Large-scale cluster storage systems contain hundreds-of-thousands of hard disk drives in their primary storage tier. Since the clusters are not built all at once, there is significant heterogeneity among the disks in terms of their capacity, make/model, firmware, etc. Redundancy settings for data reliability are generally configured in a “one-scheme-fits-all” manner assuming that this heterogeneous disk population has homogeneous reliability characteristics.

DPUs (data processing units) are an exciting new category of processor that complement CPUs and GPUs inside data centers. DPUs are fast at data-centric tasks, while they retain the full programmability of CPUs. DPUs have typically been used to offload networking and security functions from compute servers, but have not been used to build storage systems until recently. In this talk, we will briefly introduce DPUs, then highlight the use of DPUs to build storage systems. This is an emerging new use case for DPUs.

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.

The SNIA Swordfish™ ecosystem is broader than just the specification. This session will provide an overview an overview of the various tools and programs to help developers accelerate both implementation and adoption of Swordfish. This includes demonstrating the interactive nature of tools, schema, and development, by leveraging the testing done by other tools, such as schema validation, implementation conformance testing throughout the development cycle.

Compute, memory, storage, and connectivity demands are forcing the industry to adapt as it meets the expanding needs of cloud, edge, enterprise, 5G, and high-performance computing. UCIe — Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express — is an open industry standard founded by the leaders in semiconductors, packaging, IP suppliers, foundries, and cloud service providers to address customer requests for more customizable package-level integration.

As hardware layers in storage systems (such as network and storage devices) continue to increase in performance, it is vital that the IO software stack does not fall behind and become the bottleneck. Leveraging the capabilities of computational storage devices, such data processing units (DPUs), allows for the IO software stack to accelerate CPU and memory bandwidth constrained operations in order to fully take advantage of the storage hardware in the system.

Digital transformation is driving applications to process more data in memory and in real time. Lack of Infrastructure technologies to support such environments is pushing customers to either over-provision expensive hardware or deploy complex solutions. Enterprises and cloud providers are looking to provide more flexibility and improve efficiencies for their customers, all without requiring huge lift in costs, hardware infrastructure or applications. In this talk, we showcase VMware Software Memory Tiering including near term trends like CXL, PCIGen5, for memory disaggregation.

Introduced in 2021, Fabric Notifications developed into a key resiliency solution for storage networks. Providing the ability to respond to events impacting the Fabric, Fabric Notifications enhances the overall user experience when deploying traditional Fibre Channel SANs. In this session, the improvements in the user experience are profiled for solutions using Linux, AIX, and PowerPath. The latest developments in both standards and market solutions are also provided as an update to this exciting new technology.

NVM Express® (NVMe®) has become synonymous with high-performance storage with widespread adoption in client, cloud, and enterprise applications. The NVMe 2.0 family of specifications, released in June 2021, allow for faster and simpler development of NVMe solutions to support increasingly diverse environments, now including Hard Disk Drives (HDDs).

Persistent scripting brings the benefits of persistent memory programming to high-level interpreted languages. More importantly, it brings the convenience and programmer productivity of scripting to persistent memory programming. We have integrated a novel generic persistent memory allocator into a popular scripting language interpreter, which now exposes a simple and intuitive persistence interface: A flag notifies the interpreter that a script’s variables reside in a persistent heap in a specified file.