Conference Prostor 2018: questions and answers about the future of storage systems

Every autumn, the Radiks team gathers people who are not indifferent to data storage technologies at the annual conference PROSTOR. In the previous article we talked about how it was before, and now it’s time to take stock of the 4th conference, which took place on the 1st of November at the Red October.

The PROSTOR conference is a platform for discussing data storage technologies, these are discussions about issues and trends in their development, this is a meeting place for people who know and love a lot of money. The fourth “Prostor” gathered over 250 guests and 12 speakers with presentations, and partner companies presented 9 demo stands.
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See how it was!

Conference demo area

Traditionally, on the demo stands, there was a lot of communication, software and hardware solutions and new products from manufacturers were demonstrated: disk shelves, servers, controllers, adapters.

Traditionally, in the demonstration space, products of world industry leaders were represented: Western Digital, Mellanox, Broadcom, Panasonic, Micron, Microsemi.

Our partners from the company Netberg brought to demonstrate several new products from its catalog of hardware solutions.

Colleagues from the company "MCST" deployed a booth with a demonstration of domestic developments and presented, in particular, the Russian data storage system based on Elbrus processors and software RAIDIX.

New components for storage

Dmitry Zotov from Adaptec, Microsemi, a Microchip Company, spoke about the role of RAID and HBA in the data center and in the enterprise, and also presented a line of new developments.

Boris Neyman, Mellanox Technologies, introduced new adapters and switches, noting a significant increase in Ethernet traffic in modern scalable infrastructures.

Jaroslav Nadporozhsky, Broadcom, introduced a new generation of MegaRAID adapters and talked about the prospects for using NVMe technologies.

A detailed list of hardware solutions for storing and transferring data from Netberg was introduced by Andrey Sapronov.

New approaches to data storage

Gregory Nikonov from Western Digital presented two full reports, detailing support for the open processor architecture of RISC-V and the positioning of the OpenFlex platform.

How much faster and faster is Flash? This was the report of Artem Basikhin, Micron Technology, who noted 7 development trends, including the global increase in data and the natural growth of SSD capacity.

More speed

How to defeat the slow datapath in a RAIDIX ERA, said Svetlana Lazareva, head of the research and development laboratory at Reidix, in a presentation. The recipe is simple: Lockless architecture, fast computations, parallelization, and queue optimization.

Pavel Lavrenko from RSK spoke about the results of testing the performance of the Govorun supercomputer, which is in 9th place in the IO 500 rating, and, in general, about the merger of computing systems and data storage systems in building platforms for high-performance computing.

Successful implementations

Rufat Ibragimov from the Radiks team presented the details of building a multi-petabyte storage system (6512 disks of 10 TB each) for the Japanese research center RIKEN.
We, by the way, will tell about this large-scale implementation in the next publication!

Daniel German Šmulian, block-guy of the Israeli company Excelero, spoke about solving the problem of storage services in a distributed environment and the product, called NVMesh. It is worth adding that his inspiring report was not only about technologies, but also about the achievements that follow the creation of new technologies.

Reliability and long-term storage

The presentation of Anton Petrochenko, Panasonic Russia, was devoted to the topic of safety and efficiency of long-term storage. Anton spoke about the advantages of the freeze-ray technology, demonstrated to the audience the possibilities of a robotic library and photos of flooded data centers from different points of the globe.

Conference for professionals

Every year we see new faces at our conference. Every year we meet here our old colleagues and acquaintances. They all share an interest in what they do.

Here they talk about the future, exchange opinions, argue about approaches and discuss solutions. It is at such events that you understand that working in this industry is not just work. This is the passion of professionals who truly love what they do.