Modern memory, storage and content delivery systems are built out of myriad components that provide a dizzying set of parameters used to optimize their cost or performance. By modularly simulating the components into building blocks, we show how you can quickly try many different sets of configurations. This modularity also allows plugging in alternative or proprietary components to measure their impact on the overall system cost and performance. These simulations can be built in days or weeks, instead of the months to years needed to build and test live systems.

At SNIA SDC 2022, we introduced Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer (CSAL), a host based FTL deployed at scale at Alibaba, which doubled VM density and cut time to insight in half in their cloud services. To deliver these technology benefits to more customers, we released CSAL to open source in SPDK v22.09 and at SNIA SDC 2023 we are announcing a reference design published on the SPDK website. With Intel winding down Optane and the increased availability of dense QLC SSDs, the need for CSAL has increased. Accordingly, Solidigm has acquired the CSAL technology and development team.

In today's data-driven world, the demand for high-speed and reliable storage networks is constantly increasing. Fibre Channel (FC) has long been a preferred choice for storage area networks (SANs) due to its performance, scalability, and robustness. To meet the evolving needs of modern virtualized data centers, Fibre Channel introduced a groundbreaking feature known as Virtual Lanes (VLs), which allows for efficient resource utilization and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS).

Welcome and opening remarks by Jason Molgaard Co-Chair SNIA Technical Council and Principal Storage Solutions Architect Solidigm

Given LANL simulations can generate a Petabyte of data per time step with thousands to tens of thousands of time steps, data gravity is a huge concern at the lab. Performing analytics on this data to find and understand interesting features on simulation output is extremely expensive requiring movement of Petabytes of data and a data analytics platform with enough memory, not storage, to hold a full timestep (Petabyte).

Building on Optimizing Complex Hierarchical Memory Systems through Simulation from SDC 2023, this talk details recent work to optimize caching systems used in Content Delivery Networks, or CDNs. CDNs are built out of groups of servers at a variety of locations with various tiers and types of caches. Modern CDN caches present a huge array of variable configurations.

This session will give a brief overview of CXL and its evolution and then focus on possible use cases for storage.

In order to develop open source CXL ecosystem software it has proven useful to emulate CXL features within the QEMU project. In this talk, I will introduce the current major CXL features that QEMU can emulate and walk you through how to set up a Linux + QEMU CXL environment that will enable testing and developing new CXL features. In addition, I will highlight some of the limitations of QEMU CXL emulation.