The open-source community is pushing forward new technology to make hardware more flexible, scalable, and efficient. As a leader in energy-conscious hardware design, we’re excited to participate in the Open Compute Project (OCP) Regional Summit, taking place in Amsterdam. This two-day event – tailored for hardware designers, data center architects, infrastructure engineers, and other technologists – will highlight how hardware designs support the growing demands on compute infrastructure. Here are four reasons we’re excited about the summit!
1. Zoned Storage for the Zettabyte Era
Hans Holmberg, Technologist at Western Digital, will be giving an executive track presentation titled, “Architecting for the Zettabyte Era with Zoned Storage.” As we’ve discussed in detail in previous blog posts, Zoned Storage, our open-source initiative, is a powerful opportunity to bring Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) and Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) technologies under a unified architecture at zettabyte scale.
In his talk, Hans will share how Zoned Storage can help data centers manage continuous workloads, including surveillance, IoT/IIoT, edge, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. By creating an ecosystem with synergistic data solutions, developers can:
- Leverage open source and standards
- Enable performance efficiencies by serializing workloads into zones
- Simplify firmware and provide the host with system-level intelligence for data placement
- Ensure access to highest capacities and better performance
We can’t wait to share more about our vision of this purpose-built future.
2. RocksDB Interactive Demo Booth
Similar to our interactive server at this year’s Flash Memory Summit, our booth will demonstrate end-to-end integration of zones. This integration can be achieved through RocksDB – the first database to detail the real-world benefits of our ZNS development drives. We’re looking forward to showing our implementation has garnered impressive results, from a 20 percent increase in capacity to a 20 percent reduction in TCO and a significant rise in writes!
3. New File System in Linux® Kernel
Recently, we made another important mark in the open-source community. We contributed to a new file system in the Linux kernel to program our ZNS solid-state drives. By tapping into current work in the ZAC/ZBC software ecosystem, we only had to make a few additions to support ZNS. The big advantage of this file system is that each file is matched to a specific zone, which makes it easier to program to. More open-source developments down the road, including the potential ratification of ZNS, could keep the momentum for open data infrastructure that utilizes Zoned Storage Devices.
4. OCP Futures Technology Symposium
With an eye towards the future, we’re looking forward to this new symposium that features research in the open hardware ecosystem, data center, and beyond. The OCP Futures Technology Symposium, which will have representatives from both academia and industry, is a great opportunity to connect open source innovators with the most promising research in scalable computing architecture.
Learn More about OCP Amsterdam
Follow us at the 2nd annual OCP Regional Summit in Amsterdam, where you’ll learn about new developments in data center design, infrastructure, and technology in a series of keynotes, technical talks, case studies, symposiums, expositions and more!
To learn more about our Zoned Storage Initiative, check out our developer website.