Storage Developer Conference

The SNIA NVM Programming model enables applications to consume emerging persistent memory technologies through step-wise evolution to greater and greater value. Starting with an overview of the latest revision of the NVM programming model specification this session summarizes the recent work of the NVM programming TWG in areas of high availability and atomicity. We take an application view of ongoing technical innovation in a persistent memory ecosystem. Learning Objectives: 1) Learn what the SNIA NVM programming TWG has been working on; 2) Learn how applications can move incrementally towards greater and greater benefit from persistent memory; 3) Learn about the resources available to help developers plan and implement persistent memory aware software.

Building on the concepts presented in the Introduction to Swordfish (and Redfish) sessions, this session will go into more detail on the new Swordfish API specification. Learning Objectives: 1) Introduction to the specifics of the Swordfish, API, 2) Working with the Swordfish Schema.

The SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) is working to create and publish an open industry standard specification for storage management that defines a customer centric interface for the purpose of managing storage and related data services. This specification builds on the DMTF’s Redfish specification’s using RESTful methods and JSON formatting. This session will present an overview of the specification being developed by SSM including the scope targeted in the initial (V1) release in 2016 vs later (2017). This session will also provide the positioning of the specification developed by the SSM TWG vs SMI-S as well as the base Redfish specification.

Hyperscaler companies as well as large enterprises who build their own datacenters have specific requirements for new features in storage drives. The SNIA Technical Council has created a white paper on these requirements and how current and future standards and open source projects can address them. This talk will present the results of the the TC research in this area and discuss how SNIA and other standards bodies are making changes to accommodate them. Learning Objectives: 1) Learn about Datacenter customer drive requirements, 2) Learn about existing and new standards for drive interfaces, 3)Learn about open source projects that address these requirement.

Swift on File enables the swift object store hosted over clustered file system to have file as well as object access for the same data. Such multi protocol access enables various use-cases where data can be ingested via object and processed for analytics over file protocols (SMB/NFS/POSIX). In another manifestation, data can be accessed or shared by the user interchangeable via different protocols enabling user data sync n share across protocols. For some of these use-cases, there is a strong need to have common User Identity management across object and file protocols so that one can leverage the underlying common file system features like quota management per user or group, per user/group placement policies on data or even have common authorisation across file and object . In order to achieve this, the approaches need to ensure that objects created by an user via Swift is associated with the user's user ID (UID) and group ID (GID) which is same when the object is accessed by that user via file protocols li

The implementation of advanced SMB3 features is a broad and important set of topics on the Samba roadmap. One of these SMB3 features that is currently being actively worked on is Multi-Channel, a kind of channel bonding at the SMB level intended to increase both performance and fault-tolerance of SMB sessions. It is not only one of the most generally useful features of SMB3 but also a prerequisite for enabling RDMA as a transport for SMB with SMB Direct. This talk will provide details about the current project to finish the implementation of SMB3 Multi-Channel in Samba, explaining the challenges for development and how they are solved. The presentation will include demos. The talk will conclude with a brief outlook how SMB Direct support can be added to Samba. Learning Objectives: 1) Refresher on Multi-Channel, 2) State of implementation of Multi-Channel in Samba, 3) Challenges for Samba to implement Multi-Channel, 4) Design of Multi-Channel in Samba, 5) Outlook to SMB Direct support.

Practical experience from implementing the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) and from deploying and interoperability testing multiple vendor implementations of KMIP form the bulk of the material covered. Guidance will be provided that covers the key issues to require that your vendors address and how to distinguish between simple vendor tick-box approaches to standard conformance and actual interoperable solutions. Learning Objectives: 1) In-depth knowledge of the core of the OASIS KMIP 2) Awareness of requirements for practical interoperability 3) Guidance on important of conformance testing

