As hardware layers in storage systems (such as network and storage devices) continue to increase in performance, it is vital that the IO software stack does not fall behind and become the bottleneck. Leveraging the capabilities of computational storage devices, such data processing units (DPUs), allows for the IO software stack to accelerate CPU and memory bandwidth constrained operations in order to fully take advantage of the storage hardware in the system.

Digital transformation is driving applications to process more data in memory and in real time. Lack of Infrastructure technologies to support such environments is pushing customers to either over-provision expensive hardware or deploy complex solutions. Enterprises and cloud providers are looking to provide more flexibility and improve efficiencies for their customers, all without requiring huge lift in costs, hardware infrastructure or applications. In this talk, we showcase VMware Software Memory Tiering including near term trends like CXL, PCIGen5, for memory disaggregation.

Introduced in 2021, Fabric Notifications developed into a key resiliency solution for storage networks. Providing the ability to respond to events impacting the Fabric, Fabric Notifications enhances the overall user experience when deploying traditional Fibre Channel SANs. In this session, the improvements in the user experience are profiled for solutions using Linux, AIX, and PowerPath. The latest developments in both standards and market solutions are also provided as an update to this exciting new technology.

NVM Express® (NVMe®) has become synonymous with high-performance storage with widespread adoption in client, cloud, and enterprise applications. The NVMe 2.0 family of specifications, released in June 2021, allow for faster and simpler development of NVMe solutions to support increasingly diverse environments, now including Hard Disk Drives (HDDs).

Persistent scripting brings the benefits of persistent memory programming to high-level interpreted languages. More importantly, it brings the convenience and programmer productivity of scripting to persistent memory programming. We have integrated a novel generic persistent memory allocator into a popular scripting language interpreter, which now exposes a simple and intuitive persistence interface: A flag notifies the interpreter that a script’s variables reside in a persistent heap in a specified file.

The exploration of computation near flash storage has been prompted by the advent of network-attached flash-based storage enclosures operating at tens of gigabytes/sec, server memory bandwidths struggling to keep up with network and aggregate I/O bandwidths, and the ever-growing need for massive data storage, management, manipulation and analysis. Multiple tasks from distributed analytical/indexing functions to data management tasks like compression, erasure encoding, and deduplication are all potentially more performant, efficient and economical when performed near storage devices.

For the past three decades, PCI-SIG® has delivered a succession of industry-leading PCI Express® (PCIe®) specifications that remain ahead of the increasing demand for a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect for compute-intensive systems in diverse market segments, including data centers, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), high-performance computing (HPC) and storage applications. In early 2022, PCI-SIG released the PCIe 6.0 specification to members, doubling the data rate of the PCIe 5.0 specification to 64 GT/s (up to 256 GB/s for a x16 configuration).

Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) is an open industry-standard interconnect offering coherency and memory semantics using high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity between the host processor and devices such as accelerators, memory buffers, and smart I/O devices. CXL technology is designed to address the growing needs of high-performance computational workloads by supporting heterogeneous processing and memory systems for applications in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, communication systems, and High-Performance Computing.

A deep dive of the methodology and tooling that we use at Meta, to improve debuggability of failures in the datacenters, especially for failures on components like SSDs where privacy requirements might prohibit us from sending the components back for FA or add custom instrumentations in our datacenter. In particular, we will talk about how the tool tracewatch coupled with Latency Monitoring log page helps us trigger trace collection on failures using BPF based triggers.

SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. In this iteration of the talk, we’ll update the audience on SMB protocol changes as well as improvements to the Windows implementation of the SMB server and client. Added to the SMB protocol is a new server-to-client notification mechanism, which enables a variety of novel use cases. We’ll present the details of protocol messaging (new message types, etc) as well as the one scenario which leverages this new mechanism (server-triggered graceful session closure).