Registration is now open for the upcoming Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) Conference – July 22-23, 2019 on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

The 2019 PIRL event features a collaboration between UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the SNIA to bring industry leaders in programming and developing persistent memory applications together for a two-day discussion on their experiences.

PIRL is a small conference, with attendance limited to under 100 people, including speakers.  It will discuss what real developers have done, and want to do, with persistent memory. Most of the presentations will include demonstrations of live code showing new concepts.  The conference is designed to be a meet-up for developers seeking to gain and share knowledge in the growing area of Persistent Memory development.

PIRL features a program of 18 presentations and 5 keynotes from industry-leading developers who have built real systems using persistent memory.  They will share what they have done (and want to do) with persistent memory, what worked, what didn’t, what was hard, what was easy, what was surprising, and what they learned.

This year’s keynote presentations will be:

• * Pratap Subrahmanyam (Vmware): Programming Persistent Memory In A Virtualized Environment Using Golang
• * Zuoyu Tao (Oracle): Exadata With Persistent Memory – An Epic Journey
• * Dan Williams (Intel Corporation): The 3rd Rail Of Linux Filesystems: A Survival Story
• * Stephen Bates (Eideticom): Successfully Deploying Persistent Memory and Acceleration Via Compute Express Link
• * Scott Miller (Dreamworks): Persistent Memory In Feature Animation Production

Other speakers include engineers from NetApp, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oracle, Sandia National Labs, Intel, SAP, Red Hat, and universities from around the world.  Full details are available at the PIRL website.

PIRL will be held on the University of California San Diego campus at Scripps Forum, a state-of-the-art conference facility just a few meters from the beach.  Discounted early registration ends July 10, so register today to ensure your seat.

Registration is now open for the upcoming Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) Conference – July 22-23, 2019 on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

The 2019 PIRL event features a collaboration between UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the SNIA to bring industry leaders in programming and developing persistent memory applications together for a two-day discussion on their experiences.

PIRL is a small conference, with attendance limited to under 100 people, including speakers.  It will discuss what real developers have done, and want to do, with persistent memory. Most of the presentations will include demonstrations of live code showing new concepts.  The conference is designed to be a meet-up for developers seeking to gain and share knowledge in the growing area of Persistent Memory development.

PIRL features a program of 18 presentations and 5 keynotes from industry-leading developers who have built real systems using persistent memory.  They will share what they have done (and want to do) with persistent memory, what worked, what didn’t, what was hard, what was easy, what was surprising, and what they learned.

This year’s keynote presentations will be:

• * Pratap Subrahmanyam (Vmware): Programming Persistent Memory In A Virtualized Environment Using Golang
• * Zuoyu Tao (Oracle): Exadata With Persistent Memory – An Epic Journey
• * Dan Williams (Intel Corporation): The 3rd Rail Of Linux Filesystems: A Survival Story
• * Stephen Bates (Eideticom): Successfully Deploying Persistent Memory and Acceleration Via Compute Express Link
• * Scott Miller (Dreamworks): Persistent Memory In Feature Animation Production

Other speakers include engineers from NetApp, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oracle, Sandia National Labs, Intel, SAP, Red Hat, and universities from around the world.  Full details are available at the PIRL website.

PIRL will be held on the University of California San Diego campus at Scripps Forum, a state-of-the-art conference facility just a few meters from the beach.  Discounted early registration ends July 10, so register today to ensure your seat.

Registration is now open for the upcoming Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) Conference – July 22-23, 2019 on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The 2019 PIRL event features a collaboration between UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the SNIA to bring industry leaders in programming and developing persistent memory applications together for a two-day discussion on their experiences. PIRL is a small conference, with attendance limited to under 100 people, including speakers.  It will discuss what real developers have done, and want to do, with persistent memory. Most of the presentations will include demonstrations of live code showing new concepts.  The conference is designed to be a meet-up for developers seeking to gain and share knowledge in the growing area of Persistent Memory development. PIRL features a program of 18 presentations and 5 keynotes from industry-leading developers who have built real systems using persistent memory.  They will share what they have done (and want to do) with persistent memory, what worked, what didn’t, what was hard, what was easy, what was surprising, and what they learned. This year’s keynote presentations will be:

