FAST '17 Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions

BoF Schedule

Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Don't miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your time at the conference. Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic.

Scheduling a BoF

It's not too late! To schedule a BoF, simply write the BoF title as well as your name and affiliation on the BoF board located in the registration area. If you have a description of your BoF you'd like posted on this Web page, please schedule your BoF on the BoF board, then send its title, the organizer's name and affiliation, and the date, time, and location of the BoF to bofs@usenix.org with "FAST '17 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Descriptions

USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC BoF)
Monday, February 27, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Tasman Room
Let’s talk about women in advanced computing. All registered attendees—of all genders—are welcome to attend this BoF.

Students and Young Professionals Meetup
Monday, February 27, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Tasman Room
Come for the refreshments, stay for the opportunity to meet and network with other students and young professionals.

Board Game Night
Monday, February 27, 9:00 pm–11:00 pm, Tasman Room
Join us for some good old-fashioned board games. We’ll have some on hand, but bring your own games, too!

Tracing and Measurement
Organizers: Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College, and Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University
Tuesday, February 28, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Central Room
Discussion of recent activity in tracing and measurement. Erez Zadok will preview the new strace2ds tool, which captures system-call traces into the DataSeries format. Geoff Kuenning will review the current status of and future plans for the SNIA IOTTA Trace Repository, which is transitioning from NSF to community support.

Tintri Vendor BoF: "Experiences Building a Cloud-based Analytics Platform for Tintri Storage Arrays"
Andrew Large, Tintri
Tuesday, February 28, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Grand Ballroom DE
We’ll talk about the motivation for building a cloud-based analytics platform for Tintri customers, some of the (product, management, and technical) challenges we encountered, and how we tackled those challenges.

Deduplication Researchers Meetup
Philip Shilane, Dell EMC
Tuesday, February 28, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Tasman Room
Let’s discuss open problems and future research for deduplicated storage.

IBM Cloud Object Storage Vendor BoF
Jason Resch, IBM Cloud Storage Object Storage
Wednesday, March 1, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Tasman Room
IBM Cloud Object Storage was built upon the acquisition of Cleversafe, a highly innovative company that pioneered the application of erasure codes to object storage. A significant number of innovations were made over its 12 year history, and the company enjoyed one of the highest patent-per-employee ratios in the world. In this BoF session, we will cover the highlights from a decade of R&D and hear stories behind some of the most significant discoveries and innovations we made during the past 12 years.

Jason Resch has 18 years of professional software engineering experience and is presently a Senior Software Architect at IBM Cloud Object Storage (formerly Cleversafe, Inc.)—a company that pioneered the application of Erasure Codes to Object Storage.

SNIA Long Term Data Retention Survey
Wednesday, March 1, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Central Room
Ten years ago, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) 100 Year Archive Task Force developed an influential survey that was intended to determine the requirements for long-term digital information retention in the data center. The survey was a leading instrument, bringing awareness to the extreme problem of long term digital information retention, and led to the development of the SNIA Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF). Since that time, much has happened to improve the situation. Major efforts have been undertaken to solve elements of the problem in groups like the US Library of Congress, UK National Archives, SMTPE, SNIA, EU/CASPAR, etc. In addition, several commercial software packages and cloud services are now available providing preservation services. However, what is not clear, is whether these tools are being used widely and whether needs are being met. The SNIA Long Term Retention Special Interest Group (LTR SIG) and the Data Protection and Capacity Optimization (DPCO) committee have recently begun an effort to develop a new 100 Year Archive survey. The goal of this new survey is to assess:

• What has changed in 10 years, are the key tenants of the original survey still true?
• Have business drivers changed? Have businesses raised or lowered the perceived priority of data preservation?
• What preservation methods are being used? What systems, and how are they being consumed (i.e., in a data center or in the cloud)?
• Are users meeting their goals for data preservation? What challenges remain?

To better define the surveys goals, target populations, and specific questions, SNIA is soliciting input from storage, preservation, and archiving professionals. Please attend this BoF to find out how to participate, or to find out more about ongoing work at SNIA.