Special SDI Seminar - Ethan Miller
April 22, 2026 12:30PM—1:30PM
Location:
In Person
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Panther Hollow Conference Room 4105, Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center
Speaker:
ETHAN L. MILLER,
Engineer, Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage)
https://ethanmiller.org/
This talk describes early design ideas for an alternate approach to archival storage: low-cost, high-capacity flash storage. Long-term archival storage is typically implemented using disk or nearline media such as tape and optical media. While this approach is relatively inexpensive, it limits access to archival data behind a slow interface with limited bandwidth. In contrast, high-density QLC flash storage shipping today can fit half an exabyte into a single rack, with increases in density forecast to exceed an exabyte per rack in less than 18 months. QLC flash has low power consumption, much higher read bandwidth, and longer durability than existing archival storage. Using flash for archival storage also greatly reduces the cost of media migration, currently a major issue for traditional archival media. More excitingly, archival QLC flash enables new ways of interacting with archival storage via "background" data accesses that piggyback on periodic data scrubbing to leverage the massive bandwidth available at low cost and power from flash storage. Using storage under this model, researchers can run many more experiments on their archived data at relatively low cost compared to today's approach of fetching archival data to "fast" storage and analyzing it.
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Ethan L. Miller is an engineer in the Office of the CTO at Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) and a Professor Emeritus in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he held the Veritas Presidential Chair in Storage. He helped co-found Pure Storage, and has worked with the company since 2009 to develop reliable high-performance flash-based storage systems. At Everpure, his focus is on reliability, efficient data structures, data security, and the design of future data storage systems. His work at Everpure has resulted in over 200 granted patents. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
At UC Santa Cruz, Prof. Miller was an active member of the faculty from 2000-2023 and the Director of the NSF IUCRC Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS) from 2013-2020. He was also a founding member of the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC) at UC Santa Cruz. He has co-authored over 170 papers in a range of topics in file and storage systems, operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, information retrieval, and computer security. He was a member of the team that developed Ceph, a scalable high-performance distributed file system for scientific computing that is now being adopted by several high-end computing organizations. His work on reliability and security for distributed storage is also widely recognized, as is his work on secure, efficient long-term archival storage and scalable metadata systems.
Faculty Host: George Amvrosiadis
For More Information:
karenl@cmu.edu