In this presentation we extend previous work to include p2p transfers between NVMe devices and RDMA capable NICs running protocols like Infiniband, RoCE and iWARP. We present experimental results using both 10Gbe iWARP and 56G Infiniband NICs that show how the latency associated with remote transfer of data can be reduced whilst also offloading the CPU allowing it to focus on other tasks. We show how this work can act as a precursor for the NVMe over Fabrics work currently being standardized. We also show how the Controller Memory Buffer (CMB) feature introduced in NVMe 1.2 be utilized in a novel fashion to aid this work. Learning Objectives: 1) What are the benefits of NVM Express 2) How can NVM Express and RDMA be utilized prior to NVMe over Fabrics 3) How Donard code builds on open-source code 4) How latency, bandwidth and CPU offload can all be improved using peer-2-peer

Programming with persistent memory is hard, similar to the type of programming a file system developer does because of the need to write changes out in a way that maintains consistency. Applications must be re-architected to change data stored in two tiers (DRAM and storage) into three tiers (DRAM, pmem and storage). This presentation will review key attributes of persistent memory as well as outline architectural and design considerations for making an application persistent memory aware. This discussion will conclude with examples showing how to modify an application to provide consistency when using persistent memory. Learning Objectives: 1) Introduce how persistent memory differs from DRAM and standard storage for storing application data. 2) Show examples of the architectural considerations for making an application persistent memory aware, 3) Give examples of how to modify an existing application to utilize persistent memory, 4) Discuss the open source Non-Volatile Memory Library (NVML) available on

Attacks against enterprises and their technology vendors are facilitated by the current rapid adoption of embedded systems, cloud solutions, and web based platforms. These attacks often undermine the very monetization, scalability and user experience goals for which these systems were designed and deployed. As malicious hackers advance their techniques at a staggering pace, often rendering current defense tactics obsolete, so too must security practitioners obsess over deploying progressive techniques. Pre-sented by the elite organization of white hat hackers most widely known for being first to break the iPhone, this session will analyze the anatomies of real world attacks against high profile systems, ranging from the well known Target breach, to Texas In-struments RFID, to Apple products, and more. It will extract lessons from these attack anatomies to provide a framework to account for these modern attackers, articulate industry context, and supply attendees with key takeaways, including immediately acti

This presentation will describe the changes being made to the Windows OS, its file systems and storage stack in response to new evolving storage technologies. Learn how windows is adaptaing to new storage technologies.

Intel Design environment heavily depends on a large scale NFS infrastructure with 10s of PBs of data. Global Name space helps to navigate this large environment in a uniform way from 60,000 compute servers. But what if a user doesn't know where the piece of data he is looking for is located? Our customers used to spend hours waiting for recursive "grep" commands' completion - or preferred not to bother with some less critical queries. In this talk, we'll cover how Intel IT has identified an opportunity to provide a faster way to look for an information within this large-scale NFS environment. We'll review various open source solutions which were considered, and how we've decided to implement a mix of home-grown scalable NFS crawler with open source ElasticSearch engine to index parts of our NFS environment. As part of this talk we'll discuss various challenges and our ways to mitigate them, including: # Crawler scalability required to index large amounts of dynamically changing data within pre-defined

Data wants to live in the cloud, and move freely between enterprises, phones, homes and clouds, but one major obstacle remains: How can your data be protected against alteration and disclosure? This session introduces the Cloud Encrypted Object Extension to the CDMI standard, which permits encrypted objects to be stored, retrieved, and transferred between clouds. Originating out of work to make CDMI usable for Electric Medical Records (EMR) application, Cloud Encrypted Objects are a standards-based way to encrypt data, verify integrity, and provide access to secured content, such that objects can freely move between clouds in a cross-protocol manner. Learning Objectives: 1) Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects are used by a client, 2) Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects can move between clouds, 3) Learn about access control and delegation for Cloud Encrypted Objects, 4) Learn how Cloud Encrypted Objects can be stored and accessed from file systems, CDMI, S3, Swift and other repositories.

