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.

Vendor BoFs
Want to demonstrate a new product or discuss your company's latest technologies with FAST '09 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 '09 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Schedule (as of February 26, 2009)
For the most current schedule, please see the BoF Boards in the registration area.

BoF Descriptions

Cloud Storage
Mark Carlson and Alan Yoder, Storage Networking Industry Association
Thursday, February 26, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., San Francisco B

Cloud Storage has emerged as a new model for storage resource allocation and provisioning. This is a natural extension to past efforts such as Storage Service Providers, Utility and Grid.

While many elements of cloud storage build on these other, past efforts, the unique aspects that seem to define cloud storage include:

• Pay as you go
• Self service provisioning
• Rich application interfaces
• No need for consumers to manage their own storage

While public clouds have received the most attention, the concepts that clouds have advanced are gaining traction for private clouds supported by enterprise IT environments.

This Birds of a Feather session will discuss the possibility of starting industry standards and promotion efforts around cloud storage. This includes common terminology, reference models and possible standard APIs.

Please join us to find out what SNIA and other industry groups are doing in this space and find out how you can get involved.

Federated File Systems
Daniel Ellard, BBN Technologies
Wednesday, February 25, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., San Francisco A

The NFSv4 and CIFS protocols permit functionality that can be leveraged to create a heterogeneous, federated-file sytem with a single namespace that spans an enormous number of file servers or clusters. Members of the NFSv4 working group, including researchers from IBM, NetApp, Sun, EMC, Microsoft, and BBN Technologies are collaborating on an open, standard protocol to build such a file system. The purpose of this BoF is to summarize the current state of the work and to invite collaboration among vendors and researchers with interest in file system federation.

How to Cheat at Benchmarking
Avishay Traeger, IBM; Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University
Thursday, February 26, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., San Francisco B

We will demonstrate how to "cheat" when running file and storage system benchmarks: it is possible to run some of today's most popular benchmarks in ways that give a false impression of the system's overheads. We will also review a community effort to improve the quality of file and storage system benchmarking, and then open the floor to discuss short-term and long-term goals, possible solutions, and research directions.

Microsoft Vendor BoF
Wednesday, February 25, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., San Francisco C

Storage at Microsoft touches a broad set of teams and businesses, with the opportunity to ship real products to billions of customers. Come talk with senior developers, architects, and technical program managers about some of the cool things Microsoft is doing in filesystems and storage. We'll explore some of the exciting opportunities we see to create new technologies, and to exploit some significant inflection points like solid state storage, multitier caching, and cloud computing infrastructure.

We want to hear from you too – expect plenty of interactive Q&A.

Open Storage
Sun Microsystems Vendor BoF
Wednesday, February 25, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., San Francisco C

Using open source software and industry-standard hardware to deliver the latest storage innovations.

pNFS BoF
Sorin Faibish, EMC; Mike Eisler, NetApp; Brent Welch, Panasas, Inc.; Piyush Shivam, Sun Microsystems
Wednesday, February 25, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., San Francisco A

Parallel NFS (pNFS) is a part of the NFSv4.1 standard that adds parallel I/O to NFS. This brings the performance potential found in proprietary HPC file systems to the NFS standard. Find out more about pNFS, including a technical overview, status on the RFC, status on the Linux implementation, and what vendors are saying.

SPEC sfs208 Benchmark: The Road Ahead
Sorin Faibish, EMC; Darren Sawyer, NetApp; and Jerry Lohr, SGI
Thursday, February 26, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., San Francisco A

SPEC sfs2008 new benchmark has its one year anniversary during the FAST conference. Last year's BoF at FAST 2008 introduced to the storage industry the newly announced benchmark and it was well received by the storage industry. This year we want to discuss new features that the SPEC sfs committee is looking to be included in the next generation of storage benchmarks. We expect to collect ideas for new features as well as new benchmarks that the storage industry is interested in.

SSD Storage Challenges
Milo Polte, Carnegie Mellon University
Thursday, February 26, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., San Francisco C

Storage in the Real World Vendor BoF
Paul Rafferty and Mauricio Rojas, LexisNexis; Sponsored by Hitachi Data Systems
Wednesday, February 25, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., San Francisco B

We will talk about the challenges we face daily, from getting disk approved to figuring out what kind of disk gets assigned for each project. We will touch on trouble points, our solutions to some of these problems, and go over metrics. In short, it will give vendors and academics a view into the "real world."

Storage Tracing and Trace Sharing
Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College and SNIA IOTTA TWG
Thursday, February 26, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., San Francisco A

Traces continue to be critical in storage research. At this BoF we will discuss tracing tools and techniques, standardization efforts, and trace availability and activity at the SNIA IOTTA Trace Repository.

Storage Technologies and Challenges in Virtualized Environments
VMware Vendor BoF
Ajay Gulati, VMware Inc.
Thursday, February 26, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., San Francisco C

Storage technologies are playing an increasingly major role in enhancing the capabilities of virtualized environments.
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 get a glimpse of some of the future products and what applications they can enable?

Join engineers from VMware in a discussion about a number of novel storage-related technologies that VMware has been working on. We will also discuss some of the currently open problems and challenges related to better storage performance and management.

We will give two live demos:
1) Online storage migration (Storage VMotion)
2) Transparent and efficient workload characterization of VM workloads inside ESX Server

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, VM aware storage (VMAS) and our dynamic Virtual Machine instrumentation tool called VProbes.