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. BoFs may be scheduled during the conference at the registration desk or in advance by contacting bofs@usenix.org with "FAST '07 BoF" in the subject line and the following information in the body of the email:

1. BoF title
2. Organizer name and affiliation
3. Date and time preference
4. Brief description of BoF (optional)

Wednesday, February 14, 2007
ROOM	# of Seats	7:00 p.m.– 8:00 p.m.	8:00 p.m.– 9:00 p.m.	9:00 p.m.– 10:00 p.m.	10:00 p.m.– 11:00 p.m.
Ballroom V/VI	50	VMware Vendor BoF Storage Virtualization for Virtual Machines	Federated, Global File Systems: The Road Ahead Daniel Ellard and Craig Everhart, NetApp; Manoj Naik and Renu Tewari, IBM Almaden	Linux IO and File System BoF Ric Wheeler, EMC
Willow Glen	70	OSD and Its Applications Sami Iren, Seagate Research		Long Term Offsite Storage Lance Bailey

Thursday, February 15, 2007
ROOM	# of Seats	8:00 p.m.– 9:00 p.m.	9:00 p.m.– 10:00 p.m.	10:00 p.m.– 11:00 p.m.
Ballroom V/VI	50	Storage System Startups: Current and Future Founders and Employees Andrew J. Klosterman, Carnegie Mellon University	Home and Personal Storage Steve Schlosser, Intel Research Pittsburgh; Sami Iren, Seagate Research
Willow Glen	70	SNIA Trace Repository Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College

BoF Descriptions

Storage Virtualization for Virtual Machines
Wednesday, February 14, 2007, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Ballroom V/VI

This BoF will start with an overview of the architecture of ESX server, VMware's data center-class virtualization product. The main focus of the BoF will be on the architecture of the storage stack in ESX's proprietary kernel. We will motivate the need for encapsulating virtual machine (VM) state in special containers that are safely shared on Storage Area Networks and explain how we achieve that in ESX. In the second part of the BoF, we will describe how we take advantage of VM state encapsulation to enable a range of solutions such as VM mobility, availability and disaster recovery. We will conclude with a list of future directions and open issues that are interesting from a research perspective.

OSD and Its Applications
Organizer: Sami Iren, Seagate Research
Wednesday, February 14, 2007, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Willow Glen

We'll discuss the recently ratified OSD (Object-based Storage Devices) standard and its applications. We are interested in soliciting feedback from the storage community on how OSD might be utilized by current/future applications and what applications would be best to demonstrate capabilities of OSD in the short term.

Federated, Global File Systems: The Road Ahead
Organizers: Daniel Ellard and Craig Everhart, NetApp; Manoj Naik and Renu Tewari, IBM Almaden
Wednesday, February 14, 2007, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Ballroom V/VI

The purpose of this BoF is to further collaboration among vendors and researchers working on problems related to the development of open protocols and implementations of federated global file systems that provide a common namespace across different fileservers along with the ability to seamlessly traverse and access the data hosted by them. This would include file system virtualization, federation, replication and data migration implemented across heterogenous environments spanning multiple operating systems, filesystems and NAS filers while leveraging the features of standard file access protocols at the client (e.g., NFS and CIFS).

Linux IO and File System BoF
Organizer: Ric Wheeler, EMC
Wednesday, February 14, 2007, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Ballroom V/VI

The Linux IO and File System workshops were held at the beginning of the week to provide leading linux developers a chance to meet and go over recent and planned changes in the Linux kernel. This BOF will provide a high level report out on the activities of the workshop and a forum for discussing the state of the Linux IO stack & file systems.

Long Term Offsite Storage
Organizer: Lance Bailey
Wednesday, February 14, 2007, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Willow Glen

Disk to disk great but tape is not dead. Let's talk about issues regarding tape storage retention and rotation.

Storage System Startups: Current and Future Founders and Employees
Organizer: Andrew J. Klosterman, Carnegie Mellon University
Thursday, February 15, 2007, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Ballroom V/VI

This BoF is intended to solicit information from founders and employees of companies that have emerged from, or are in a startup phase. Invited speakers will be asked to present what knowledge they have gained and care to share from their experiences forming and working for storage-oriented startups.

The stated intention is to pass on wisdom from those who have been there, to build confidence in the next generation of innovators (whether they eventually choose to work in a startup or established company) and to encourage entrepreneurial ventures that challenge the status quo.

The target audience consists of soon-to-graduate students and anyone else possibly interested in forming, or working for, a storage system startup.

SNIA Trace Repository
Organizer: Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College
Thursday, February 15, 2007, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Willow Glen

The SNIA Trace Repository is a central location for hosting any and all traces related to file systems. It is planned to become the standard place for storing and acquiring file system traces.

At this BoF, we will announce the launch of the repository, discuss current status and future plans, and solicit input from the community about the best way to go forward with the project.

Home and Personal Storage
Organizers: Steve Schlosser, Intel Research Pittsburgh; Sami Iren, Seagate Research
Thursday, February 15, 2007, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Ballroom V/VI

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
• Portability, mobility, management, backup
• Interoperability between devices
• Data synchronization
• Universal DRM