Solid State Storage

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The Abstracts

The Benefits of Solid State in Enterprise Storage Systems
David Dale
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This tutorial is an update to an existing popular SNIA Tutorial. Targeted primarily at an IT audience, it presents a brief overview of the solid state technologies which are being integrated into Enterprise Storage Systems today, including technologies, benefits, and price/performance. It then goes on to describe where they fit into typical Enterprise Storage architectures today, with descriptions of specific use cases. Finally the presentation speculates briefly on what the future will bring.

An In-depth Look at SNIA's Enterprise Solid State Storage Test Specification (PTS v1.1)
Dr. Easen Ho
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V1.0 of the Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification for Enterprise (PTS-E) has been released to the public and is slowly gaining recognition. PTS-E V1.0 presents uniform methodology for SSS testing, and covers basic device characteristic such as IOPS, Throughput and Latency. Additional tests intended for V1.1 are of interest to the Enterprise environment is now being introduced that includes a more in-depth look at how drives perform in specific access environments, with added emphasis on mixed workloads and response time characteristics of the device

Learning Objectives

To explain the motivation and need for the new tests in PTS-E V1.1.
To describe the mechanics of these tests in detail, and to provide illustrative results.
At the end of this tutorial, listeners should gain sufficient knowledge to implement and interpret the results from these new tests

Realities of Solid State Storage
Luanne Dauber
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Solid State storage promises to transform the capabilities and economics of the "performance" segment of enterprise storage, and a myriad of different vendor implementations of solid state have arrived on the scene. Early implementations simply replace some HDDs in enterprise arrays with SSDs, but is one-for-one replacement of disks really the most effective way to utilize SSDs? New approaches for accelerating array performance with Solid State have arrived, ranging from SSD caching, SSD tiering, and/or creating entire Volumes/LUNs from Solid State. This tutorial will compare the performance, reliability, endurance, and cost properties of different SSD approaches, illustrate the impact of SSD properties on typical enterprise I/O workloads, and give users a roadmap for how to think about Solid State influencing their future storage architecture.

Learning Objectives

Explain the fundamental structure of flash memory cells
Explain how that affects how enterprise storage built on flash behaves
Help users understand what kinds of questions to ask of suppliers selling flash based storage for enterprise class applications.

What Happens When Flash Moves to Triple Level Cell (TLC)
Luanne Dauber
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Solid State storage promises to transform the capabilities and economics of the performance and increasingly the mainstream segment of enterprise storage, and a myriad of different vendor implementations of solid state have arrived on the scene. The main difference between these new systems and traditional storage arrays is one thing: the storage medium. One of its defining characeristics is that it changes – a lot. The pending introduction of a new architecture for flash called triple level cell (TLC) will double the capacity per area for storing data; what what will be the impact on data integrity and resiliency? How are these new cells different from the previous and what should you, as an enterprise storage buyer, know about them?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this presentation, you will have a basic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the TLC architecture, what it is and what motivated its development.
You will understand how the TLC architecture is likely to impact the use and deployment of flash memory in enterprise applications by examining the effects of the cell on resiliency and data integrity.
Finally, we will look at some of the other upcoming non-volatile storage architectures that are leading research in semiconductors and how they might compete with TLC.

NVMe the nextGen Interface for Solid State Storage
Anil Vasudeva
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Today SSD drives are severely hamstrung by the way they are attached to servers via switches and HBAs introducing severe hits on latency. To operate at its full capabilities to deliver 1 million IOPs to keep a multi-core CPU busy, it needed an interface that is not mediated through a disk drive gateway of a switch or HBA. Now a new generation of two separate interfaces - NVM Express and SCSI over PCIe are being introduced direct attach of SSDs to PCIe – which portend to radically improve the latency and power consumption compared to existing SATA/SAS interfaces while eliminating the need for HBAs or switches thus savings system cost. Major OSs like Windows, Linux and ESXi.are starting to ship host drivers to support the new interfaces. Some 80 companies varying from Computer Systems to Storage and Chip manufacturers are on board embracing the new NVMe/SOP Direct Attach SSD interfaces

Learning Objectives

The presentation will cover how the previous generation of SSDs were being attached to servers, how the new PCIe Direct Attach SSD architectures are being implemented, quantify the performance advantage being achieved by Servers, the power and cost reductions achieved, status of standards and feature sets

SCSI Express - Fast & Reliable Flash Storage for the Enterprise
Marty Czekalski
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The SCSI Trade Association (STA) has accepted SCSI Express as a formal project and has taken ownership of refining, defining and marketing this data storage industry standard initiative. SCSI Express combines the rugged storage-centric SCSI interface with the low-latency features of PCIe to create a powerful new interface ideal for the high performance needs of solid state storage. These two technologies enable unprecedented performance gains while maintaining Enterprise attributes such as reliability, availability and serviceability to directly connected storage devices. In addition, SCSI Express devices will provide maximum flexibility for storage configuration along with a level of investment protection.

Learning Objectives

Attendees will learn the basics of SCSI Express
Attendees will learn why SCSI Express is important to the enterprise computing platform and how it is implemented
Attendees will learn the current status of SCSI Express and the timeline for implementation