One of the best conferences for students of advanced storage concepts is the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies. This year it is in San Francisco on February 24–27 and the StorageMojo team will be there.

The final frontier
As the transition to digital data accelerates the issues inherent in massive digital storage gain prominence. Some interesting topics this year include:

  • The Case of the Fake Picasso: Preventing History Forgery with Secure Provenance
  • Understanding Customer Problem Troubleshooting from Storage System Logs
  • Sparse Indexing: Large Scale, Inline Deduplication Using Sampling and Locality
  • Spyglass: Fast, Scalable Metadata Search for Large-Scale Storage Systems
  • Smoke and Mirrors: Reflecting Files at a Geographically Remote Location Without Loss of Performance
  • A Performance Evaluation and Examination of Open-Source Erasure Coding Libraries for Storage

The StorageMojo take
Think of FAST as a tradeshow for advanced ideas in storage – and no salesman will call. The next 5 years will be a time of extraordinary change. FAST is a periscope into the clear air of the academy.

Most of what gets presented will never be a product – but the concepts will shape the products we buy in a few years. If architecture and strategy are part of your portfolio, FAST is a good investment.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.