Paper Title: Accelerating the Qualification of Enterprise SSDs

Paper Abstract: As the use of SSDs spreads throughout today's data centers, the importance of verifying their reliability and performance before deployment increases. Drive qualification requires the joint participation of suppliers and customers because datacenters lack the ability to monitor, analyze, and replay production workloads. On the other hand, SSD vendors cannot possibly understand the challenges and behavioral issues of real-world implementations without customer involvement. Meanwhile, both suppliers and customers want to accelerate the entire process as much as possible to reduce overhead costs and get drives into use as fast as possible. Architectures are currently available for accelerated validation, and a wide range of useful tools are available to support the effort.

Paper Author: Leah Schoeb, Sr. Developer Relations Manager, AMD

Author Bio: Leah Schoeb is a Sr. Developer Relations Manager in the platform architecture team at AMD, where she engages with solid state storage vendors on storage technology futures. She has over 25 years of experience in the computer industry, with the last decade in solid state technology. She is also the Founding Data Architect at Data Glass, where she assists systems companies with performance engineering and optimization, market positioning, and benchmarking. She was previously Acting Director Reference Architecture at Intel, where she led a team of segment managers and architects managing cross functional teams for flash and NVMe based data solutions, and reference architectures in major cloud and enterprise solution design assignments. She has held management and engineering positions at VMware, Dell, and Sun Microsystems, and was also a Senior Partner at the analyst firm Evaluator Group, where she focused on storage, virtualization, and cloud infrastructure. Leah has ten publications on such subjects as optimizing Oracle, automated tiering, and solid state performance specifications, and has presented at many technical conferences including SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference and Data Storage Innovation Conference. She currently serves as the Industry Trends Chairperson for Flash Memory Summit. Leah has also participated and provided thought leadership for industry groups such as the Transaction Performance Council (TPC), Storage Performance Council (SPC), and Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). She is a member of the SNIA Technical Council and a co-founder of their Solid State Storage System Technical Work Group. She earned an MBA at the University of Phoenix and a BSEE at the University of Maryland, College Park.