drives?; 2) Do hard drives follow a predictable pattern of failure over time?; 3) How reliable are drive SMART stats in predicting drive failure?

It is well-known that cache performance is non-linear in cache size and the benefit of caches varies widely by workload. Irrespective of whether the cache is in a storage system, database or application tier, no two real workload mixes have the same cache behavior! Existing techniques for profiling workloads don’t measure data reuse, nor do they predict changes in performance as cache allocations are varied. Recently, a new, revolutionary set of techniques have been discovered for online cache optimization. Based on work published at top academic venues (FAST '15 and OSDI '14), we will discuss how to 1) perform online selection of cache parameters including cache block size and read-ahead strategies to tune the cache to actual customer workloads, 2) dynamic cache partitioning to improve cache hit ratios without adding hardware and finally, 3) cache sizing and troubleshooting field performance problems in a data-driven manner. With average performance improvements of 40% across large number of real, multi-ten

Anyone managing a mass storage infrastructure for HPC, Big Data, Cloud, research, etc., is painfully aware that the growth, access requirements and retention needs for data are relentless. At the heart of that problem is the need to rationalize the way that data is managed, and create online access to all that data without maintaining it in a continuous, power-consuming state. The solution lies in creating an active archive that enables straight-from-the-desktop access to data stored at any tier for rapid data access via existing file systems that expand over flash, disk and tape library storage technologies. Active archives provide organizations with a persistent view of the data and make it easier to access files whenever needed, regardless of the storage medium being utilized. Learning Objectives: 1) Understand how active archive technologies work and how companies are using them to enable reliable, online and efficient access to archived data; 2) Learn the implications of data longevity and planning cons

One of the major barriers to adoption of persistent memory is preparing applications to make use of it's direct access capabilities. This presentation discusses a new user space file system for persistent memory and how it breaks these barriers. The presentation introduces the key elements to consider for a user space persistent memory file system and discuss the internals of this new file system. The discussion concludes with a presentation of current status and performance of this new persistent memory file system. Learning Objectives: 1) Discussion of current barriers to persistent memory adoption; 2) Introduce how this new file system breaks down the barriers to adoption of persistent memory; 3) Introduce the SW internals of the this file system; 4) Present performance statistics and discussion of why this file system out-performs conventional, kernel based file systems.

This presentation reviews how classic storage architectures create barriers to throughput and scaleability for several of today's hot applications. Case studies and benchmarks are used to illustrate how a very high performance, NVMe networked storage solution allows these applications to break through these barriers. Learning Objectives: 1) Understand how storage can limit scale out application performance; 2) Understand how new scale out apps apply different tiers of storage; 3) Understand barriers to application scale out; 4) Understand barriers to application throughput; 5) Understand how networked NVMe storage can dramatically improve app performance and scalability.

With many SMB3 servers in the industry, some with optional extensions, getting optimal configuration, and POSIX compliance can be confusing. The Linux kernel client continues to improve with new performance and security features, and implementation of SMB3.1.1. This presentation will discuss recent enhancements to the Linux kernel client, as well as extensions to provide improved Apple (AAPL) interoperability and new POSIX extensions for Linux/Samba (see Jeremy Allison's presentation) and improved POSIX emulation to other servers. New copy offload features will be demonstrated, as well as the current state of POSIX compatibility to different server types. Finally, a discussion of new protocol features under development in the Linux kernel client will be discussed. Learning Objectives: 1) How POSIX compliant is access from Linux to SMB3 servers?; 2) How can I best configure access depending on server type: Windows or Mac or Samba or other NAS?; 3) What is the status of the Linux kernel client? What new feat

Significant advances in throughput and latency for non-volatile media and networking require scalable and efficient software to capitalize on these advancements. This session will present an overview of the Storage Performance Development Kit, an open source software project dedicated to providing building blocks for scalable and efficient storage applications with breakthrough performance. There will be a focus on the motivations behind SPDK's userspace, polled-mode model, as well as details on the SPDK NVMe, CB-DMA, NVMe over Fabrics and iSCSI building blocks. http://spdk.io. Learning Objectives: 1) Why use userspace drivers; 2) When polling is better than interrupts; 3) Applying shared-nothing architecture to storage.

Linux is usually at the edge of implementing new storage standards, and NVMe over Fabrics is no different in this regard. This presentation gives an overview of the Linux NVMe over Fabrics implementation on the host and target sides, highlighting how it influenced the design of the protocol by early prototyping feedback. It also tells how the lessons learned during developing the NVMe over Fabrics, and how they helped reshaping parts of the Linux kernel to support over Fabrics and other storage protocols better

NVM Express is predominately a block based protocol where data is transferred to/from host memory using DMA engines inside the PCIe SSD. However since NVMe 1.2 there exists a memory access method called a Controller Memory Buffer which can be thought of as a PCIe BAR managed by the NVMe driver. Also, the NVMe over Fabrics standard was released this year that extended NVMe over RDMA transports. In this paper we look at the performance of the CMB access methodology over RDMA networks. We discuss the implications of adding persistence semantics to both RDMA and these NVMe CMBs to enable a new type of NVDIMM (which we refer to as an NVRAM). These NVRAMs can reside on the IO sub-system and hence are decoupled from the CPU and memory sub-system which has certain advantages and disadvantages over NVDIMM which we outline in the paper. We conclude with a discussion on how NVMe over Fabrics might evolve to support this access methodology and how the RDMA standard is also developing to align with this work. Learning Ob

SMB3 is the default Windows and MacOS X file sharing protocol, but what about making it the default on Linux ? After developing the UNIX extensions to the SMB1 protocol, the Samba developers are planning to add UNIX extensions to SMB3 also. Co-creator of Samba Jeremy Allison will discuss the technical challenges faced in making SMB3 into a seamless file sharing protocol between Linux clients and Samba servers, and how Samba plans to address them. Come learn how Samba plans to make NFS obsolete (again :-) ! Learning Objectives: 1) SMB3; 2) Linux; 3) Windows interoperability.