• * Pratap Subrahmanyam (Vmware): Programming Persistent Memory In A Virtualized Environment Using Golang
• * Zuoyu Tao (Oracle): Exadata With Persistent Memory – An Epic Journey
• * Dan Williams (Intel Corporation): The 3rd Rail Of Linux Filesystems: A Survival Story
• * Stephen Bates (Eideticom): Successfully Deploying Persistent Memory and Acceleration Via Compute Express Link
• * Scott Miller (Dreamworks): Persistent Memory In Feature Animation Production

Other speakers include engineers from NetApp, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oracle, Sandia National Labs, Intel, SAP, Red Hat, and universities from around the world.  Full details are available at the PIRL website. PIRL will be held on the University of California San Diego campus at Scripps Forum, a state-of-the-art conference facility just a few meters from the beach.  Discounted early registration ends July 10, so register today to ensure your seat.

Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a webcast on how increases in networking speeds are impacting storage. If you missed the live webcast, New Landscape of Network Speeds, it's now available on-demand. We received several interesting questions on this topic. Here are our experts' answers: Q. What are the cable distances for 2.5 and 5G Ethernet? A. 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T Ethernet are designed to run on existing UTP cabling, so it should reach 100 meters on both Cat5e and Cat6 cabling. Reach of 5GBASE-T on Cat 5e may be less under some conditions, for example if many cables are bundled tightly together. Cabling guidelines and field test equipment are available to aid in the transition. Q. Any comments on why U.2 drives are so rare/uncommon in desktop PC usage? M.2 are very common in laptops, and some desktops, but U.2's large capacity seems a better fit for desktop. A. M.2 SSDs are more popular for laptops and tablets due to their small form factor and sufficient capacity.  U.2 SSDs are used more often in servers, though some desktops and larger laptops also use a U.2 SSD for the larger capacity.   Q. What about using Active Copper cables to get a bit more reach over Passive Copper cables before switching to Active Optical cables? A. Yes active copper cables can provide longer reach than passive copper cables, but you have to look at the expense and power consumption. There may be many cases where using an active optical cable (AOC) will cost the same or less than an active copper cable. Q. For 100Gb/s signaling (future standard) is it expected to work over copper cable (passive or active) or only optical? A. Yes, though the maximum distances will be shorter. With 25Gb/s signaling the maximum copper cable length is 5m. With 50Gb/s signaling the longest copper cables are 3m long. With 100Gb/s we expect the longest copper cables will be about 2m long. Q. So what do you see as the most prevalent LAN speed today and what do you see in next year or two? A. For Ethernet, we see desktops mostly on 1Gb with some moving to 2.5G, 5Gb or 10Gb. Older servers are largely 10Gb but new servers are mostly using 25GbE or 50GbE, while the most demanding servers and fastest flash storage arrays have 100GbE connections. 200GbE will show up in a few servers starting in late 2019, but most 200GbE and 400GbE usage will be for switch-to-switch links during the next few years. In the world of Fibre Channel, most servers today are on 16G FC with a few running 32G and a few of the most demanding servers or fastest flash storage arrays using 64G. 128G FC for now will likely be just for switch-to-switch links. Finally for InfiniBand deployments, older servers are running FDR (56Gb/s) and newer servers are using EDR (100Gb/s). The very newest, fastest HPC and ML/AI servers are starting to use HDR (200Gb/s) InfiniBand. If you're new to SNIA NSF, we encourage you to check out the SNIA NSF webcast library. There you'll find more than 60 educational, vendor-neutral on-demand webcasts produced by SNIA experts.  

Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a webcast on how increases in networking speeds are impacting storage. If you missed the live webcast, New Landscape of Network Speeds, it’s now available on-demand. We received several interesting questions on this topic. Here are our experts’ answers: Q. What are the cable distances for 2.5 and 5G Ethernet? A. 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T Ethernet are designed to run on existing UTP cabling, so it should reach 100 meters on both Cat5e and Cat6 cabling. Reach of 5GBASE-T on Cat 5e may be less under some conditions, for example if many cables are bundled tightly together. Cabling guidelines and field test equipment are available to aid in the transition. Q. Any comments on why U.2 drives are so rare/uncommon in desktop PC usage? M.2 are very common in laptops, and some desktops, but U.2’s large capacity seems a better fit for desktop. A. M.2 SSDs are more popular for laptops and tablets due to their small form factor and sufficient capacity. U.2 SSDs are used more often in servers, though some desktops and larger laptops also use a U.2 SSD for the larger capacity.   Q. What about using Active Copper cables to get a bit more reach over Passive Copper cables before switching to Active Optical cables? A. Yes active copper cables can provide longer reach than passive copper cables, but you have to look at the expense and power consumption. There may be many cases where using an active optical cable (AOC) will cost the same or less than an active copper cable. Q. For 100Gb/s signaling (future standard) is it expected to work over copper cable (passive or active) or only optical? A. Yes, though the maximum distances will be shorter. With 25Gb/s signaling the maximum copper cable length is 5m. With 50Gb/s signaling the longest copper cables are 3m long. With 100Gb/s we expect the longest copper cables will be about 2m long. Q. So what do you see as the most prevalent LAN speed today and what do you see in next year or two? A. For Ethernet, we see desktops mostly on 1Gb with some moving to 2.5G, 5Gb or 10Gb. Older servers are largely 10Gb but new servers are mostly using 25GbE or 50GbE, while the most demanding servers and fastest flash storage arrays have 100GbE connections. 200GbE will show up in a few servers starting in late 2019, but most 200GbE and 400GbE usage will be for switch-to-switch links during the next few years. In the world of Fibre Channel, most servers today are on 16G FC with a few running 32G and a few of the most demanding servers or fastest flash storage arrays using 64G. 128G FC for now will likely be just for switch-to-switch links. Finally for InfiniBand deployments, older servers are running FDR (56Gb/s) and newer servers are using EDR (100Gb/s). The very newest, fastest HPC and ML/AI servers are starting to use HDR (200Gb/s) InfiniBand. If you’re new to SNIA NSF, we encourage you to check out the SNIA NSF webcast library. There you’ll find more than 60 educational, vendor-neutral on-demand webcasts produced by SNIA experts.  

Video streaming is an easy-to-understand workload from the I/O perspective, right?  It’s pretty obvious that it’s a workload heavy on long, streaming reads. The application can be modeled with a consistent read flow, and the software tests should be easy.  However, an analysis of the real-world workload shows something very different. At the disk level, the reads turn out to be a rapid flow of 4k and 8k block reads from a solid-state-disk.  Further, other processes on the system also add in a small amount of 4k and 8k writes in the midst of the reads. All of this impacts the application --and an SSD -- which was likely heavily tested on the basis of long, streaming reads. Understanding the real-world characteristics of a workload can be a significant advantage in the development of new hardware, new systems, and new applications.   The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) and SSSI member company Calypso Systems are providing an opportunity to build a repository of workloads for the industry to use for real-world testing, as outlined in a new SSSI white paper How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution. This paper is also available in Chinese at the SSSI Knowledge Center White Papers page. By going to the TestMyWorkload site, anyone can participate by providing a trace capture of an I/O workload that can be used by others to develop better products. The capture itself traces the block transfers, but does not capture actual data.  Any workload replay would use representative blocks, so there are no concerns about data security or integrity from these captures. The repository can be used by any participant to test hardware and software, and can help system vendors and users optimize configurations for the best performance based on real-world data.  By participating in this effort, organizations and individuals can provide insight and gain from the knowledge of all the contributors. Follow these three steps to be a part of the revolution today! 1.  Read the white paper. 2.  Download the free capture tools at TestMyWorkload.com. 3. Mark your calendar and register HERE to learn more in the free SNIA webcast How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution on July 9 at 11:00 am Pacific/2:00 pm Eastern.

Video streaming is an easy-to-understand workload from the I/O perspective, right?  It’s pretty obvious that it’s a workload heavy on long, streaming reads. The application can be modeled with a consistent read flow, and the software tests should be easy.  However, an analysis of the real-world workload shows something very different. At the disk level, the reads turn out to be a rapid flow of 4k and 8k block reads from a solid-state-disk.  Further, other processes on the system also add in a small amount of 4k and 8k writes in the midst of the reads. All of this impacts the application –and an SSD — which was likely heavily tested on the basis of long, streaming reads.

