Carbon nanotube memory (NRAM) promises to be that disruptive memory you’ve dreamed about: DRAM class performance in a non-volatile memory. Across all applications, from SSD through NVDIMM, and from consumer and IoT through enterprise level architectures, replacing not only all volatile memory but also the energy store subsystems of supercapacitors and batteries, NRAM is the inflection point for high performance, low power, low weight, ultra-small solutions.

Erasure codes are a common means to achieve availability within storage systems. Encryption, on the other hand, is used to achieve security for that same data. Despite the widespread use of both methods together, it remains little known that both of these functions are linear transformations of the data. This relation allows for them to be combined in useful ways. Ways that are seemingly unknown and unused in practice.

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.

This white paper provides an excellent explanation of the recently completed and approved Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (PTS) – an effort that started almost three years ago by SSSI’s sister group, the SSS – Technical Work Group (SSS-TWG).

Professional media and entertainment applications have a diverse set of digital storage requirements. Different professional media and entertainment applications, such as rendering and animation, resemble scientific and engineering modeling and high performance computing. Other aspects of media and entertainment have similarities to content delivery and general business archiving. However, for media and entertainment applications there is always a slight twist from traditional applications. Figure 1 illustrates the sort of workflows used in professional media and entertainment1 .

Professional media and entertainment applications have a diverse set of digital storage requirements. Different professional media and entertainment applications, such as rendering and animation, resemble scientific and engineering modeling and high performance computing. Other aspects of media and entertainment have similarities to content delivery and general business archiving. However, for media and entertainment applications there is always a slight twist from traditional applications. Figure 1 illustrates the sort of workflows used in professional media and entertainment1 .

Benchmarks lie. They report aggregates that misrepresent what’s really going on within a storage system.
Modern storage controllers have complex data paths that include myriad peripherals like DMA controllers, co-processors, heterogeneous data buses and other data processing engines. Optimizing these data paths can be a challenge given that each peripheral presents its own unique timing to the system, creating hidden performance bottlenecks. Aggregate benchmarks just don’t provide the kind of information needed to identify the bottlenecks and correct the design.

Order of magnitude advances in non-volatile memory density and performance are upon us bringing significant systems level architecture opportunities. Intel® 3D XPoint™ Memory, with much higher performance than NAND and greater density than DRAM has entered the platform to address the gap between the two. Intel® Optane™ SSDs are already available as fast storage volumes delivering significant application performance improvements to applications. Persistent Memory will take us further.

Many software infrastructures used in modern data centers and storage appliances rely on key value abstraction to access underlying storage and memory systems. However, the existing devices only provide a block interface via storage protocols. As a result, an S/W translation layer such as memcached, LevelDB, RocksDB, extent layer, etc is used to bridge this gap. However, the high overhead of such software layers impact on performance, reliability, resource utilization, and scalability of infrastructure.

Four years have elapsed since our first IOPS survey – What has changed? Since 2012 we have been surveying SysAdmins and other IT professionals to ask how many IOPS they need and what latency they require. Things have changed over the past four years. Everyone understands that SSDs can give them thousands to hundreds of thousands of IOPS (I/Os Per Second), with flash arrays offering numbers in the million-IOPS range, while HDDs only support from tens to hundreds of IOPS. But many applications don’t need the extreme performance of high-end SSDs.