The SNIA Swordfish Conformance Test Program enables manufacturers to test their products with a vendor-neutral test suite and validate conformance to the SNIA Swordfish specification. Swordfish implementations that have passed CTP are posted on the SNIA website; this information is available to help ease integration concerns of storage developers and increase demand for available Swordfish products. This session will provide an overview of the program, what functionality implementations and base requirements are needed for implementations to pass Swordfish CTP.

Accessing data within an enterprise spread across geo-diverse locations challenges work productivity, time, and IT resources. Existing methods require data to be transferred and replicated leading to delayed business insights or even insights based on stale data. In addition, having to send a copy of data to every user that requires it leads to copy sprawl, data management challenges and compromised data security. Even with data transfer, data arrives at the destination in an unpredictable time and performance varies with data type/size and application.

Polled mode applications such as the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) NVMe over Fabrics target can demonstrate higher performance and efficiency compared to applications with a more traditional interrupt-driven threading model. But this performance and efficiency comes at a cost of increased CPU core utilization when the application is lightly loaded or idle. This talk will introduce a new SPDK scheduler framework which enables transferring work between CPU cores for purposes of shutting down or lowering frequency on cores when under-utilized.

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 architectures.

SATA multi-actuator drives appear as a single drive to the system stack, yet all IO is addressed to LBA ranges on each actuator. Linux IO schedulers must be aware of this geometry via log pages in ATA Command Set –5 and then optimize behavior to ensure that actuators are kept busy. Legacy IO scheduler behavior can lead to underutilized actuators, delayed IO completion resulting in poor performance.

We are all used to thinking that from a performance perspective distributed storage symmetrical systems perform best because of the weakest link in the chain effect. This presentation discusses situations in which asymmetrical implementation reduces the cost of implementation and improves the performance. This happens because of the public cloud resource variety and price structure. The presentation discusses the model and the details for cheaper and more performant asymmetrical Ceph deployment

The advent of cloud and the everything as a service (XaaS) model requires storage developers to rethink how their products are consumed. Organizations are looking to develop infrastructure and processes that are agnostic from any one cloud vendor, including their own on-premises datacenters. Container orchestrators (COs) like Kubernetes enable this ideal by allowing entire application deployments to be packaged up (in containers and manifests) and moved from environment to environment with relative ease.

This is a two-part detailed technology presentation on LTO, erasure codes, and archival storage. In the first part, we will cover core LTO technology by reviewing areal density roadmaps, physical and logical LTO formats, and data durability for long-term archival applications including environmental requirements. In the second part, we will discuss new two-dimensional erasure-coded tape for durable and available long-term data storage where random access is used. Tape has recently reemerged as the lowest cost medium for different levels of cold data in archival data storage.

Data has become the new source code and data storage and I/O are becoming the major inhibitor for deriving actionable intelligence as well as proving data management capabilities for managing data - DataOps, is becoming paramount for the success of AI projects, particularly in Capital markets. This session will discuss the trends, solutions and benchmarks involved for successful AI imprementation for historic and realtime datasets.

Yes, it really does say Windows and SPDK in the same sentence! The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) is a well-regarded set of tools and libraries for writing high performance user mode storage applications on Linux and FreeBSD. However, in a typical Data Centre, a significant percentage of the servers will be running Microsoft Windows where the options for NVMe support are more limited. This talk looks at what is involved in making SPDK run natively on Windows.