The interest in hyper-converged infrastructure has increased dramatically in the last few years. But there is a lot of confusion in the market. Which use cases are best suited for hyper-converged? What should a buyer look for when evaluating different hyper-converged products? How to manage hyper-converged in your infrastructure? How does Software-defined Storage (SDS) fit into all of this?

Learning Objectives

In October 2016 three new system interconnect consortia emerged that could change the way persistent memory is integrated. Although their value propositions differ their combined effect relates to the scale of memory systems and the way memory integrates with computation and storage. This session summarizes the motivation and direction taken by the Gen-Z, Open CAPI,and CCIX consortia and how they might affect persistent memory.

The unique challenges in the field of nuclear high energy physics are already pushing the limits of today’s storage solutions, however, the projects planned for the next ten years call for storage capacities, performance and access patterns that challenge the limits of many of today’s solutions.

The unique challenges in the field of nuclear high energy physics are already pushing the limits of storage solutions today, however, the projects planned for the next ten years call for storage capacities, performance and access patterns that exceed the limits of many of today's solutions.

Rozo Systems develops a new generation of Scale-Out NAS with a radical new design to deliver a new level of performance. RozoFS is a high scalable, high performance and high resilient file storage product, fully hardware agnostic, that relies on an unique patented Erasure Coding technology developed at University of Nantes in France. This new philosophy in file serving extends what is capable and available today on the market with super fast and seamless data protection techniques.

High-performance SSDs with NVM Express* (NVMe) enable you to shrink your footprint, increase your storage density, support data-intensive workloads and enable storage solutions which are easier to deploy and manage. All flash software defined storage or hyper-converged solutions bring the best business value when coupled with NVMe. In this discussion we will present different ways to approach NVME through NVME over Fabrics in the data center. Join us for a collaborative discussion on the benefits of NVMe and how 2016 is a transformative year for storage.

Today’s exponential growth of Big-Data makes lossless compression one of the most important operations in a data center as it expands storage capacity, reduces storage costs and speeds up data access. Off-loading compression from processors to FPGAs can free up valuable CPU time while reducing compression time and power consumption. Moreover, sharing accelerators across a data center can further improve resource utilization and lower operation costs.

Leveraging the NVMe standard to present FPGA accelerators as NVMe namespaces allows user space code to access accelerators as simple block devices via standard in-box drivers. NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is a network protocol for NVMe that is used to communicate between a host machine and NVMe devices over high-performance Ethernet networks. Leveraging NVMe-oF allows an accelerator, that presents as a standard NVMe namespace, to be shared across existing transports such as RDMA, TCP/IP or Fibre Channel.

Manila is the file sharing service for OpenStack . Manila provides the management of file shares (for example, NFS and CIFS) as a core service to OpenStack. Manila services, like all other openstack services follows a pluggable architecture, and it provides a management of a shared file system instances. This paper discusses our work on integrating a multi-protocol NAS storage device to the OpenStack Manila service.

NVMe over Fabrics is a powerful standard that provides fast access to non-volatile memory devices across fabric interconnects. An emerging NVMe-oF transport is good old TCP/IP. Its benefits are obvious, as it is fast, scalable, well-understood, and extremely simple to deploy. TCP/IP is, after all, the most widely used network protocol of them all, and well known and heavily-implemented in every data center. The major question is how to achieve high performance and low latency with TCP/IP. As most designers know, TCP/IP has pitfalls, such as timeout-based retranmissions and incast.