Paper Title: Flash Technology, Fabrics, Flash Storage Networking, Software Defined Storage

Paper Abstract: As the cloud services market matures, some service providers are showing strengths in certain areas while others show strength in different areas. These realizations place a new set of requirements on IT management: to provide an infrastructure that is nimble to enable leveraging and mixing on-premises resources with multiple cloud resources, and to be able to change it up as technologies and services evolve. This means the backbone of IT will need to be more network based to access resources wherever they are, and to be more software defined to integrate those resources into the appropriate workflows. This flexible model has given rise to the development of composable, disaggregated infrastructures, where data storage resources can be leveraged by applications that are not hosted in the same server. In this discussion, Western Digital will describe how data storage can be hosted outside of application specific servers with very little, if any, change to existing infrastructure, while substantially reducing costs by more effectively leveraging shared pools of data storage resources.

Paper Author: Mark Pastor, Director, Product Management, Western Digital

Author Bio: Mark Pastor is director of product management at Western Digital. In his current role he is focused on platforms for archive and cold storage as well as for federal government use cases. Mark has been in the storage industry over twenty years. Before Western Digital, Mark was at Quantum Corporation for 10 years where he defined and launched several products related to data management, AI, archive, object storage, tape libraries and autonomous vehicle storage. Prior to that, Mark was at Seagate for twelve years where he was part of the founding team for LTO technology and consortium and he was responsible for defining and launching the world’s first self-encrypting hard drives, as well as storage devices for mobile products. Mark holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from UCLA.