Hardware is getting smarter every day. GPUs, hardware accelerated networks, and non-volatile memories are increasingly replacing capabilities offered today by operating systems and software libraries. Leveraging them can yield orders of magnitude improvements in latency and throughput, but often only through the use of complex specialized SDKs instead of simple hardware-agnostic abstractions like socket or files.

This presentation is a discussion of the algorithm that utilizes a recently standardized multi-stream feature in SCSI and NVMe that provides performance and latency improvements for big data applications. Multi-stream SSDs, which is already published as NVMe and SCSI T10 standards specifications, can isolate different lifetime data to separate erase blocks, and thus reduce garbage collection overhead and improve overall SSD performance and latency. Currently applications are responsible for stream management such as data-to-stream mapping.

Application and Storage caches in modern systems must be manually tuned and sized in response to changing application’s workload. A balance must be achieved between cost, performance and revenue loss from cache sizing mis-matches. However, caches are inherently nonlinear systems making this exercise equivalent to solving a maze in the dark.
Until now!

Using scripts and automation tools such as Ansible is common when doing repetitive management tasks and monitoring systems in the data center, but writing these scripts can be challenging when integrating with different storage system management interfaces. PyWBEM simplifies these tasks when dealing with storage systems managed by the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) standard. PyWBEM is an open source Python library that simplifies dealing with storage system discovery, security, monitoring, performance, fault reporting, and active management.

Recent research has shown that applications often incorrectly implement crash consistency. We present ccfs, a file system that improves the correctness of application-level crash consistency protocols while maintaining high performance. A key idea in ccfs is the abstraction of a stream. Within a stream, updates are committed in program order, thus helping correctness; across streams, there are no ordering restrictions, thus enabling scheduling flexibility and high performance. We empirically demonstrate that applications running atop ccfs achieve high levels of crash consistency.

NVMe is being adopted inside the server to unlock the performance of solid state drives as well as newer persistent memory solutions. The next logical step is to leverage the optimized NVMe over fabrics to extend and improve application performance with large amounts of networked storage. NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe) and NVMe over RDMA standards are under definition and generating market interest. These new standards bring the performance, built-in congestion management, and ease of use that Fibre Channel brings to Enterprise Datacenters. In this presentation, we will discuss:

Open Channel describes a new interface to Solid State Drives (SSDs) which promises to increase usage of SSDs’ raw bandwidth from 40% to 95%, increase user-visible flash capacity from 50%-70% to 99%, increase I/O bandwidth by 3x and reduce per-GB hardware cost by 50%. Despite many proposals and implementations proving these benefits, industry has seen limited adoption and no standards body has integrated the concept. One of the largest hurdles to adoption is that the proposed changes permeate every layer in the storage stack, from device firmware to application.

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Three leading analysts in the Persisent Memory space will share their views on current activities and futures in this exciting area.

Unlike HDDs, which have some parameters that are specific to magnetic hard drives, SSD do not have such parameters Instead, they have other variables representing overall health of the disk. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) tools. Such tool calculates SSD health by analyzing the following variables: Reallocated Sectors Count, Current Pending Sectors Count, Uncorrectable Sector Count, as well as Percentage of the Rated Lifetime Used (i.e. SSD Life Left, whichever is available).