BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER SESSIONS

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.

Vendor BoFs
Want to demonstrate a new product or discuss your company's latest technologies with FAST attendees? Host a Vendor BoF! These sponsored one-hour sessions give companies a chance to talk about products and proprietary technology—and they include promotional benefits. Email sponsorship@usenix.org if you're interested in sponsoring a Vendor BoF. Click here for more information about sponsorship opportunities.

Scheduling a BoF
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 '12 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Descriptions

EMC Backup Recovery Systems Hospitality Vendor BoF
Stephen Manley, CTO, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division
Wednesday, February 15, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Garden Room

Come join members of EMC BRS for refreshments, and to learn about the interesting technical challenges facing the industry as CTO Stephen Manley discusses where backup is heading. EMC is hiring at all levels, for both full-time positions and internships. Door prizes, including an iPad2 and Iomega, will be given (must be present to win).

New Storage Technologies in Windows Server “8” (Microsoft Vendor BoF)
Dr. Thomas Pfenning, General Manager with File System and File Services architects, Microsoft
Wednesday, February 15, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Garden Room

The forthcoming Windows Server “8” operating system has a strong focus on new storage technologies and features. We’ve done a lot of work to achieve enterprise-class scalability and reliability, and the performance really rocks! Come meet the architects from the File System and File Services teams, and learn about our new file system (ReFS), the new physical abstraction layer (Storage Spaces), and some major revisions to the CIFS/SMB file access protocols, plus other cool new stuff. Oh, and we’re looking for interns and full-time employees too.

NFSv4.1 and pNFS Ready for Prime Time Deployment
Alex McDonald, NetApp
Wednesday, February 15, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Garden Room

With the latest NFSv4.1 and pNFS (parallel NFS) specifications in RFC 5661 ratified, we're now entering the implementation and deployment phase of next-generation NFS systems. An NFSv4.1 and pNFS client is available in the Linux kernel and some major Linux distributions; and the number of server implementations is steadily increasing. This BOF will offer current information on the availability of NFSv4.1 clients and servers, and attendees will have the opportunity to engage vendors to provide feedback and get information & assistance on moving to NFSv4.1 and pNFS.

View the presentation slides

Tracing and Replay
Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College
Wednesday, February 15, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Valley Room

Discussion of tracing and trace replay tools, techniques, and storage, including a status update on the SNIA IOTTA trace repository.

Permabit Albireo Vendor BoF
Michael Fortson, VP of Engineering, Permabit
Wednesday, February 15, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Valley Room

Discussion of Permabit Albireo. Both the Permabit Albireo software development kit and the turn-key Albireo virtual disk optimizer let software developers rapidly deliver high performance deduplication to existing block or file-based storage systems.

NSF PRObE Community Testing-at-Scale Facility
Garth Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University and Panasas, Gary Grider, Los Alamos National Lab, Andree Jacobson, New Mexico Consortium
Wednesday, February 15, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Empire Room

PRObE will provide a highly reconfigurable, remotely accessible and controllable environment that researchers can use to perform experiments that are not possible at a smaller scale. PRObE at full production scale provides at least one 1024 node clusters and a few smaller machines with extreme core count. The machines are retired large clusters donated by DOE facilities. The PRObE research environment will be based on the successful Emulab testbed-management software. PRObE is dedicated to systems research. The computer facility allows hands-on operation of very large computing resources. Researchers will have complete control of the hardware while they are running experiments. Researchers can inject both hardware and software failures while monitoring the system to see how it reacts to such failures. We envision this unique system will support research in many systems related fields such as Operating Systems, Storage, and High End Computing.

For more information, see https://newmexicoconsortium.org/probe

Storage Systems Innovation and New Challenges in the Era of Cloud Computing
(VMware Vendor BoF)
Christos Karamanolis, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Ajay Gulati, Mustafa Uysal, VMware
Thursday, February 16, 7:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Valley Room

A team of VMware engineers will talk about recent developments and future technology challenges related to storage systems in the era of Cloud computing. The first part of the presentation will shed light on some of the key issues in building cloud-scale resource management systems, based on five years of research and shipping cluster resource management products. In that context, we will outline the principles of VMware's Storage Distributed Resource Scheduling that shipped recently as part of the vSphere 5.0 suite of products and we will outline the challenges and opportunities lying ahead.

In the second part of the talk, we will take a step back and look more generally at potentially disruptive trends in storage technologies and future research opportunities. Growing memory and disk densities, increased solid-state adoption, emerging web-scale applications and cloud-based consumption models are a sample of trends shaping future storage systems within and across data-centers. Such trends raise unprecedented requirements not only for scalability of storage platforms but also for new paradigms of managing and delivering storage and data services. We will talk about this challenges and opportunities from the perspective of the most popular resource management software stack in today's data centers.

ZFS: The Future of the Open Source Storage Software
Matt Ahrens, Delphix
Thursday, February 16, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Valley Room

Users, developers, and vendors of ZFS gather to discuss how we are using and abusing ZFS for various purposes. Learn about new tools for distributed, loosely-coordinated development of the ZFS on-disk format. Share your experiences of integrating ZFS into your product or organization. Hear about the future of ZFS from a founding developer.