For client applications interacting with SMI-S implementations, PyWBEM is a python package that provides access to WBEM Servers. It also provides a mechanism for mocking WBEM Servers. In this presentation, Mike Walker will provide an overview of PyWBEM, with an emphasis on how to learn to interact with SMI-S, through open-source mockup SMI-S 1.8.0 WBEM servers available on Github.

Over the past year many improvements have been made in Linux for accessing files remotely. This has been a great year for cifs.ko with the addition of new SMB3.1.1 features and optimizations. It continues to be the most active network/cluster file system on Linux. Improvements to performance with handle leases (deferred close), multichannel, signing improvements, huge gains in read ahead performance, and directory and metadata caching improvements have been made. And security has improved with support for the strongest encryption, and more recently the exciting work on QUIC.

Object Storage is increasingly getting used on premises for a variety of use cases some of which consist of primary and critical applications. Such use cases and applications require enterprise grade Data protection and disaster recovery capabilities. Replication of S3 compatible Scale Out Object Storage presents unique challenges that are unlike found in traditional block or file storage. Replication of object storage system is done at individual bucket and object level and it not only has to deal with data replication but also object specific constructs like metadata and tags.

Quantum computers with the capability to threaten the cryptography used today may seem a long way off, but they already pose a threat to both data and systems that we are protecting today. This talk will introduce the quantum threat and discuss why this is already a topic for today and not sometime in the future when large quantum systems will emerge, with particular considerations for long-term secure storage. This will be followed by an overview of the race to standardize new cryptographic algorithms that are secure even against large quantum computers of the future.

Current storage technologies include a range of security features and capabilities to allow storage to serve as a last line of defense in an organization’s defense in depth strategy. However, the threat landscape continues to change in negative ways, so new responses are needed. Additionally, the storage technology itself is changing to address the increased capacity and throughput needs of organizations. Technical work in ISO/IEC, IEEE, NVM Express, DMTF, OpenFabric Alliance, Trusted Computing Group (TCG), Open Compute Project (OCP), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), etc.

The new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)-4.1 (INCITS 567) technology is being deployed in the market for use in practically every industry, including hyperscale data centers, banking, education, government, healthcare and manufacturing. It maintains backwards compatibility with previous-generation SAS implementations, which means that older drives will be compatible with newer storage controller and SAS expander products.

For the last eight years Backblaze has collected daily operational data from the hard drives in our data centers. This includes daily SMART statistics from over 250,000 hard drives, and SSDs, totaling nearly two exabytes of storage, and totaling over 200 million data points. We'll use this data to examine the following: - the lifetime failure statistics for all the hard drives we have ever used. - how has temperature effects the failure rate of hard drives. - a comparison the failure rates of helium filled hard drives versus air-filled hard drives.

While the Open Source cross-platform OpenZFS file system and volume manager provides advanced block-level features including checksumming, snapshotting, and replication to mitigate ransomware at the POSIX level, the evolving nature of ransomware dictates that no technology should rest on its laurels. This developer and administrator-focused talk will explore strategies for hardening OpenZFS and its supported operating systems towards a goal of total storage immutability without authorization.

The information explosion is making the storage industry look to new media to meet increasing demands. Molecular storage, and specifically synthetic DNA, is a rapidly evolving technology that provides high levels of physical data density and longevity for archival storage systems. Major challenges to the adoption are the higher error rates for synthesis and sequencing, as well as the different nature of errors. Unlike traditional storage media, erroneous insertions and deletions are a common source of errors in DNA-based storage sys- tems.

Delivering high throughput and/or high IO rates while minimizing command execution latency is a common problem to many storage applications. Achieving low command latency to implement a responsive system is often not compatible with high performance. The ATA NCQ IO priority feature set, supported today by many SATA hard-disks, provides a coarse solution to this problem. Commands that require a low latency can be assigned a high priority, while background disk accesses are assigned a normal priority level.