Capacity requirements and power consumption are becoming increasingly challenging for hyperscale deployments. Technology standards bodies have been developing specific features within Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) to address these problems and offer developers real solutions. This presentation will address multiple emerging features within SAS, the technology around these features, and how they will help developers optimize their current storage infrastructure.

Computational storage in general can bring unique benefits in increasing the efficiency of CPU utilization in a data processing system. In this presentation we discuss the benefits of leveraging computational storage for offloading compute intensive tasks of object storage applications in a disaggregated storage environment. We demonstrate the ability of the solution to complement the CPU by taking away tasks that benefit from in-situ processing within the storage, thereby improving the overall system performance while lowering the TCO.

Local disk emulation using domain-specific hardware poses a great opportunity for innovation in the storage domain. Standard host-side drivers like NVMe or virtio-blk and legacy applications can be enabled to access disaggregated storage at scale using state-of-art protocols like NVMe-oTCP while increasing performance through offload of storage services to the hardware (SmartNIC/DPU/IPU/xPU).

With CXL, system software, system hardware, and applications software developers will soon be presented with opportunities to disaggregate and pool memory into a memory-as-a-service for multiple computing hosts. In this session, Charles Fan will describe the architecture of such a system, including both services transparent to the applications and APIs that allow deeper integration. The components that will be covered include (1) host-based transparent memory tiering; (2) fabric management that allows dynamic provisioning and sharing; (3) advanced data services.

There is a demand for Hierarchical memory as use cases demand higher amounts of memory capacity and bandwidth as AI/ML, database applications scale up and scale out. Software-Defined Memory (SDM) is an emerging HW-SW co-design architecture paradigm that provides software abstraction between applications and underlying memory resources with dynamic memory provisioning to achieve the desired SLA. With emergence of newer memory technologies and faster interconnects, it is possible to optimize memory resources deployed in cloud infrastructure while achieving best possible TCO.

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.

HPE will provide an overview of their experience developing an initial Swordfish implementation. This session will provide an overview of lessons learned through the initial proof-of-concept through development phases and will include recommendations to other implementers of areas that may require additional focus.

2022 has been an interesting and challenging year for storage security. The cyber threat landscape has witnessed large numbers of attacks impacting data and increased nation state activities directed at critical infrastructure. The regulatory landscape is undergoing change as well (e.g., EU Directive 2009/125/EC also known as LOT 9) and potentially imposing requirements that necessitate adjustments to security capabilities, controls, and practices to reflect new realities. By the end of 2022 there will be significant changes to security standards and specifications relevant to storage.

Computational Storage is a new field that is addressing performance and scaling issues for compute with traditional server architectures. This is an active area of innovation in the industry where multiple device and solution providers are collaborating in defining this architecture while actively working to create new and exciting solutions. The SNIA Computational Storage TWG is leading the way with new interface definitions with Computational Storage APIs that work across different hardware architectures.

A nation-state attack on the SolarWinds network management system in December 2020 compromised the supply chains of over 18,000 organizations, including the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. As these supply chain security attacks continue, there is an increased focus on securing the supply chain. Organizations are seeking to understand their risk exposures from third parties and products they acquire and use. For products, security certifications can be useful to demonstrate security functionality as well as to assure security efficacy.