This week I’m attending the Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. This event always includes fantastic content for storage nerds like me, and I’m glad to be bringing along a few friends as well! We’ll be holding live Tech Field Day Roundtable discussions at the event, and I’ll be posting videos as well!
What is SDC?
The Storage Developer Conference is a unique event. It’s not a trade show, since it’s focused on developers rather than end user lead generation. So there’s no “show floor” full of booths and babes. Rather, SDC is an intellectual conference focused on data storage, and is packed full of storage geeks like me.
Here’s a video I recorded with a few friends who have attended the event in the past:
What is Covered at SDC?
SDC touches on all aspects of storage, from cloud to enterprise to personal. There are a few main themes or tracks at SDC 2012:
- Cloud Storage (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday)
- Solid State Storage (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday)
- File Systems (Monday and Wednesday)
- Storage Hardware (Monday and Wednesday)
- Server Message Block (SMB) (Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday)
- NFS (Tuesday)
- Block Protocols (Tuesday)
- Performance and Workloads (Tuesday)
- Storage Management (Wednesday)
- Big Data (Wednesday)
- Data Deduplication (Thursday)
- Security and Identity (Thusday)
This list really illustrates the breadth of SDC and storage developments in general. We’ve got protocols (SMB, NFS, iSCSI, FCoE), we’ve got hardware (SSD), and we’ve got data (cloud, management, big data).
Then there are the plenary sessions, Birds of a Feather meetings, and of course the legendary plugfests.
The list of companies and individuals presenting is truly astonishing! Microsoft always has a huge presence at SDC, and this year is no exception. But so many other companies are presenting (NetApp, EMC, HP, Micron, Mellanox, Fusion-io) that it’s impossible to list them all!
Tech Field Day Roundtables at SDC
Learn more about the Tech Field Day Roundtables at SDC
I’m pleased to have been invited by SNIA to help spread the word about SDC through Tech Field Day. We’ve invited four delegates to the event and will be summing things up at Roundtable discussions Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. These will be streamed live over the Internet and posted for later viewing.
SNIA asked me to come up with a varied list of independent storage experts for SDC, and I’m excited with the resulting group:
- Robin Harris, @StorageMojo
- Scott D. Lowe, @OtherScottLowe
- Jeff Darcy, @Obdurodon
- Robert Novak, @Gallifreyan
- Stephen Foskett (me!), @SFoskett
You’ll find the five of us at the Roundtables each afternoon at 1:30 (Tue, Wed) or 2 (Mon) discussing whatever we found interesting in the day.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Voice of the End User
SDC is for and by developers, but end users are very interested as well. We’d love to hear from you, too! Tweet a question or comment to any of us using the hashtag #SDConference and we’ll try to work it into the discussion!
You can watch live here, and I’ll be posting videos as well.
The above player will show live video of our Roundtables on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday!
What Am I Looking For at SDC?
The most difficult aspect of SDC for me is picking which session to attend. It’s a lot like VMworld in that respect, with multiple excellent opportunities every hour! Here’s a list of sessions I’m particularly excited about!
- Monday
- 8:30: Linux CIFS/SMB2 Kernel Clients – A Year In Review with Steven French of IBM – It’ll be interesting to hear how third-party clients are approaching SMB 2/3!
- 9:30: How Many IOPS is Enough with Thomas Coughlin – Tom is always worth listening to!
- 10:35: I/O Virtualization — Enabling New Architectures in the Data Center for Server and I/O Connectivity with Sujoy Sen of Micron Technology – I’ve been interested in I/O virtualization for a long time, and Micron is busy working on some cool stuff
- 10:35: SMB 3.0 ( Because 3 > 2 ) with David Kruse of Microsoft – David is awesome, and SMB 3 is awesome so what happens when you get them together? Awesome!
