With a review of NFSv4.0, NFSv4.1, pNFS, and NFSv4.2, this white paper explains how NFSv4 is better suited to a wide range of datacenter and high performance compute (HPC) uses than its predecessor NFSv3, as well as providing resources for migrating from v3 to v4.

NFSv4 boasts many improvements over NFSv3. This white paper explains how NFSv4 is better suited for a wide range of datacenter and HPC use cases than its predecessor NFSv3.

FPGA-based storage acceleration promises the capability to offload the host CPU for processing intensive tasks such as error correction and deduplication. By leveraging the NVMe host controller interface specification to provide access to storage acceleration functions, existing drivers and storage tools can be used to test, benchmark, and deploy the accelerator card. We describe the design and testing challenges of implementing an NVMe host controller interface for acceleration on a RISC-V microprocessor for an FPGA acceleration platform.

NVMe Over Fabric is the latest buzz in storage industry. Almost all the storage companies are developing their storage appliances with NVMeOF support and few of the companies has already launched their product with basic storage functionality support. During this presentation, I will open my presentation with key challenges customers are facing in adopting NVMeOF based solutions and where are Industry today to solve these challenges.

Isilon’s OneFS is a clustered NAS capable of scaling to multi-petabyte sizes and handling millions of IOPS. The problems of scaling servers to this degree are well understood, but what about client operations? This talk discusses challenges of joining such a cluster to a complex Active Directory infrastructure, including customer war stories and implementation details of our scalable, resilient client implementation.

File, Block and Object storage is able to take advantage of current NAND flash to get better performance. But much more performance is possible as RDMA based storage technology originally developed for the HPC industry moves to the main stream. By enhancing a storage system’s network stack with RDMA users can see an even more dramatic improvement than by just adding flash to their storage. The technology increases the performance of the entire storage system allowing File, Block and Object based applications to take more advantage of much higher performance solid state storage.

Although new non-volatile media inherently offers very low latency, remote access using protocols such as NVMe-oF and presenting the data to VMs via virtualized interfaces such as virtio adds considerable software overhead. One way to reduce the overhead is to use the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), an open-source software project that provides building blocks for scalable and efficient storage applications with breakthrough performance. Comparing the software paths for virtualizing block storage I/O illustrates the advantages of the SPDK-based approach.

In this presentation, we introduce accelerated NVMe over fabrics (NVMe-oF) target and host solutions with SPDK (storage performance development kit) library. SPDK vhost is a userspace target designed to extend the performance efficiencies of SPDK into QEMU/KVM virtualization environments. Compared with existing kernel based vhost solutions, SPDK vhost target provides up to 10x better performance and/or efficiency while enabling significantly lower latency when used with Intel Optane media.

As storage developers we are all obsessed with speed. This talk gives a different take on speed – how slow can we go? Can we even stop? If so for how long? The talk will also analyze why this is interesting, and demonstrate that the file system interface – and the way all software depends upon it – is one of the most powerful abstractions in operating systems.

For over ten years we have been developing our own server implementations of SMB1 and then SMB2/3 running on Windows in User mode; it’s easier than writing a Kernel-Mode File System driver! Over the years we have presented here at SDC the results of many experiments we have run on the possible uses of SMB2/3 beyond naive file sharing.
The time has come to give back to the SMB Plugfest and the wider filesystem community, by open sourcing our SMB2/3 implementation, with full documentation on how to build and run this code base for your own projects.