• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Computer History / Looking Back on the Storage Developer Conference

Looking Back on the Storage Developer Conference

September 24, 2012 By Stephen Leave a Comment

To say that I go to a lot of conferences and trade shows would be an extreme understatement. Although I didn’t make it to every one in my IT events calendar this year, I’ve hit nearly all of them over the years. So when I say that the Storage Developer Conference was singularly valuable and enjoyable, I hope you know that I really mean it.

I’m so glad that SNIA brought a group of us to SDC this year!

Held every year by SNIA, the Storage Developer Conference brings together extreme storage geeks to talk protocols, test interoperability in the plugfest, and generally bathe in the world of storage. Although intended for developers, I honestly felt that the content was designed for me!

Although all of the content was relevant and interesting, a few points stick out in my mind.

Ceph, Inktank, and Scale-Out

“Scaling Storage to the Cloud and Beyond with Ceph” by Sage Weil (founder of Inktank and originator of Ceph) was just as fascinating as I thought it would be. Although Sage is not a decades-long storage geek, his discussion was like a breath of fresh air blowing through the storage establishment.

Sage Weil talks Ceph at SDC12

It is clear to me that block protocols like SCSI will be with us for a long time, even as networked storage gains in popularity. But SMB and NFS are not alone in offering higher-level storage interfaces: Object and cloud storage is exploding on the scene. Between CDMI, OpenStack, Gluster, and Ceph, this new world of storage was well represented at SDC.

Ceph is particularly interesting, since it uses distributed objects as a backing store for a conventional file system interface. Although still somewhat immature (“nearly awesome” in the words of Sage), Ceph makes a lot of sense. And Inktank has attracted some great people, offering support and training for users of this “free as in puppy” software.

ReFS and Storage Spaces

“Windows File and Storage Directions” by Surendra Verma (Development Manager, Storage and File Systems, Microsoft) was nicknamed “the ReFS Session” by everyone in attendance. No area of storage is as actively and aggressively developed as Windows file systems and network protocols, and this summed up everything up quite nicely.

I will be following ReFS with great interest, but it’s not here yet. Today we have an enhanced NTFS to work with, complete with deduplication, Storage Spaces, and Chkdsk enhancements. Microsoft has tried twice before to replace NTFS – will ReFS be the one that finally sticks?

Samba 4 and PeerDist

My informal discussions with the Samba team were truly eye-opening. Compatibility with Windows networked storage is essential, and Samba remains just as relevant as it was 10 years ago! The recent acquisition of Likewise by EMC cements the relevance of Samba, and it’s great to see the team working on SMB3, PeerDist/BranchCache, and Active Directory!

Roundtable Discussions

I would like to thank SNIA for helping me bring along some friends to join the SDC experience this year. Robin Harris, Robert Novak, Jeff Darcy, and Scott D. Lowe join me for daily roundtable discussions at the conference. Watch the videos below, and see the event through our eyes!

The Tech Field Day delegates discuss SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference on Monday, September 17 2012. Stephen Foskett is joined by Scott D. Lowe, Robert Novak, Robin Harris, and Jeff Darcy, and they discuss storage for server virtualization, Microsoft’s contribution to storage, convergence, and finish with their goals for the rest of the show.

The Tech Field Day delegates discuss SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference on Tuesday, September 18 2012. Stephen Foskett is joined by Scott D. Lowe, Robert Novak, Robin Harris, and Jeff Darcy. The group talk about the day’s presentations, including a standout session by Microsoft on ReFS and HP on storage-class memory.

The Tech Field Day delegates discuss SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference on Wednesday, September 19 2012. Stephen Foskett is joined by Scott D. Lowe, Robert Novak, Robin Harris, and Jeff Darcy. We discuss the day’s presentations, including the morning keynote on shingled disk by Garth Gibson. Other topics include plans by Pure Storage and Nutanix to take over the world, how marketing drives some companies the wrong way, erasure coding and deduplication in Microsoft’s NTFS, BranchCache, and our plans for Fibre Channel over Token Ring.

Stephen’s Stance

If I could only attend one conference next year, it would be the Storage Developer Conference. Any storage developer who geeks out about storage as much as me should definitely be there next year. And the rest should watch the web site (and this blog) as the presentations and videos are released! In the mean time, go watch last year’s at the SNIA site!

Disclaimer: SNIA paid for passes and travel to SDC, and paid my company to produce the Tech Field Day Roundtables there. But this blog post was not solicited and is genuinely my own opinion.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying…
  • What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me
  • GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But…
  • Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

Filed Under: Computer History, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage Tagged With: Ceph, Inktank, Jeff Darcy, Microsoft, PeerDist, Robert Novak, Robin Harris, Sage Weil, Samba, Scott D. Lowe, SDC, SMB 3.0, SNIA, Storage Developer Conference

Primary Sidebar

Information retrieval consists of four main stages: Identifying the exact subject of the search; Locating this subject in a guide which refers the searcher to one or more documents; Locating the documents; Locating the required information in the documents.

Douglas John Foskett

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

May 29, 2020

What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

May 28, 2019

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

April 6, 2019

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Replacing Google Reader With Feedbin and Reeder

    May 5, 2013

    Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5.1

    September 4, 2012

    Why Big Disk Drives Require Data Integrity Checking

    December 19, 2014

    Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5

    July 16, 2011

    The Rack Endgame: Converged Infrastructure and Disaggregation

    September 19, 2014

    ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

    July 10, 2017

    Virtualized and Distributed Storage: This Time For Sure!

    September 2, 2014

    Why You Should Never Again Utter The Word, “CIFS”

    February 16, 2012

    Frequent Flier Kung Fu for Novices

    March 12, 2012

    Generation 3 drobo: Fall In Love All Over Again

    April 9, 2015

    Copyright © 2021 · Log in