Large scale caching systems are making a transition from DRAM to SSDs for cost/power trade-offs and that brings out interesting challenges to both software and hardware. At Facebook, CacheLib is a widely deployed general purpose caching engine, enabling this transition through hybrid caching. In this talk, we introduce hybrid cache, highlight the challenges of hybrid caches at scale and the various techniques Facebook adopts to tackle these challenges.

SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. With the recent advances in persistent memory technologies, we will take a look at how we can leverage the SMB3 protocol in conjunction with SMBDirect/RDMA to provide very low latency access to persistent memory devices across the network. With the increasing popularity of cloud storage - technologies like Azure Files which provide seamless access to cloud stored data via the standard SMB3 protocol is seeing significant interest.

Starting with version 4.14 Samba provides core infrastructure code that allows basing all access to the server's filesystem on file handles and not on paths. An example of this is using fstat() instead of stat(), or SMB_VFS_FSTAT() instead of SMB_VFS_STAT() in Samba parlance. Historically Samba's fileserver code had to deal a lot with processing path based SMB requests.

The DatacenterSSD specification has been created by a group of hyperscale datacenter companies in collaboration with SSD suppliers and enterprise integrators. What is in this specification? How does it expand on the NVMe specification? How can devices demonstrate compliance? In this talk we’ll review important items from the DatacenterSSD specification to understand how it expands on the NVMe family of specifications for specific use cases in a datacenter environment.

Today, information is being digitized on a massive scale, by servers in datacenters, by mobile devices, and by networks of sensors everywhere around us. Artificial intelligence techniques and ubiquitous processing power are making it possible to mine this massive ocean of data; however, integral to harnessing this data as knowledge is the ability to store it for long periods of time.

Boot Devices are a critical component of servers used at scale in the Data Center. The needs and use cases for boot drives in the Data Center are very different than client HDD and Flash based boot drives in laptop applications. This talk will describe the differences between client boot drive use cases and hyperscale use cases. This talk will describe hyperscale use-cases for boot drives, unique needs Hyper-Scalars have for flash based boot drives and hyperscale challenges when deploying flash based boot drives at-scale.

This paper looks back at the analysis that has been done for the drive wear-out issue on for the different E-series array systems running at different customers’ sites and uses that data to give more specific guidance on thresholds for a preemptive drive removal. Motivation of DHM: Customers with old ventage or Refurbished drive replacement may experience a data loss event and continues to see a high drive failure rate >5% AFR (Annual Failure Rate). Storage vendors expect to see high fallout rates across the hard drive population as they age.

We describe a replacement for RAID 6, based on a new linear, systematic code, which detects and corrects any combination of E errors (unknown location) and Z erasures (known location) provided that Z+2E≤4. The code is at the core of a RAID technology called PentaRAID, for which the two co-inventors were awarded a US utility patent. The problem that we address is that of weak data protection of RAID 6 systems. The known vulnerability is that RAID 6 may recover from not more than 2 failed disks in a RAID, if we know which disks failed.

The SNIA Swordfish™ ecosystem is supported by open source tools, available in open repositories that are managed by the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group on GitHub, and the DMTF Redfish Forum, also on Github. This session will walk through the tools you can use to go from zero to working SNIA Swordfish implementations.

The SSM TWG and OFA OFMFWG are working together to bring to life an open source Open Fabric Management Framework, with a Redfish/Swordfish management model and interface. This presentation will provide an overview of the status of this work, and a demo of the current state of the proof of concept, built leveraging the Redfish and Swordfish-based open source emulator.