BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER SESSIONS (BOFS)

Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Don't miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your time at the conference. The always popular evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic.

To help generate ideas for this year, we have listed some titles included in last year's BoF schedule:

1. Storage Virtualization for Virtual Machines
2. Linux IO and File System BoF
3. Federated, Global File Systems: The Road Ahead
4. Long Term Offsite Storage
5. OSD and Its Applications

To schedule a BoF, simply write the BoF title as well as your name and affiliation on one of the BoF Boards located in the registration area. If you have a description of our BoF you'd like posted on this Web page, please schedule your BoF on the BoF board, then send its title, the organizer's name and affiliation, and the date, time, and location of the BoF to bofs@usenix.org with "FAST '08 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Schedule (Current as of February 28, 2008)
For the most current schedule, please see the BoF Boards in the registration area.

BoF Descriptions

Dispersed Storage BoF
Organizer: Russ Kennedy, Cleversafe;
Speaker: Ilya Volvovski, Chief Architect, Cleversafe
Wednesday, February 27, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Gold

Dispersed Storage: Using Cauchy Reed-Solomon Information Dispersal Algorithms (IDAs) to separate incoming data into unrecognizable slices and distribute them, via secure Internet connections, to multiple storage locations on a network. Learn how it works in this BoF.

Federated Filesystems
Organizers: Renu Tewari, IBM Almaden; Daniel Ellard, Netapp
Thursday, February 28, 2008, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., California

The purpose of this BoF is to further collaboration among vendors and researchers working on problems related to networked and global file systems to create an open standard protocol for filesystem federation.

Google Vendor BoF
Thursday, February 28, 2008, 7:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Gold

1st Speaker: Mark Matossian, New Builds Manager
Google has quietly built a hardware company hidden inside a software company hidden inside a media company. This presentation will provide a rare peek at the evolution of Google hardware development and how Google's unique business requirements have shaped the supply chain and manufacturing operations.

Here come the TerrorBytes
2nd Speaker: Chuck McManis, Technical Lead/Manager
All of the major disk manufacturers should be shipping a terabyte drive in production this year, next year they may be sampling two terabyte drives. I'll look at several ways that this massive quantity of storage is affecting systems architecture. The three areas of focus will include CPU memory foot print, data protection, and the impact on networking these drives.

Home and Personal Storage
Organizers: Sami Iren, Seagate Research; Brandon Salmon, CMU; Steve Schlosser, Intel Research Pittsburgh
Thursday, February 28, 2008, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., California

How much time do you spend futzing with or worrying about the storage systems in your home? We all have increasing amounts of data that we keep in our homes and on our person that is often irreplaceable (e.g., photographs, videos, financial data, that one file with all your passwords in it...). As well, it seems like we can never find or access the data we want when we want it. Sound familiar? The things we want to do with our home storage often isn't rocket science (keeping replicas doesn't seem that hard...), however, it is the management of data in a heterogonous and often transient environment (e.g., PCs, PVRs, mp3 players, digital cameras, etc., that quite often don't speak the same language) that is truly difficult. The fact that our solution has to be "user-centric" and should accommodate users from grade school kids to their grandparents does not help either. These challenges parallel the often-cited overhead of management in enterprise storage systems, but the solutions will most likely take a different shape.

This BoF will be a discussion of current and new threads of research in home and personal storage. In particular, we'd like to motivate researchers and students to start thinking about:

• Seamless interaction between users and data
• Data access and search
• Portability, mobility, management, backup
• Interoperability between devices
• Data synchronization

Linux File System and IO Workshop Summary
Organizers: Ric Wheeler, EMC; Chris Mason, Oracle
Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Gold

This week we held the annual Linux File System and IO workshop which brought together key developers from the linux community for an intensive 2 day meeting. This BOF will provide a summary of what was talked about & ideas that were kicked around and a chance to meet some of the developers in person.

