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SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA

Principal Engineer, Storage Software Architecture

Intel Corporation

Kapil Karkra is the Lead Software Architect in XMG's Storage Software team responsible for the architecture of host-based FTL, Virtual RAID on CPU (VROC), Volume Management Device (VMD), NVMe, and Caching Acceleration Software (CAS) drivers. He also leads host software pathfinding activities. Kapil represents Intel in NVMe and SNIA Technical Working Groups. He drove several Technical Proposals into the NVMe and PCIe Standards including the proposal for NVMe Multiple Atomicity and PCIe Enclosure Management (NPEM) in the PCIe base specification. His current focus is around improving NAND SSD write amplification through software approaches and utilizing the benefits of Optane technologies in mixed media architectures. Kapil has spent his entire career advancing storage architectures (e.g., RAID, caching, FTLs, and storage interfaces) at companies like IBM and Intel. He has over 20 years of storage experience. Kapil holds over 20 patents, a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from National Institute of Technology (NIT) in India, and an MBA from Arizona State University. Outside work, Kapil dabbles in improvisational theater, speaking, and writing. He lives in Chandler, AZ with his wife and two daughters, ages 15 and nine.

Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer (CSAL): Enabling Unprecedented Performance and Capacity Values with Optane and QLC Flash

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Cloud service providers offer a range of storage services to enterprises, such as block storage and object storage. Currently, more data is being created, stored, and analyzed than ever before. Cloud service providers tend to extend storage capacity to meet the requirement of high-growth technologies, such as big data analytics, real-time databases, and high-performance computing. All these technologies require not only high performance but also ever-expanding data volumes.

New Developments in Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer (CSAL), an FTL in SPDK

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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.

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