A discussion of the Hyper-V Storage Quality of Service protocol (MS-SQOS) and updates to networked storage requirements for Windows Server 2016 virtual machine hosts. This session is targeted at engineers and product managers of providers of networked storage to Hyper-V hosts and anyone else interested in how Hyper-V hosts utilize storage. Those attending this session should be able to gain familiarity with customer scenarios around storage quality of service, should be able to describe the purpose and scope of the MS-SQOS protocol, and should understand how Windows Server 2016 made changes to how it uses networked storage. Learning Objectives: 1) Describe the purpose and scope of the MS-SQOS protocol; 2) Become aware of customer scenarios around storage quality of service; 3) Enumerate updates in how Hyper-V hosts use networked storage in Windows Server 2016.

Traditional disk based storage arrays commonly use various forms of RAID for failure protection and/or performance improvement. Modern distributed storage systems are built as shared nothing architectures using commodity hardware components and have different failure characteristics. RAID has changed very little ever since its introduction three decades ago. There are several new and powerful constructions of erasure codes in the recent past (post- 2007) that were handcrafted to meet the needs of modern storage architectures. Several notable ones are fountain codes, locally repairable codes (LRC) and regenerating codes. However, these codes have made very little impact in the industry, because of the highly resistant nature of the storage vendors to investigate this space. The subject of erasure codes is core to storage technologies, but is sadly ignored by most storage conventions. One of the reasons could be the complexity involved in understanding the space. This talk will provide a non-mathematical, no

Storage virtualization is gaining popularity as an efficient way to increase the flexibility and the consolidation of data centers. Virtualization is commonly used to provide fast and reliable storage access and therefore constitute an important factor to fulfill customer’s demand for a minimum latency in cloud storage applications. This work introduces a new approach for implementing the iSCSI extensions for RDMA protocol (iSER) using block virtualization techniques. The iSER protocol is implemented in the user-space using the common Libiscsi library and serve as the transportation layer protocol instead of the common TCP protocol. A unique implementation of a virtual block device using Quick Emulator (QEMU) is proposed to carry out block virtualization delivered over iSCSI. The benefit of using iSCSI/iSER protocol over the common iSCSI/TCP is clearly demonstrated. Experiments results demonstrate average improvement factor of about 200% over the common iSCSI/TCP in term of average I/O operations per second

NVMe SSDs are becoming increasingly popular choice in scale out storage for latency sensitive workloads like databases, real time analytics, video streaming. NVMe SSDs provide significant performance throughput and lower latency compared to SATA, SAS SSDs. It is not unrealistic to expect these devices providing close to million random IOs per second. However scale out software stacks have significant amount of software overhead limiting the immense potential of NVMe SSDs. In this session, we present all flash scale out cluster performance, analysis on data path I/O overhead and programming techniques to systemically address software performance barriers. Learning Objectives: 1) Scale out storage software data path flows; 2) Performance profiling with NVMe SSDs; 3) User mode v/s kernel mode NVMe SSD integration; 4) Optimization techniques.

A new class of ultra low latency remote storage is emerging - nonvolatile memory technology can be accessed remotely via high performance storage protocols such as SMB3, over high performance interconnects such as RDMA. A new ecosystem is emerging to "light up" this access end-to-end. This presentation will explore one path to achieve it, with performance data on current approaches, analysis of the overheads, and finally the expectation with simple extensions to well-established protocols.

With a design started in 2006, OpenIO is a new flavor among the dynamic object storage market segment. Beyond Ceph and OpenStack Swift, OpenIO is the last coming player on that space. The product relies on an open source core object storage software with several object APIs, file sharing protocols and applications extensions. The inventors of the solution took a radical new approach to address large scale environment challenges. Among them, the product avoids any rebalance like consistent hashing based systems always trigger. The impact is immediate as new machines contribute immediately without any extra tasks that impact the platform service. OpenIO also introduces the Conscience, an intelligent data placement service, that optimizes the location of the data based on various criteria such nodes workload, storage space. OpenIO is fully hardware agnostic, running on commodity x86 servers promoting a total independence.

Standardization efforts have continued for features to improve SSD performance and endurance. NVMe, SCSI, and SATA have completed standardization of streams and background operation control. Standardization is beginning on how SSDs may implement Key Value Storage (KVS) and In Storage Compute (ISC). This effort is progressing in the SNIA Object Drive Technical Work Group (TWG), and may involve future work in the protocol standards (NVMe, SCSI, and SATA). Currently the Object Drive TWG is defining IP based management for object drives in utilizing the DMTF RedFish objects. Future Object Drive TWG work will include APIs for KVS and ISC. This presentation will discuss the standardization of streams, background operation control, KVS, and ISC and how each of these features work. Learning Objectives: 1) What is streams; 2) What is background operation control; 3) Progress of standardization in NVMe, SCSI, SATA, and SNIA.

A tutorial on using the open source persistent memory (PMEM) programming library offered at pmem.io; including examples providing power-fail safety, while storing data on PMEM. Programming examples will zero in on pmem.io’s transactional object store (i.e. “libpmemobj”) library, which is layered on the SNIA NVM Programming Model. The examples covered will demonstrate proper integration techniques, macros, C API, key theory concepts, terminology, and present in depth overview of what the library offers for PMEM programming initiatives. Learning Objectives: 1) Overview of persistent memory programming; 2) Close examination of the transactional object store library (libpmemobj); 3) Code integration walkthrough.