Blog Oct 20, 2016

Thank you OpenZFS 2016 Developers Summit Sponsors!

The OpenZFS community is small but tight knit and the OpenZFS Developers Summit is a key part of it.

The OpenZFS community is small but tight knit and the OpenZFS Developers Summit is a key part of it. Through the hard work of our Delphix staff and the generous donations of our sponsors, we were able to organize and put on this important event. Day 1 of the fourth annual OpenZFS Developers Summit dawned onto an unseasonably hot day in San Francisco. Community members from all over the world came to hear the State of OpenZFS from ZFS founder, Matt Ahrens and the keynote presentation by Dustin Kirkland from Canonical. Other talks included ZFS-Native Encryption by Tom Caputi from Datto, ZFS Validation & QA by Sydney Vanda & John Salinas from Intel and Channel Programs by Sara Hartse & Chris Williamson from Delphix. The over 90 attendees listened to 5 hours of presentations in total and asked insightful questions of their peers giving the presentations.

We were delighted that we were able to livestream and record the presentations again this year. Our livestream was watched by people from all over the world, in Hungary, Japan, and Norway to name a few. We had 615 unique views on our stream with an average of 180 people watching at any given time. We even had one person in Auckland, New Zealand who watched 2 hours, the third highest viewing length! If you weren't able to join us, you can still watch the presentations. The recordings are available on Youtube and are already garnering many views.

Day 2 was the annual OpenZFS hackathon. Delphix hosted about 35 people at our San Francisco office to get updates on ongoing projects, collaborate on new ideas, and work together to improve this open source software. Some of the projects that were revisited include Persistent L2ARC and TRIM by Saso Kiselkov from Nexenta, Redacted send/receive by Paul Dagnelie from Delphix, and Parity Declustered RAID for ZFS (DRAID) by Isaac Huang from Intel. The event lasted for about 6 hours and at the end, everyone shared what they worked on during the day. The top 4 "best in show" received Intel Compute Sticks that were donated by Intel, one of our Platinum sponsors. They were:

zpool checkpoint by Dan Kimmel & Serapheim Dimitropoulos
preferred ashift by George Wilson
zstd compression algo by Saso Kiselkov
testing encryption with Illumos debug kernel by Tom Caputi & Dan McDonald

For a list of the other projects at the hackathon, please visit this year's event page.

We are excited that our small conference reaches so many people and we hope to continue growing in the future. This wouldn't be possible without the support of the global OpenZFS community, the work of our Delphix staff, and our wonderful sponsors. If you are interested in donating to OpenZFS, there is a PayPal button on our SPI project page.Thank you all very much and hope to see you next year!