OpenSDS is an open source project aiming to address storage integration challenges, particularly in scale-out cloud native environments with heterogeneous storage platforms. This session will provide an overview of the project including the goal and mission, value proposition, and key reference project the team is working on. The 2nd part of the session will look under the hood and reveal more detail about the project architecture, as well as some of the design thinking, goal and concept.

Most environments use Active Directory as their primary authentication and authorization source. Users and groups are stored there. Any storage system must authenticate and authorize users in some way. Samba's winbind provides a solution to seamlessly integrate with Active Directory using the same mechanisms a native Windows client uses. It provides an API to authenticate users and retrieve authorization information like gorup memberships of authenticated users.

In this tutorial, we will introduce the audience to the lunatic fringe of extreme high-performance computing and its storage systems. The most difficult challenge in HPC storage is caused by millions (soon to be billions) of simultaneously writing threads. Although cloud providers handle workloads of comparable, or larger, aggregate scale, the HPC challenge is unique because the concurrent writers are modifying shared data. We will begin with a brief history of HPC computing covering the previous few decades, bringing us into the petaflop era which started in 2009.

In an ideal world, furnishing an application with access to Persistent Memory would result in an immediate improvement in application performance or efficiency. The reality is that may be true for some applications, others may rely on middleware, and still others may require modifications. This session explores some of these alternatives, and does so in the context of the NVM Programming Model, which provides a framework for accessing Persistent Memory.

With a design started in 2006, OpenIO is a new flavor among the dynamic object storage market segment. Beyond Ceph and OpenStack Swift, OpenIO is the last coming player on that space. The product relies on an open source core object storage software with several object APIs, file sharing protocols and applications extensions. The inventors of the solution took a radical new approach to address large scale environment challenges. Among them, the product avoids any rebalance like consistent hashing based systems always trigger.

Consistent Hashing provides a mechanism through which independent actors in a distributed system can reach an agreement about where a resource is, who is responsible for its access or storage, and even derive deterministically a prioritized list of fall-backs should the primary location be down. Moreover, consistent hashing allows aspects of the system to change dynamically while minimizing disruptions. We've recently developed a new consistent hashing algorithm, which we call the Weighted Rendezvous Hash.

This presentation covers QA methodologies when it comes to testing a Storage solution on the network level. The term "Multidimensional QA" derives from the diversity of Storage solutions which is a production of numerous factors being it software or hardware configurations. The role of the QA department is to select the right subset of the above factors which will best cover the range of relevant Storage solutions. Choosing right tools is yet another challenge. We will share The Visuality Systems’ QA discipline as well as tool reviews and, if time allows, some figures.

ZFS uses an Adaptive Replacement Cache, ARC, algorithm to manage the data and metadata page cache buffers. The cache is partitioned into most recently used and most frequently used buckets. For each partition it uses ghost caches to derive even better cache hit patterns. This way the algorithm provides a very good short term and long term value differentiation and is scan resistant.

As HDD capacity continues to increase, IOPs capability has not kept up. Customers are increasingly facing IOPs/TB limitations in their workload which prevents them from taking full advantage of the HDD capacities available to them. For larger capacity HDDs to be successful in the marketplace, they will have to be able to support commensurately higher IOP.

Tape has always been a reliable, low-cost, green medium for long-term storage needs. However, moving objects to tape has sometimes been challenging and expensive. The DS3 protocol, which is an extension of the S3 protocol popularized by Amazon, provides easy storage to tape through HTTP web services. Additionally, DS3 uses the open Linear Tape File System (LTFS) format to store the objects on tape, making the data readable by many applications. With DS3, developers can easily create applications that move data to tape.

Learning Objectives