The SNIA Swordfish specification has expanded to include full NVMe and NVMe-oF enablement and alignment across DMTF, NVMe, and SNIA for NVMe and NVMe-oF use cases. This presentation will provide an overview of the most recent work adding detailed implementation requirements for specific configurations, ensuring NVMe and NVMe-oF environments can be represented entirely in Swordfish and Redfish environments.

Infrastructure Processing Units (IPU) is an evolution of SmartNIC, focusing on infrastructure processing such as networking offload and storage offload. IPU is a critical ingredient in the disaggregated computer architectures and becomes a control point in the DC-oF (Data Center of the Future). In this talk, we would like to share the NVMe over TCP Initiator implementation as an example for IPU based storage offload, focusing on SPDK (https://spdk.io) support for IPU based NVMe over TCP Initiator solution.

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. The profiles are now part of the Swordfish CTP program; ethernet attached drives can validate conformance to the specifications by participating.

Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) is a proposed standard for a memory to memory data movement and acceleration interface. Software memcpy is the current data movement standard for software implementation due to stable CPU ISA. However, this takes away from application performance and incurs software overhead to provide context isolation. Offload DMA engines and their interface are vendor-specific and not standardized for user-level software.

DEM is an open source simulator/emulator, providing an RF/SF interface, on top of an NVMe / NVMe-oF emulation environment. DEM enables centralized, efficient, and dynamic configuration and provisioning of NVMe-oF Resources.

For client applications interacting with SMI-S implementations, PyWBEM is a python package that provides access to WBEM Servers. It also provides a mechanism for mocking WBEM Servers. In this presentation, Mike Walker will provide an overview of PyWBEM, with an emphasis on how to learn to interact with SMI-S, through open-source mockup SMI-S 1.8.0 WBEM servers available on Github.

Over the past year many improvements have been made in Linux for accessing files remotely. This has been a great year for cifs.ko with the addition of new SMB3.1.1 features and optimizations. It continues to be the most active network/cluster file system on Linux. Improvements to performance with handle leases (deferred close), multichannel, signing improvements, huge gains in read ahead performance, and directory and metadata caching improvements have been made. And security has improved with support for the strongest encryption, and more recently the exciting work on QUIC.

Object Storage is increasingly getting used on premises for a variety of use cases some of which consist of primary and critical applications. Such use cases and applications require enterprise grade Data protection and disaster recovery capabilities. Replication of S3 compatible Scale Out Object Storage presents unique challenges that are unlike found in traditional block or file storage. Replication of object storage system is done at individual bucket and object level and it not only has to deal with data replication but also object specific constructs like metadata and tags.

Quantum computers with the capability to threaten the cryptography used today may seem a long way off, but they already pose a threat to both data and systems that we are protecting today. This talk will introduce the quantum threat and discuss why this is already a topic for today and not sometime in the future when large quantum systems will emerge, with particular considerations for long-term secure storage. This will be followed by an overview of the race to standardize new cryptographic algorithms that are secure even against large quantum computers of the future.

Current storage technologies include a range of security features and capabilities to allow storage to serve as a last line of defense in an organization’s defense in depth strategy. However, the threat landscape continues to change in negative ways, so new responses are needed. Additionally, the storage technology itself is changing to address the increased capacity and throughput needs of organizations. Technical work in ISO/IEC, IEEE, NVM Express, DMTF, OpenFabric Alliance, Trusted Computing Group (TCG), Open Compute Project (OCP), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), etc.