Software-Enabled Flash™ (SEF) technology, a vendor-neutral Linux Foundation open source project, fundamentally redefines how flash memory is used for cloud and enterprise applications, providing storage developers the power to control flash memory data placement, latency outcomes and isolation. This session will dive deep into: using the new Software-Enabled Flash SDK to build applications, traditional I/O stacks vs. SEF implementations, configuration and control options available to the programmer, and how to get the most from SEF-based applications.

In this presentation, we will describe a complete end-to-end Software Defined Storage (SDS) solution for cloud data centers using Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs). IPUs provide a high performance NVMe interface to host, abstracting away the details of networked storage and enabling storage disaggregation and bare-metal hosting. NVMe/TCP is a high performance protocol widely deployed because of its ease of deployment and better scalability in large scale-out networks.

With the ongoing work in the CS TWG, the chairs will present the latest updates from the membership of the working group. In addition, the latest release will be reviewed at a high level to provide attendees a view into next steps and implementation of the specification in progress. Use cases, Security considerations, and other key topics with also be addressed.

Modern AI systems usually require diverse data processing and feature engineering at a tremendous scale and employ heavy and complex deep learning model that requires expensive accelerators or GPUs. This leads to the typical design of running data processing and AI on two separate platforms, which leads to severe data movement issues and creates big challenges for efficient AI solutions.

Learn what is happening in NVMe to support Computational Storage devices. The development is ongoing and not finalized, but this presentation will describe the directions that the proposal is taking. Kim will describe the high level architecture that is being defined in NVMe for Computational Storage. We will describe how this new command set fits within the NVMe I/O Command Set architecture. The commands that are necessary for Computational Storage will be described. We will discuss a proposed new memory model that is able to be used for computational programs.

Emerging memory technologies have gotten a couple of big boosts over the past few years, one in the form of Intel’s Optane products, and the other from the migration of CMOS logic to nodes that NOR flash, and now SRAM, cannot practically support. Although these appear to be two very different spheres, a lot of the work that has been undertaken to support Intel’s Optane products (also known as 3D XPoint) will lead to improved use of persistent memories on processors of all kinds: “xPUs”.

Almost everyone understands that systems and data both have lifecycles that typically include a disposal phase (i.e., what you do when you do not need something anymore). Conceptually, data needs to be eliminated either on a system or entirely (everywhere stored) as part of this disposal. Failure to correctly eliminate certain data can result in costly data breach scenarios. Selecting the form of storage sanitization that is appropriate to the sensitivity of the data sensitivity and that also considers circular business models is something that many organizations are pursuing.

Azure Disks provide block storage for Azure Virtual Machines and are a core pillar of the Azure IaaS platform. In this talk, we will provide an overview of Direct Drive - Azure's next-generation block storage architecture. Direct Drive forms the foundation for a new family of Azure disk offerings, starting with Ultra Disk (Azure's highest performance disks). We will describe the challenges of providing durable, highly-available, high-performance disks at cloud scale as well as the software and hardware innovations that allow us to overcome these challenges.

NVMe-oF drives can support NVMe over ethernet, but how do you manage them? This presentation will show how Swordfish has developed a standard model for NVMe ethernet-attached drives, providing detailed profiles as guidance for implementations including required and recommended properties. This presentation will also cover the new features to support the latest version of the Native NVMe-oF™ Drive Specification.

Linux's ability to access files remotely via SMB3.1.1 continues to improve. Many new SMB3.1.1 features and optimizations have been implemented and with the new kernel server Linux (ksmbd) in mainline Linux there are now multiple Linux server options (Samba and ksmbd). Performance has improved with better use of leases in metadata caching, and dynamic reconfiguration of network interfaces and enhanced parallelization has improved multichannel performance.