Rapidly increasing data sizes, the high cost of data movement, and the advent of fast, NVMe-over-fabric based flash enclosures have led to the exploration of computation near flash for more efficient and economical storage solutions. Ordered key-value stores, commonly developed as software library code that runs inside application processes such as LevelDB and RocksDB, are one of many storage functions that can potentially benefit from offloaded processing.

DMTF has released SPDM version 1.3, with a number of enhancements to the protocol. These include: - Support for multiple keys - Event notification - Improvements in measurement handling - A hash-extended measurement mechanism - Endpoint identification - Even more support for extensibility by industry partners Status of libspdm, an open source implementation of the SPDM protocol on github. These changes enable new capabilities to be built on top of SPDM to enable a variety of solutions. Work on SPDM v1.4 is already underway.

TP4159 PCIe Infrastructure for Live Migration is an upcoming NVM Express® (NVMe) feature. The over-arching flow of Live Migration as viewed from an SSD will be discussed. Concerns for Live Migration state machine transitions, Virtual Memory (VM) addresses, log entry timings, and other implementation nuances will be highlighted. Attendees will obtain an understanding of both Source and Target SSD expected behaviors for Live Migration. In combination with the NVMe spec, attendees will be better prepared to implement an industry-compliant Live Migration feature for SSDs.

New technologies and platforms have laid waste to the assumptions of fixed-size, monolithic memory. Multiple layers of CXL-attached memory and persistent memory now provide a wide variety of types and speeds of memory available to developers of future systems. We will compare these various tiers of memories, whether inside the box or remotely attached. Next, we will examine how users and consumers of multi-tiered memory can make use of their varying characteristics, such as latency and persistence.

HPC architectures increasingly handle workloads where the working data set cannot be easily partitioned or is too large to fit into node local memory. We have defined a system architecture and a software stack to enable large data sets to be held in fabric-attached memory (FAM) that is accessible to all compute nodes across a Slingshot-connected HPC cluster, thus providing a new approach to handling large data sets.

CXL, an open industry standard interconnect, addresses the growing high-performance computational workloads to support heterogeneous processing and memory systems with applications in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Analytics, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloudification of the Network and Edge, communication systems, and High-Performance Computing by enabling coherency and memory semantics on top of PCI Express® (PCIe®) based I/O semantics to optimize performance in evolving usage models.

2023 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 and potentially imposing requirements that necessitate adjustments to security capabilities, controls, and practices to reflect new realities. By the end of 2023 there will be significant changes to security standards and specifications relevant to storage.

Current clustered Samba uses its homegrown distributed database "ctdb" as a storage backend for maintaining coherent fileserver state. ctdb predates most cloudy distributed NoSQL databases that came to rise on the wings of the likes of Google Bigtable, Amazon Dynamo, Apache Cassandra and so on in the 2000's. It has worked extremely well for the high performance scaleout NAS usecase, but the emerging shift to the cloud entails serious scalability, elasticity and managability challenges. So are there alternatives to ctdb?

The Key Per IO (KPIO) project was a joint initiative between NVM Express® and the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Storage Work Group to define a new KPIO Security Subsystem Class (SSC) under TCG Opal SSC for NVMe® class of Storage Devices. Self-Encrypting Drives (SED) perform continuous encryption on user accessible data based on contiguous LBA ranges per namespace. This is done at interface speeds using a small number of keys generated/held in persistent media by the storage device. KPIO allows a large number of encryption keys to be managed and securely downloaded into the NVM subsystem.

As industries grapple with an ever-expanding and complex sea of data, there is a paramount need for rethinking storage and analytics. Traditionally, data is categorized as structured or unstructured, but at AirMettle, we perceive data through a different lens. Most data embodies a semi-structured nature, an overlooked characteristic that holds the key to unlocking unprecedented efficiency in data analytics.