Former Tech Field Day delegate Chin-Fah Heoh delves into the implications of AI on storage and data management, drawing from Gina Rosenthal’s recent article about Solidigm at AI Field Day. Chin-Fah discusses the escalating demands placed on storage systems by AI workloads, emphasizing the critical need for high-performance solutions. The stages of AI data processing (ingestion, preparation, training, checkpointing, and inferencing) require high read IOPS, ultra-high write throughput, and low latency. Chin-Fah also explores the role of data governance in ensuring the integrity and trustworthiness of data for AI applications. Read more on his blog!
Spinning Disk Use Cases Are Getting Smaller
Jim Jones shares his perspective on the evolving landscape of data storage, noting the diminishing number of use cases for spinning disk technology in his latest blog post. As the performance gap between spinning disks and SSDs continues to widen, he explores the implications for enterprises and their storage strategies. Dive into his analysis to understand the current state of storage solutions and the direction in which the industry is headed.
Computational (DNA) Storage – End of Evolution Part 4
Ray Lucchesi explains the progression of DNA storage as presented by SNIA at the recent Storage Field Day event. The author explains the concept of computational storage in DNA strands and elaborates on the potential efficiency of this methodology in terms of data density and orchestration. The article implies that the technology is still in its nascent phase with accuracy rates around 70-80%, but suggests a promising future with the incorporation of innovative features like error-correcting codes (ECC).
Thinking About… Storage in 2023
Jim Jones discusses the ways storage has developed in 2023 and beyond. He predicts dramatic improvements in capacity and access speed due to developments in technologies like NVMe and CXL and also foresees advancements in how storage is managed and consumed, highlighting the emergence of hybrid-approaches involving on-premises, edge, and cloud deployments.
Preserving Data Through Centuries Without Hard Drives – Meet DNA Data Storage
DNA data storage subverts the conventional technologies, and creates a new kind of hierarchy that breaks barriers of data overload. Watch SNIA present this new technology at the recent Storage Field Day event here on the site. For a quick read, check out the article on DNA Data Storage at Gestalt IT.
Storage Short Take #69
In J Metz’s latest “Storage Short Take,” he covers a wide variety of topics in the storage industry, from Ceramic Nano Memory to the Storage Developer Conference and new developments in storage media. The blog touches on important industry updates like NodeWeaver’s bare-metal operating system, No-Code configuration tool, and the evolving approach of Nyriad. Additionally, it highlights SNIA’s new technical white paper on Storage Security, Encryption, and Key Management, and preparatory updates for SuperComputing 23.
155: GreyBeards SDC23 Wrap Up Podcast With Dr. J Metz, Technical Dir. Of Systems Design AMD and Chair of SNIA BoD
Dr. J Metz, Technical Director of Systems Design at AMD and Chair of SNIA BoD, recently made a guest appearance on the GreyBeards on Storage podcast, detailing highlights from the Storage Developers Conference 2023 and Storage Field Day and charting the ongoing research directions of SNIA. The discussion touched on topics from DNA data storage and Smart Data Transfer Interfaces (SDXI) to challenges and future opportunities in storage and memory sectors. With a track record of deconstructing complex systems and technologies, Dr. Metz’s expertise in storage networking constitutes essential listening for professionals and enthusiasts in the IT industry.
Storage Field Day 26 Is Headed to SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference
Stephen Foskett announces the upcoming Storage Field Day 26, set to take place on September 20th and 21st, in collaboration with SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference. In this highly-anticipated tech event, industry leaders and delegates will dive deep into the future of storage technology, exploring areas such as cybersecurity, data management, application performance, and artificial intelligence. With exciting presentations, roundtable discussions, live broadcasts and podcasts, Storage Field Day 26 promises a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic evolution and disruptive potential of storage technologies.
Faster and Bigger SSDs Enable Us to Talk About Something Else Than IOps
For Jon Klaus, one of the major themes at Storage Field Day this week was the state of NVMe in the enterprise. Some companies like VAST Data were bullish enough to declare the death of the spinning disk, while other presenters like Western Digital were more optimistic about the long term viability of older media alongside NVMe. For Jon, what was significant was moving beyond just a speed and feed conversation around NVMe. Instead presenters focused on why geography of data and latency matters more across the entire IT stack.
