FAST '08 Conference - approaching ... fast!

The File and Storage Technologies conference is a pre-eminent conference for storage designers and researchers held once a year. The FAST '08 conference is nearly upon us! It will be held again in San Jose, CA, February 26–29, 2008.

I have to say I'm particularly excited about this year's conference - 6 of the 21 refereed papers to be presented are from Network Appliance and our university research partners. As a technologist at the most cutting edge storage company in the industry, this really puts a spring in my step.

Check it out:

The program:

Pergamum: Replacing Tape with Energy Efficient, Reliable, Disk-Based Archival Storage

AWOL: Adaptive Write Optimizations in Linux

Is Disk the Dominant Contributor for Storage Subsystem Failures? A Comprehensive Study of Failure Characteristics

Parity Lost and Parity Regained

An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack

SWEEPER: An Efficienty Disaster Recovery Point Identification Mechanism

What's really great about these six papers is that the authors are comprised of NetApp developers, some very bright students from several universities who interned at NetApp and university researchers. We have a great intern program at NetApp - and the students always bring a sense of enthusiasm and vibrancy to the Advanced Technology Group reporting into me.

I really hope to see you at the conference - it's always a great time - with an opportunity to meet with storage engineers and discuss where we are - and more importantly - where we are going.

See you there!

P.S. In response to availability of papers. As far as I understand it, full access to the papers on the Usenix site requires a Usenix membership for one year following the conference - which can be as low as $45 per year for a student membership. After one year the papers are available for free to one and all (for example - all the FAST 2007 papers seem to be online now). Usenix needs membership money to run, and I assume the one year incentive to become a member helps them make ends meet.

So, expect the same for the FAST 2008 conference. That said, I would note that there are often related papers on the university sites for the papers submitted to FAST. And there are other conferences more aggressive about posting their papers quickly such as SOSP 2007 - and if you follow the links off the technical program page - you can eventually access such gems as this paper on Dynamo.

Finally, the ATG Group is organizing NetApp submitted papers to conferences over the next couple months to post as quickly as possible (per the various agreements with refereed conferences and journals) on our web site - I'll update this information when we go live with that publication effort.

P.P.S. FAST is this coming Monday - and I would note that we just had John Strunk start at NetApp, co-author of a seventh FAST paper written while at CMU - "Using Utility to Provision Storage Systems".

Comments

[Shibin Zhang]

I am doing some self-study on storage technologies. Is there a way I can access the 5 papers? Thanks.

[Shibin Zhang]

I haven’t heard any response yet!

There are lots of developers like me who want to learn the advanced knowledge but can’t afford the registration fee.

Thanks,

Shibin

[Brian Pawlowski]

Hi - sorry - running around too much and wrestling with this blogging software. I am adding a postscript to my blog on what papers are available, resources, etc. Give me one second and check my blog entry again.

Happy New Year!

[Shibin Zhang]

Thanks, Brian. I read the paper you mentioned in the postscript. I could understand some of the paper. I also listened to the TechTalk Podcast Dave talked about the future of technology, I could understand most of it too (there were only few I couldn’t understand). I think my hobbit of self-study does help. I should continue if I am not getting very busy in the future.

[Jennifer Davis]

I received an email from Anne Dickinson today: "USENIX is pleased to announce open public access to all its conference
proceedings.

This significant decision will allow universal access to some of the
most important technical research in advanced computing. In making this
move USENIX is setting the standard for open access to information, an
essential part of its mission.

USENIX could not achieve such goals without the support and dedication
of its membership. We urge you to encourage others to join USENIX.
Membership helps us present over 20 influential conferences each year
and offer open access to the technical information presented there.

USENIX conference proceedings can be found at:
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/
"

So people can see this conference as well as past conferences that have included NetApp presentations.