- 11:35: NVM Express – Delivering Breakthrough PCIe SSD Performance and Scalability with Paul Luse of Intel – NVMe has much promise, and I can’t wait to get an update
- 11:35: InfiniBand Technology and Usage Update with Erin Filliater of Mellanox – I’m very interested in InfiniBand, and Mellanox and Microsoft have been rocking it lately
- 13:30: Continuously Available SMB — Observations and Lessons Learned with David Kruse and Mathew George of Microsoft – SMB CA? Seriously!
- 14:30: Exploiting the Benefits of Direct Native Programming Access to Non-Volatile Memory Devices with Ashish Batwara of Fusion-io – Consider this a counterpart to all the SCSI and SMB discussions
- 14:30: Status of SMB2/SMB3 Development in Samba with Michael Adam of the Samba Team – As I said – what will third-party SMB 3 clients look like?
- 15:35: GlusterFS Challenges and Futures with Jeff Darcy of Gluster.org – Jeff’s one of my guys!
- 15:35: How Can Hypervisors Leverage Advanced Storage Features? with Dr. Anupam Bhide of Calsoft – Good question!
- 16:35: Bridging POSIX-like APIs and Cloud Storage with Wesley Leggette of Cleversafe
- Tuesday
- 11:20: Windows File and Storage Directions with Surendra Verma of Microsoft – This ought to be an amazing look forward from a true storage powerhouse
- 13:00: Data Integrity in the Cloud with Christoph Hellwig of Nebula – I’m really excited to meet Christoph and hear what he has to say!
- 13:00: NFSv4 Protocol Development with Alex McDonald of NetApp – It’s Alex! ‘Nuff said!
- 14:00: NFSv4.1 Architecture and Tradeoffs in Windows Server 2012 with Roopesh Battepati and Mike Johnson of Microsoft – Microsoft talking NFS? Yeah!
- 15:05: Building Commercial Storage Systems from Consumer SSDs with John Hayes of Pure Storage – John is an amazingly knowledgeable technical speaker and Pure is doing some great work
- 16:05: Revisiting Storage for Smartphones with Nitin Agrawal of NEC Laboratories America – I have no idea what to expect from this award-winning paper from the USENIX File & Storage Technology Conference
- Wednesday
- 09:00: Storage Systems for Shingled Disks with Garth Gibson – Mr. Gibson is storage, and shingled disks are the future. Let the man speak.
- 13:15: Linux File and Storage Systems: Challenges and Futures with Ric Wheeler of Red Hat – Ric knows Linux FS, and I’m excited to hear what he has to say
- 14:15: The Btrfs Filesystem with Chris Mason – Chris is Mr. Btrfs, and Btrfs is Better!
- 15:20: Scaling Storage to the Cloud and Beyond with Ceph with Sage Weil of Inktank – No one knows Ceph like Inktank, and I’m thrilled to get a primer from the man who knows it best!
- 16:20: ReFS – Next Generation File System for Windows with J.R. Tipton and Malcolm Smith of Microsoft – This time for sure! Microsoft is back with a next-generation filesystem and this will be the best presentation to date.
- Thursday
- 09:30: Primary Data Deduplication in Windows Server 8 with Sudipta Sengupta and Jim Benton of Microsoft – Dedupe in the filesystem is one of the hidden gems of Server 2012!
- 10:30: High Performance File Serving with SMB3 and RDMA via the SMBDirect Protocol with Tom Talpey and Greg Kramer of Microsoft – SMBDirect is an exciting new protocol, and these are the best people to be presenting it!
- 11:25: Is MLC Ready for the Enterprise? with Esther Spanjer of SMART Storage Systems – A very good question!
As you can see, there’s no way I can attend all these sessions. Many overlap with each other or with the Tech Field Day Roundtables, and some happen while I’m flying! But the presentations will be distributed at the SDC web site after the event, and I’ll be reading them ravenously, just like I did with the past few years’ sessions!
Stephen’s Stance
If you’re a real storage geek like me, you simply must attend SDC. If you’re there this year, come say hi! If not, you should start making plans for next year. Be there!
Disclaimer: SNIA is paying our expenses to attend, but this post was written on my own initiative.