LISA '09 Opening Remarks, Awards, and Keynote

LISA '09 Program Chair: Adam Moskowitz

Keynote Address
Ahead in the Cloud: The Power of Infrastructure as a Service

Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com

Building a reliable, flexible infrastructure that can scale up or down at a moment's notice can be a complicated, expensive challenge, but it's essential for businesses today, whether they are enterprises trying to cut costs, young businesses saturated with customer demand, or start-ups about to launch. This talk will review lessons learned from building Amazon.com, one of the world's largest distributed systems. It will focus on state management, a key factor for scalability, reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness.

Data Storage Day Welcome

The Evolution of Storage Networking and the Current Trends in the Industry
This session sets the stage for the subsequent lectures at Data Storage Day. We start by looking at how today's enterprise SAN and NAS solutions evolved from humble direct-attached disk and file servers. We then turn our sights to the industry trends that are shaping the current wave of innovation. Specifically, we are interested in deduplication, storage virtualization, solid state storage devices, automated management of tiered storage, cloud storage, and massively scalable file systems.

Deduplication and Single Instance Storage: Practical Applications for Backups, Archiving, and Primary Storage
Deduplication (dedupe) and single instance storage (SIS) are perhaps the hottest topics in the storage industry. EMC just acquired a dedupe startup for over two billion dollars! Meanwhile, all of the leading backup vendors are scrambling to integrate dedupe into their products.  But this is just the beginning of a major new technology trend! Dedupe offers benefits not just for backups, but also for cloud storage, archiving, virtual desktops, and even primary storage for high performance production servers and VMs.

This session is broken into three parts:

1. The first section discusses the fundamental technology of dedupe, revealing both the shortcomings of current approaches and the opportunities for new solutions. 
2. The second section focuses on dedupe for backups. We illustrate different ways to integrate dedupe into backup systems as well as revealing non-dedupe approaches that might deliver similar results at lower costs.
3. Lastly, we describe applications for dedupe and SIS in rich media archives, virtual desktops, and primary storage.

Lunch Break

Visit the Vendor Exhibition
Find out more about the exhibition here.

Tiered Storage and Life Cycle Management: Running the Gamut All the Way from Solid State Disk to Linear Tape
The goal of this session is to identify the most effective ways to scale storage performance and capacity while controlling costs. The session is broken into three parts: 

1. We begin with a general discussion of tiered storage, suggesting different properties of storage devices that can be used to define tiers. We raise the question of whether it makes sense (financially and from the standpoint of complexity) to roll out a tiered strategy versus settling on a single class of storage for all of one's needs.
2. The next section analyzes the performance and reliability properties of different types of storages devices. We look at spinning disk (15K, 10K, SATA), solid state disk (MLC, SLC, RAM), and even tape drives.
3. Lastly, we look at technologies for automating the management of tiered storage in a variety of different scenarios.
 

A Primer on Cloud Storage and High Capacity File Systems
The momentum behind cloud computing has really lit a fire under the chairs of developers of storage management software and file systems.  Conventional storage technologies cannot scale limitlessly, not to mention that they are too rigid to expand and contract with the ebb and flow of the cloud. The cloud demands a whole new class of file systems and storage management approaches. As it turns out, the problems being tackled by cloud storage providers are problems that exist in private large-scale storage sites, so regardless of whether you plan to put compute resources in the cloud, you might find that cloud storage technology is relevant to you. 

This session looks at the current state of cloud storage solutions while defining the basic terminology and illustrating the major problems left to solve. Special focus is given to object-based storage models as alternatives to conventional file systems. 

Storage Day Questions, Answers, and Wrap-Up

Exhibit Hall Happy Hour

Join us at the Vendor Exhibition for refreshments, and take the opportunity to learn about the latest products and technologies.

Evening 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. Find out more here.