Understanding the real-world characteristics of a workload can be a significant advantage in the development of new hardware, new systems, and new applications.   The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) and SSSI member company Calypso Systems are providing an opportunity to build a repository of workloads for the industry to use for real-world testing, as outlined in a new SSSI white paper How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution. This paper is also available in Chinese at the SSSI Knowledge Center White Papers page.

By going to the TestMyWorkload site, anyone can participate by providing a trace capture of an I/O workload that can be used by others to develop better products. The capture itself traces the block transfers, but does not capture actual data.  Any workload replay would use representative blocks, so there are no concerns about data security or integrity from these captures.

The repository can be used by any participant to test hardware and software, and can help system vendors and users optimize configurations for the best performance based on real-world data.  By participating in this effort, organizations and individuals can provide insight and gain from the knowledge of all the contributors.

Follow these three steps to be a part of the revolution today!

1.  Read the white paper.

2.  Download the free capture tools at TestMyWorkload.com.

3. Mark your calendar and register HERE to learn more in the free SNIA webcast How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution on July 9 at 11:00 am Pacific/2:00 pm Eastern.

Video streaming is an easy-to-understand workload from the I/O perspective, right?  It’s pretty obvious that it’s a workload heavy on long, streaming reads. The application can be modeled with a consistent read flow, and the software tests should be easy.  However, an analysis of the real-world workload shows something very different. At the disk level, the reads turn out to be a rapid flow of 4k and 8k block reads from a solid-state-disk.  Further, other processes on the system also add in a small amount of 4k and 8k writes in the midst of the reads. All of this impacts the application –and an SSD — which was likely heavily tested on the basis of long, streaming reads. Understanding the real-world characteristics of a workload can be a significant advantage in the development of new hardware, new systems, and new applications.   The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) and SSSI member company Calypso Systems are providing an opportunity to build a repository of workloads for the industry to use for real-world testing, as outlined in a new SSSI white paper How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution. By going to the TestMyWorkload site, anyone can participate by providing a trace capture of an I/O workload that can be used by others to develop better products. The capture itself traces the block transfers, but does not capture actual data.  Any workload replay would use representative blocks, so there are no concerns about data security or integrity from these captures. The repository can be used by any participant to test hardware and software, and can help system vendors and users optimize configurations for the best performance based on real-world data.  By participating in this effort, organizations and individuals can provide insight and gain from the knowledge of all the contributors. Follow these three steps to be a part of the revolution today! 1.  Read the white paper. 2.  Download the free capture tools at TestMyWorkload.com. 3. Mark your calendar and register HERE to learn more in the free SNIA webcast How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution on July 9 at 11:00 am Pacific/2:00 pm Eastern.

As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. In addition to decisions surrounding what technologies to use, they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. Storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in week, days or hours but in minutes.

That’s why the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) is hosting another live webcast on Kubernetes in the Cloud (Part 2) on July 17, 2019. In part one of this three part series, we covered the high level aspects of Kubernetes. This presentation will discus key capabilities IT vendors are creating based on open source technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes to build self-service infrastructure to support hybrid multi-cloud deployments. We’ll cover:

• Persistent storage and how to specify it
• Ensuring application portability between Private and Public Clouds
• Building a self-service infrastructure (Helm, Operators)
• Selecting Block, File, Object (Traditional Storage, SDS)

Register today to save your spot. And bring your questions, our experts will be on hand to answer them on the spot.

As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. In addition to decisions surrounding what technologies to use, they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. Storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in week, days or hours but in minutes.

That’s why the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) is hosting another live webcast on Kubernetes in the Cloud (Part 2) on July 17, 2019. In part one of this three part series, we covered the high level aspects of Kubernetes. This presentation will discus key capabilities IT vendors are creating based on open source technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes to build self-service infrastructure to support hybrid multi-cloud deployments. We’ll cover:

• Persistent storage and how to specify it
• Ensuring application portability between Private and Public Clouds
• Building a self-service infrastructure (Helm, Operators)
• Selecting Block, File, Object (Traditional Storage, SDS)

Register today to save your spot. And bring your questions, our experts will be on hand to answer them on the spot.