The SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) is working to create and publish an open industry standard specification for storage management that defines a customer centric interface for the purpose of managing storage and related data services. This specification builds on the DMTF’s Redfish specification’s using RESTful methods and JSON formatting. This session will present an overview of the specification being developed by SSM including the scope targeted in the initial (V1) release in 2016 vs later (2017).

Virtualization has offered the ability to execute diverse applications (ERP, Exchange,Database etc..) on parallel VM’s in a shared hardware platform. This in turn has imposed challenges w.r.t. efficient resource scheduling/allocation to cater CPU and Network intensive workloads with several traits- random vs sequential, large vs small I/O request size, read vs. write ratio, and degree of parallelism.

BetrFS is a new file system that outperforms conventional file systems by orders of magnitude on several fundamental operations, such as random writes, recursive directory traversals, and metadata updates, while matching them on other operations, such as sequential I/O, file and directory renames, and deletions. BetrFS overcomes the classic trade-off between random-write performance and sequential-scan performance by using new "write-optimized" data structures.

Cinder has long been a key component in OpenStack for providing block storage. It provides support for a broad variety of storage backends ranging from LVM, NFS shares, FC and iSCSI SANs, and more. Yet with all these options, Cinder provides one consistent API abstraction that can be used to manage those varied storage options. But what many don’t realize is – Cinder can be used for much more than OpenStack. Over the last several releases, there has been a focus on making Cinder a viable stand alone storage management interface.

Cloud-native frameworks are becoming a de-facto choice for deploying scalable micro-services. Flash based storage manageability in the container frameworks need to evolve to deliver scalable storage services to container workloads. OpenSDS (Linux Foundation project) aims to provide a unified software-defined storage control plane to simplify flash storage manageability to service on-prem and cloud micro-services.

Machine Learning, Video Processing, Analytics, and IoT all run on data, and typically, they require massive amounts of data. This data is needed by data scientists, line of business, developers and others. Object storage, which is the default storage for the PBs and EBs of unstructured data in clouds, has brought huge efficiencies to these application-centric use cases. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of object storage, using IBM's Cloud Object Storage (formerly Cleversafe) as an example.

Interest in object-based and software defined storage, such as CEPH, OpenStack Swift, SNIA CDMI and Amazon S3, is expanding rapidly. Is it still just for non-mission critical or archiving applications or can it really be used for more performance-sensitive production application workloads? If so, how can one prove that these newer storage approaches can handle such workloads? Where are the performance limits? What are the testing parameters that the industry should be most concerned about?

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) Project released an open source NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) software target in conjunction with release of the NVMe-oF specification in 2016. This target has continued to evolve to ensure linear scaling with the addition of CPU cores, NICs, and NVMe devices, all while maintaining the low latency characteristics of RDMA and FC. This talk will address a number of challenges encountered during this evolution of the SPDK NVMe-oF target including:

In November 2018, NVMe.org has ratified the NVMe/TCP standard in record time. TCP/IP is the most widely used network protocol of them all, well-known and widely- implemented in every data center. NVMe/TCP brings the power of NVMe over Fabrics to TCP/IP networks by mapping NVMe commands and data movement onto TCP. NVMe/TCP provides performance and latency that are comparable with RDMA without requiring any network changes. Nevertheless, by going over a lossy IP network, any NVMe/TCP implementation must deal with certain network issues such as packet loss and retransmissions.

We present NOVA, a free, open-source, Linux file system designed to maximize performance on NVDIMM-based storage systems while providing strong consistency guarantees. Experimental results show that, on write-intensive workloads, NOVA provides a 2.5x times greater throughput and 4.5x lower latency than EXT4-DAX and is as fast or faster than any other currently available NVDIMM file system. NOVA also provides strong data and metadata integrity guarantees in the face of NVDIMM media and system failures. The talk will describe NOVA’s design, features, and performance characteristics.