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Better Together And Storage Tokens
Tom Coughlin
The increasing performance and lowering costs for solid state storage and memory technologies has prompted the creation of new computer architectures that can take advantage of these devices to enable the solution of real-world problems, such as artificial intelligence (AI) to support the internet of things (IoT), rapid data analysis and discovery and the creation of more realistic games and other entertainment.
The memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Gen-Z consortium and the OpenFabrics Alliance will help to cement interoperability of in-box and rack products and more distributed and composable infrastructure.
The Gen-Z consortium is developing an open systems interconnect designed to provide memory-semantic access to data and devices via direct-attached, switched or fabric topologies. The figure below shows how Gen-Z would provide access to external pooled memory and compute accelerators (with CXL running on PCIe) is used with a compute node.
GenZ Figure
Gen-Z Fabric Connecting Compute Nodes with Memory and Accelerator Pools
The Gen-Z Consortium also recently released its Gen-Z Fabric Management Specification 0.7 Draft to the public. The draft specification defines in-band management for composable compute, memory and storage using industry-standard protocols; and outlines key system features and requirements which must be supported by the Gen-Z fabric's management stack
The OpenFabrics Alliance promotes remote direct memory access (RDMA) switched fabric technologies for server and storage connectivity.
The MOU between the two organizations is intended to advance the industry standardization of open-source fabric management and the corresponding software. The two organizations believe that an open-source fabric management framework that is adaptable to existing and emerging fabrics is beneficial to the industry, as it preserves client software investment as fabrics change and as new fabrics emerge.
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Potential activities outlined in the agreement include joint development of a roadmap guiding future enhancements and development of the OpenFabrics libfabric API as well as an abstract fabric manager built on the concepts of Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF) Redfish standard. Redfish is a widely adopted infrastructure management interface industry standard that is designed to be scalable, allowing it to target systems ranging in size from small clusters all the way up to the largest HPC systems. Developments supporting fabric management for high-performance memory, processor and accelerator interconnect fabrics will continue to evolve, leveraging the concepts of Redfish.
Storj Labs has been developing the idea of peer-to-peer cloud storage using reserved storage space on individual connected storage, including network attached storage (NAS) devices for several years. In March the company launched its Tardigrade decentralized storage network and it just released an app for users of QNAP's NAS devices to generate cryptocurrency revenue from unused hard disk drive capacity and bandwidth.
The Tardigrade storage network consists of digital storage space provided by storage node operators (SNOs) who will commit a certain level of storage capacity availability to their connected Linux, MacOS or Windows storage devices. These SNOs then provide storage space for the Tardigrade storage network where customers can store sharded encrypted files. The company says that current total capacity is about 17 PB with 12 PB in use and about 6,500 storage nodes at the time of the QNAP launch. 2,300 people have joined the network. The company says that it can grow capacity much faster than traditional cloud companies, assuming they get the users.
The files are broken into 256 MB encrypted pieces that are then broken up into 95 fragments. 80 of these fragments are scattered to different locations and hard disk drives. It only takes recovering 30 of these 256 MB pieces to restore the entire the encrypted file (stored using Reed-Solomon erasure coding).
In exchange for sustaining their nodes at 99.9% availability, SNOs receive payment in STORJ tokens. These tokens are run on the Ethereum platform and represent cryptographically tracked value. STORJ tokens can buy storage space on the Tardigrade network and API-series associated with the service. The value of these tokens is subject to various factors, including the supply of and demand for storage. According to The Register, actual user income from their storage isn't that much, about $1.50 per TB per month for static storage and $20 per TB of storage egress per month.
Closer standardization work between Gen-Z and the OpenFabric Alliance will lead to interoperable high performance storage fabrics both within enclosures and between them. Storj Labs peer-to-peer cloud storage lets users earn tokens for their unused storage.