Achieving a New Level for Data Storage and Cloud Fluidity
Matt Leib has seen Pure Storage at a few Field Day events. In this post, he builds off the previous discussions the company had around NVMe to illustrate how the companies forward thinking approach to an all-NVMe portfolio enables greater density at the scale required for the largest enterprises.
NVMe and NVMe-oF 101 with SNIA: queues everywhere!
Jon Klaus gives the rundown on NVMe and NVME-oF as presented by Dr. J Metz of SNIA at Storage Field Day in June. He details the differences between NVMe and NVMe-oF and also explains why you should even care about NVMe at all. Jon also compliments SNIA’s unbiased and informative presentation.
An Introduction to SNIA
Keiran Shelden introduces SNIA after their Storage Field Day 16 presentation, explaining what exactly they do. Keiran was impressed by SNIA’s work to promote and educate about storage and recommends their educational resources.
From Viewer to Speaker: My Storage Field Day Experience
Dr. J Metz remembers his Storage Field Day 16 presentation for SNIA, relaying how he prepared and how he thought the presentation went. He also discusses what he sees as the benefit of the Tech Field Day model and gives advice to any future presenters.
SNIA and Dr. J. Metz talk NVMeOF at #SFD16
Matt Leib reflects on SNIA’s Storage Field Day 16 presentation, highlighting J Metz’s presentation and explanation of NVMeOF. He focuses in on how NVMeOF is made to optimize the stack and remove some of the barriers inherent to the SCSI protocol.
Why Deterministic Storage Performance is Important
Chris Evans looks at why deterministic performance is important in storage. This effects everyone from hyperscalers, to smaller enterprises using HCI. Chris recalls SNIA’s Storage Field Day presentation from last year discuss how the organization is addressing tail latencies as part of this issue. Regardless of the size of an organization, consistent average performance is good, but significant poor performing outliers can be a significant challenge.
Storage dinosaurs evolving too
In the age of cloud, the traditional storage admin are often seen as relics of the past. But for Chin-Fah Heoh, these old “dinosaurs” are actually evolving to become vital to the modern enterprise. This is because they have a deep understanding of data. At Storage Field Day, he’s looking forward to hearing from companies like Hedvig and WekaIO on how they solve the problems of persistent storage in distributed systems. With these difficult data question more important than ever in the enterprise, Chin-Fah thinks its the best time to be a “storage dinosaur”.
Swordfish – A Standard by Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet
Alex Galbraith hear from SNIA last year at Storage Field Day, and takes a look at the Swordfish. This defines the standards for APIs used by storage devices to make sure they’re consistent. Alex doesn’t think this will displace more proprietary approaches overnight, but if developed in parallel, may become a widely used standard. Plus, the project is designed to quickly ratify requirements when added by a few vendors, which should keep it relevant going forward.
SNIA Hops on DePop with Hyperscalers
SNIA presented at Storage Field Day, discussing how hyperscalers are effecting the storage industry as a whole. These businesses command so much storage that they can exert direct feature requests to component makers due to their unique scale. Rich Stroffolino looks at the effects of low percentage tail latency on application performance, and the DePop standard that was developed to address it.
What the heck is tail latency?
Mark May elaborates on the problem of tail latency, as presented on by SNIA at Storage Field Day. According to SNIA, these spikes in latency can be up to ten times as bad as average latency. Mark says that this problem could be fixed by building smarter software that can tag an IO with a retry policy hint, allowing it to favor response time over data recovery. According to SNIA, over 2% of IO may be suffering due to tail latency. Mark knows this is a real problem and hopes it can be fixed in the near future.
SNIA’s Swordfish Is Better Than The Film
At Storage Field Day, SNIA presented on their Swordfish, their scalable storage management standard. With the way that storage has radically changed in the data center over the last fifteen years, Dan think that projects like Swordfish demonstrate just how vital SNIA has become in the industry.
