Synthetic DNA-based data storage has been on the rise as a candidate for Data Storage due to its longer shelf life and higher data density. This technology is expected to tackle the ever-increasing demand for cold storage and reduce energy consumption of data-centers to preserve information over long periods of time. In 2021, Lenovo and IPT joined the race towards DNA synthesis for data storage application. In regards to the traditional chemical method, the established “base-by-base” synthesis promises the highest information density on short length DNA strands.

There are several well-known advantages of using synthetic DNA for cold-data storage, such as higher density, reduced energy consumption, and durability compared with the standard storage mediums used for the same purpose. The enablement of this technology in the market involves the development of cost-effective DNA synthesizers that can write the data at an appropriate throughput speed and a CODEC able to handle data from different synthesis and sequencing technologies.

Security for NVMe over Fabrics is highly sought by customers and evolving at a fast pace. Experience with initial implementations uncovered a few shortcomings in the original design of certain NVMe/TCP security features that have resulted in recent security protocol changes. Furthermore, a lack of understanding on how configured single-system NVMe over Fabrics security policies interact led to the standardization in NVM Express of an interoperability framework. This session will explain these recent developments in NVMe-oF security and their importance to achieve a secure SAN.

Almost 10 years ago, the SPDK userspace polled mode nvme driver showed performance and efficiency far surpassing what was capable with the Linux kernel. But in recent years, Linux has responded with io_uring and asynchronous NVMe passthrough interfaces. The xNVMe project has also helped storage projects and applications adapt to the ever-growing list of Linux storage interfaces. This talk will compare the strengths of the SPDK and Linux NVMe drivers, explain how xNVMe has enabled io_uring NVMe passthrough in SPDK, and share some early performance results.

Firmware update, security management and initial system provisioning need to be performed at scale, which is a challenge for many environments. Standards-based Management is essential for interoperability between the components required for large-scale deployments. Standards-based out-of-band mechanisms such as MCTP and NVMe-MI provide the basic functionality but need Swordfish to provide the client interface and scalability. Implementations have been developed as open source and upstreamed to integrate between these two layers.

Composable disaggregated infrastructures provide a promising solution to addressing the provisioning and computational efficiency limitations, as well as hardware and operating costs, of integrated, siloed systems. But how do we solve these problems in an open, standards-based way? The Sunfish project, a collaboration between DMTF, SNIA, the OFA, and the CXL™ Consortium to provide elements of the overall solution, with Redfish® and SNIA Swordfish™ manageability providing the standards-based interface.

The first Redfish and Swordfish standards appeared in 2015 and 2016. The first Redfish and Swordfish open-source implementations showed up in 2019. There are implementations that fit in the BMC, as well as software implementations, such as python, C++ and golang that run on top of an operating system. This session will provide a survey of these implementations.

NVM Express® (NVMe®) technology has become synonymous with high-performance storage seeing widespread adoption in client, cloud and enterprise applications. Since the release of the NVMe 2.0 family of specifications, the NVM Express organization has released a number of new features to allow for faster and simpler development of NVMe solutions in order to support increasingly diverse environments.

SNIA Swordfish® provides a comprehensive standards-based interface to manage scalable storage. This presentation provides a broad look at the Swordfish ReSTful hierarchies, maps these to some common applications, and provides an overview of the Swordfish tools and documentation ecosystem developed by SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG).

Emerging Deep Learning/ Machine learning and cloud native Applications at data center scale demand terabytes of data flowing across the storage/ memory hierarchy, straining interconnect bandwidth and component capacities. The Industry has responded with a wide range of solutions like process node shrink, higher capacity devices, new tiers, innovative form factors, new interconnect technologies and fabrics, new types of compute architectures, new algorithms and more to creatively leverage storage/memory tiering.