OpenSolaris Storage BoF
Sun Vendor BoF
Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., California

This BoF will provide a place for people to learn about the Storage Community in OpenSolaris. There are a number of exciting projects in process and many of the developers will be on hand to chat about their work. This BoF will also provide an opportunity to discuss the OpenSolaris platform and the rich environment to develop new technologies.

Petascale Data Storage BOF
Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Gold
Organizer: Garth Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University and Panasas, Inc.
Co-organizers: Peter Honeyman, University of Michigan/CITI; Darrell Long, University of California, Santa Cruz; Gary Grider, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Lee Ward, Sandia National Laboratory; Evan Felix, Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory; Phil Roth, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Bill Kramer, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Petascale Data Storage Institute is a DOE-funded collaboration of three universities and five national labs with the objective of anticipating the challenges of data storage for computing systems operating in the peta-operations per second to exa-operations per second and working toward the resolution of these challenges in the community as a whole. An important part of our agenda is outreach to other researchers and practitioners to share our resources and gather better understanding of the petascale issues ahead from all.

In this BOF we will:

1. introduce the Petascale Data Storage Institute (PDSI),
2. advertise PDSI gathered and released sources of useful data, including

• data sets of node and storage failures in large scale computing
• file access traces of non-trivial petascale computing applications
• collections of file systems statistics gathered from petascale computing systems and other systems,

3. discuss requirements for one or more petascale data storage systems and applications, and
4. lead an open discussion of these and other issues for large scale data storage systems.

pNFS
Wednesday, February 27, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Valley

pNFS is an extension to NFSv4 that allows clients to overcome NFS scalability and performance barriers. Like NFS, pNFS is a client/server protocol implemented with secure and reliable remote procedure calls. A pNFS server manages storage metadata and responds to client requests for storage layout information. pNFS departs from conventional NFS by allowing clients to access storage directly and in parallel. By separating data and metadata access, pNFS eliminates the server bottlenecks inherent to NAS access methods.

By combining parallel I/O with the ubiquitous standard for Internet filing, pNFS insulates storage architects from the risks of deploying best-of-breed technologies, promising state of the art performance, massive scalability, and interoperability across standards-compliant application platforms.

Portable Testbeds
Thursday, February 28, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., California
Organizer: Mitch Williams, Sandia

SPEC sfs2008: A New Benchmark for NFS and CIFS Servers
Organizers: Sorin Faibish, EMC; Darren Sawyer, NetApp; The entire SPEC sfs Subcommittee
Wednesday, February 27, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Valley

SPEC.org sfs committee developed a new benchmark for NAS servers that is intended to update the old sfs97 NFS benchmark and adapt it to the new storage workloads. Additional to the NFS version a new benchmark for CIFS servers was also develped. The BoF will be used to officially announce the new benchmark and discuss with the storage industry how can the benchmark help build better NAS storage. The BoF will investigate what useful features sfs benchmark can add in the future.

Storage Innovation at Microsoft
Microsoft Vendor BoF
Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., California

Trace Collection and Sharing
Organizers: Geoff Kuenning and Bruce Worthington
Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Valley

One of the most important research tools we have is traces of file system status and activity. In this BoF, researchers will get together to discuss issues in collecting and sharing traces. Bruce Worthington of Microsoft will demonstrate the built-in tracing facilities in Windows; Eric Anderson of HP will talk about standardizing how traces are stored; and Geoff Kuenning of Harvey Mudd College will review the SNIA trace repository, a "one-stop shopping" site for trace data.

Virtualization-enabled Storage Technologies
VMWare Vendor BoF
Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., California

Do you wonder what VMware has to do with storage? Are you interested in learning about VMware technologies beyond core server virtualization? Do you want to put your hands on future products?

Join engineers from VMware in a discussion about a number of novel storage-related technologies that VMware has been working on. We will give two live demos: Online storage migration (Storage VMotion) and Fault Tolerant Virtual Machines. In addition, there will be a number of manned stations with posters and demos of technologies such as Distributed Storage IO Resource Management, VMware's Cluster File System (VMFS), ESX's Pluggable Storage Stack, and our dynamic Virtual Machine instrumentation tool called VProbes.