Microsoft Azure has provided REST endpoints for blobs, tables, and queues since its inception. This is an efficient and simple stateless storage API for new applications. However, there is a very large installed base of mature applications, especially enterprise and vertical, which are written to a conventional file API such as Win32 or the C runtimes. Azure File Service provides [MS-SMB2] compliant file shares with the same high availability as Azure’s REST endpoints since the backing store for both transient handle state and files data is, under the hood, Azure tables and blobs. As a bonus, the file share namespace is also exposed via REST, allowing simultaneous and coherent access to file data from both endpoints. This talk will relate the experience and challenges of designing and implementing a wire compliant continuously available SMB server where the backing store is not even a conventional file system, let alone NTFS. Learning Objectives: 1) Learn how an SMB sever can be built on top of something

A new class of ultra-low latency storage is emerging, including Persistent Memory (PM), as well as advanced nonvolatile storage technologies such as NVMe. The SNIA NVM TWG has been exploring these technologies and has more recently prepared a white paper for requirements of remotely utilizing such devices. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), arbitrated by file and block storage protocols, is a clear choice for this access, but existing RDMA and storage protocol implementations incur latency overheads which impact the performance of the solution. And while raw fabric block protocols can address latency overheads, they do not address data integrity, management and sharing. This talk explores the issues, and outlines a pathfinding effort to make small, natural extensions to RDMA and upper layer storage protocols to reduce these latencies to acceptable, minimal levels, while preserving the many advantages of the storage protocols they extend. Learning Objectives: 1) Learn key technologies enabling remote acces

Network File Systems, needed for accessing everything from low end storage, to Windows and Mac servers, to high end NAS, continue to evolve. NFS and SMB, the two dominant network storage protocols, also continue to improve with exciting new features in their most recent dialects. And the Linux clients continue to improve their implementation of these protocols, recently adding security and performance enhancements for SMB3 and new pNFS layout types along with the NFSv4.2 support in the NFS client. This presentation will discuss some of the recent changes in network file system support in Linux including enhanced CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 support in the kernel client, and also new developments in the NFS client. It will also discuss in progress work on new protocol features for improved performance, clustering scalability, reliability and availability. It will also compare and contrast some of the key features of the SMB3 and NFS Linux clients. Learning Objectives: 1)Understanding key features and limitations of the SM

The Cloud Data Management Interface is designed to provide namespace-based management functionality for the superset of object, file and block protocols. This makes it ideally suited for use with common protocols such as NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, Swift and S3. This session provides an overview of how CDMI interoperates with these protocols, and how the use of CDMI as a management protocol adds value to multi-protocol systems. Concrete examples and use cases from end-users and vendors will be highlighted. Learning Objectives: Learn how to use CDMI to manage object repositories. Learn how to use CDMI to manage file systems. Learn how to use CDMI to manage block storage systems. Learn how CDMI works with multi-protocol systems

The SMB3 ecosystem continues to grow with the introduction of new clients and server products, a growing deployment base, and new generations of networking technologies. This talk covers the changes to the SMB3 protocol in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, the design considerations, and how the changes will affect both protocol implementers and customers. The challenges and performance of 100Gb Ethernet and RDMA solutions on the next-generation Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) will be presented for the first time.

SMR is a gamechanger drive technology, embraced by all major manufacturers. SMR changes fundamental assumptions of filesystem management. This long-help abandonment of Random-Writes now makes drives behave as sequential-access tape. Seagate is leading the way in providing a standards compliant IO stack for use with the new drives. Using the new ZAC/ZBC commands to make and maintain a filesystem is essential for performant operation. Seagate is sharing lessons learned from modifiying EXT4 for use with SMR. This effort is called the SMR Friendly File System (SMRFFS). Learning objectives: 1) Forward-write only considerations for the block allocation scheme , 2) Zones/BlockGroup/AllocationGroup alignment and use , 3) Superblock, and other required write-in-place management schemes. Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is the next generation storage technology for continued improvement in HDD areal density, and offers new opportunities for open compute environments. In massive, scale-out cold storage applications such as active archive, social media and long-term data storage, SMR HDD-based solutions offers the highest density, lowest TCO and leading $/TB. This speaking session will clearly articulate the difference in SMR drive architectures and performance characteristics, and will illustrate how the open source community has the distinct advantage of integrating a host-managed platform that leverages SMR HDDs. Further, HGST will discuss how SMR presents the possibility for unprecedented storage capacities, maintains a familiar form factor, and creates a lower-power envelope so architects can create responsive cold storage data pools that can be accessed in near real-time. Learning objectives: Demonstrate how leveraging a SMR HDD provides advantages to a host-managed platform. Show how