Paper Title: Using Flash Memory Cost-Effectively in Software Composable Infrastructures

Paper Abstract: The arrival of the big data era has led to the need for an evolution in data centers. Whereas individual physical or virtual servers were more than adequate to handle traditional business applications like ERP, modern big data workloads designed for today's social, mobile, analytics, and IoT applications require a new approach that distributes the data and the processing of that data across clusters of servers. <br><br> Solid state storage is becoming a critical part of these application deployments. This talk will discuss how to build a data center scale-out solution for modern big data apps based upon so-called ''composable infrastructure'. Composable infrastructure disaggregates compute and storage into pools of available resources. Intelligent software control then easily and quickly 'composes' the pools into the right ratio of compute to storage for each app/workload. Enterprises benefit from such composability because they have to buy only the required compute and storage, and can scale the resources up and down independently according to the needs of each application. <br><br> Solid state storage presents both opportunities and issues with regard to use within a software composable infrastucture. A key challenge is ensuring the performance gains expected from solid state storage while simultaneously providing methods for reducing cost of deployment. Such issues obviously occur in all discussions of compute and storage deployment, but the continued premium cost of flash demands new approaches to making it cost-effective.

Paper Author: Brian Pawlowski, CTO, DriveScale

Author Bio: Brian Pawlowski is a distinguished technologist, with more than 35 years of experience in building technologies and leading teams in high-growth environments at global technology companies such as Sun Microsystems, NetApp and Pure Storage. Before joining DriveScale as CTO, Brian served as vice president and chief architect at Pure Storage, where he focused on improving the user experience for the all-flash storage platform provider’s rapidly growing customer base. He also was CTO at storage pioneer NetApp, which he joined as employee #18. Brian began his career as a software engineer for a number of well-known technology companies. Early in his days as a technologist, he worked at Sun, where he drove the technical analysis and discussion on alternate file systems technologies. Brian has also served on the board of trustees for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology as well as a member of the board at the Linux Foundation. Brian studied computer science at Arizona State University, physics at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as physics at MIT.