Data bytes stored continues to grow at about 40% annually. This trend now exceeds the device capacity growth rate of all existing commercial scale media types including HDD, Flash, Tape and Optical, and the gap between growth rates is about 20%. That implies that the datacenter footprint for storage will be approximately doubling every 3.5 years just to keep up. However, the roadmaps for ongoing density improvement makes the situation much more stark.

Software-Enabled Flash™ technology is being developed to allow storage developers to maximize the value of flash deployed in their data centers. It makes flash storage software-defined by redefining the relationship between the host and solid-state storage. Purpose-built, media-centric hardware focused on cloud-scale requirements, combined with an open source API and SDK, give developers tools to define latency outcomes, tenant isolation, control flash background processes, and build their own application-centric storage protocols.

Los Alamos is working to revolutionize how scientific data management is done, moving from large Petabyte sized files generated periodically by extreme scale simulations to a record and column based approach. Along the journey, the NVME Computational Storage efforts became a strategic way to help accomplish this revolution. Los Alamos has been working on a series of proof of concepts with a set of data storage industry partners and these partnerships have proven to be the key to success.

The exponential growth in data volume and traffic across the global internet infrastructure is motivating the exploration of new architectures for data centers to achieve the demand for better performance, efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO). One promising trend is to segregate the functional components of compute, memory, storage, and networking into pools and organize them as needed according to the specific needs of different workloads. This disaggregation and composability will take us beyond the classic architecture of servers as the unit of computing.

Welcome and Opening Remarks

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).

In less than two years, “AI” has gone from a nice technical curiosity to a financial, industrial, and publicity juggernaut. Beyond the hype and the inflated stock prices, though, what does this mean from technical perspective?