Welcome to webinar and conference season! There's a lot of updates going on that are well worth a quick glance (or more). Originally I thought that this was going to be a rather brief short-take, but it looks like it's well worth the price!
As always, links were live at time of publication.
Storage Media and Technology
I've answered quite a few questions on Quora about the pros/cons of SSDs and HDDs, but anyone who really wants to know the answer beyond the capacity/cost/speed question really needs to learn more about how these things work. Jim Handy has a really good description of Write Amplification, one of the key principles. Well-worth the read.
Secure Data Recovery writes that newer HDDs may not be as resilient as older HDDs. They explain this by stating that drive manufacturers have gravitated towards the performance- and capacity-side of the trade-off equation, preferring it over reliability. It's an interesting (and logical) take.
CXL over Ethernet? (PDF) CXL/E? CXLoE? Danny Moore from Rambus has this to say about the paper: "Here is a fun little paper, pretty fresh out of the oven. CXL + RDMA. Some of my favorite acronyms. By adding the load/stores on top of RDMA, the paper proposes that you can actually streamline your RDMA by optimizing out some of the uglier sides of RDMA like buffer sizing and management. Overall looks like there are some advantages, but does feel a little clunky to me. They add in a MESI cache layer to suck up some of that latency, but in the end they still end up with network-ish performance."
Want 1PB in a SSD? Imagine the resilvering time!
Wait, what? Kioxia has been working on 7-bits per cell for NAND (hepta-level cell)?! And beyond?
Storage Companies in the News
The Board of Toshiba announced its support for a $15B takeover offer from a subsidiary of Japan Industrial Partners, Inc., which will then take the company private.
Tom Coughlin has a take in Forbes about the Storage Implications from the Toshiba Buyout that's well worth the short read.
You thought MinIO and Nutanix were a juicy bit of industry gossip? Now it looks like Weka is in MinIO's sights. Now, Chris Evans brings up a few excellent points: once you start getting into this kind of pattern you can have some pretty significant, unintended consequences. He brings up the natural fear that end customers will have about the licenses being pulled out from under them. From a business perspective, though, it appears that Nutanix and Weka vehemently disagree with MinIO's assessment. I can't help but wonder if there is any benefit of the doubt to be given to Nutanix and/or Weka, how many other companies may be looking at MinIO as if they may be next.
Synology has announced that there are a couple of new vulnerabilities detected, including a "low severity" issue with sudo.
I've always been extremely impressed with Pliops' technology, but for whatever reason they just haven't been able to reach the mindshare that they really deserve. They have shifted, as a result, to selling 'data services' as opposed to 'computational storage, which does make sense at a certain level. (The article's title talks about porting to Nvidia's BlueField, but the article really doesn't cover that in any meaningful way).
Industry Associations and Standards
So, Scott Shadley and I did a thing with Philip Alsop:
The open-source NVMe SSD Management Utility for NVMe Command Line Interface (NVMe-CLI) has been updated by Jonmichaelhands. Man, that's a lot of NVMe!
Learn more about the new NVMe Boot specification and how it can help build stable, large-scale network storage deployments.
The DNA Data Storage Alliance has announced two new Board Appointments from Quantum and CATALOG.
(Special H/T to Meghan Zea for helping me corral some of these).
Webinars, Blogs, and Conferences
The HotChips conference call for papers is going to be from Sunday, August 27 - Tuesday, August 29, 2023. The Call for Contributions deadline has been extended to April 7.
The Storage Technology Showcase is now wrapped up, and the presentations have been posted. There are some pretty interesting presentations there, believe it or not. You need to create a (free) account to get access.
I'm not entirely sure how I missed this (though I probably wouldn't have been able to watch live anyway, given my schedule), but the panel lineup for this State of Storage webinar is top-notch. I haven't seen it yet, but let's face it: Timothy Prickett Morgan and Greg Schulz on the same panel? Count me in!
You can now register for the SNIA Compute + Memory + Storage Summit, happening April 11-12 as a virtual event. There is a lot of computational storage and CXL content, so if that's your thing you should definitely be looking into it. It's free.
The deadline to submit your proposal to the SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is June 16, 2023.
SNIA and the SODA Foundation will have a webinar on April 13 to discuss the Top 12 Trends in Data and Cloud Storage, highlighting the findings from the SODA Foundation research.
Next week, on April 4th, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will dive into ways to protect and detect threats at the storage layer at its webinar, Cyberstorage and XDR: Threat Detection through a Storage Lens.
On April 25, 2023, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum will host a live panel on Sustainability in the Data Center Ecosystem where experts in this space will discuss energy-efficiency in data centers and ways to rein in costs and improve sustainability.
April 11-12 the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) will hold its 19th annual OFA Virtual Workshop. My colleague and SNIA Vice Chair, Richelle Ahlvers, will be presenting “Diving into the New Wave of Storage Management,” on April 12th at 11:30 PDT.
Speaking of the OFA, On May 17, 2023, the OpenFabrics Alliance and SNIA will host a live webinar, Casting the Net: Scaling Management of Storage and Fabrics where you can learn how industry organizations - DMTF, SNIA, OFA, and the CXL Consortium are working together to provide elements of standards-based interface to address configuring and managing composable disaggregated resources.
(Special H/T to Diane Marsili for helping me corral many of these event listings).
Bonus Round
I've been trying to go back in time to find some interesting and unusual comedy legends that people may not have been exposed to (or may have forgotten). Every once in a while there is a sequence that immediately becomes a classic. By the way, I've met 'Storm' in North London numerous times...
It was even made into an animated movie. The style is exactly what you'd expect from a beat poem: