The Inevitability of Hierarchical Storage

Andy Warfield, co-founder and CTO at Coho Data discusses the challenges faced in designing a high performance and cost effective storage system using a diverse range of emerging storage media. The presentation describes how even without spinning disks, sensible storage system design will incorporate multiple types of nonvolatile memory, including SATA/SAS flash, PCIe/NVMe, and NVDIMM. Combining these diverse types of media presents a connectivity and analytics problem in system architecture, and the presentation provides a high-level overview of some advanced techniques that Coho has developed for understanding and adapting to application workloads.