Category: Ethernet Data Storage

Introducing the Networking Storage Forum

John Kim

At SNIA, we are dedicated to staying on top of storage trends and technologies to fulfill our mission as a globally recognized and trusted authority for storage leadership, standards, and technology expertise. For the last several years, the Ethernet Storage Forum has been working hard to provide high quality educational and informational material related to all kinds of storage.

From our “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” series, to the absolutely phenomenal (and required viewing) “Storage Performance Benchmarking” series to the “Great Storage Debates” series, we’ve produced dozens of hours of material.

Technologies have evolved and we’ve come to a point where there’s a need to understand how these systems and architectures work – beyond just the type of wire that is used. Today, there are new systems that are bringing storage to completely new audiences. From scale-up to scale-out, from disaggregated to hyperconverged, RDMA, and NVMe-oF – there is more to storage networking than just your favorite transport. Read More

Centralized vs. Distributed Storage FAQ

J Metz
To date, thousands have watched our “Great Storage Debate” webcast series. Our most recent installment of this friendly debate (where no technology actually emerges as a “winner”) was Centralized vs. Distributed Storage. If you missed it, it’s now available on-demand. The live event generated several excellent questions which our expert presenters have thoughtfully answered here: Q. Which performs faster, centralized or distributed storage? A. The answer depends on the type of storage, the type of connections to the storage, and whether the compute is distributed or centralized. The stereotype is that centralized storage performs faster if the compute is local, that is if it’s in the same data center as the centralized storage. Read More

RoCE vs. iWARP Q&A

John Kim
In our RoCE vs. iWARP webcast, experts from the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) had a friendly debate on two commonly known remote direct memory access (RDMA) protocols that run over Ethernet: RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and the IETF-standard iWARP. It turned out to be another very popular addition to our “Great Storage Debate” webcast series. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s now available on-demand along with a PDF of the presentation slides. We received A LOT of questions related to Performance, Scalability and Distance, Multipathing, Error Correction, Windows and SMB Direct, DCB (Data Center Bridging), PFC (Priority Flow Control), lossless networks, and Congestion Management, and more. Here are answers to them all.  Read More

We’re Debating Again: Centralized vs. Distributed Storage

J Metz
We hope you’ve been following the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) “Great Storage Debates” webcast series. We’ve done four so far and they have been incredibly popular with 4,000 live and on-demand views to date and counting. Check out the links to all of them at the end of this blog. Although we have “versus” in the title of these presentations, the goal of this series is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide a “compare and contrast” that educates attendees on how the technologies work, the advantages of each, and to explore common use cases. That’s exactly what we plan to do on September 11, 2018 when we host “Centralized vs. Distributed Storage.” Read More

RoCE vs. iWARP – The Next “Great Storage Debate”

John Kim
By now, we hope you’ve had a chance to watch one of the webcasts from the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum’s “Great Storage Debate” webcast series. To date, our experts have had friendly, vendor-neutral debates on File vs. Block vs. Object Storage, Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI, and FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER. The goal of this series is not to have a winner emerge, but rather educate the attendees on how the technologies work, advantages of each, and common use cases. Our next great storage debate will be on August 22, 2018 where our experts will debate RoCE vs. iWARP. They will discuss these two commonly known RDMA protocols that run over Ethernet: RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and the IETF-standard iWARP. Both are Ethernet-based RDMA technologies that can increase networking performance. Both reduce the amount of CPU overhead in transferring data among servers and storage systems to support network-intensive applications, like networked storage or clustered computing. Read More

A Q&A from the FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER Debate

Tim Lustig
It’s become quite clear to those of us in the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) that everyone loves a great debate. We’ve proved that with our “Great Storage Debates” webcast series which has had over 3,500 views in just a few months! Last month we had another friendly debate on FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER. If you missed the live event, you can watch it now on-demand. Our live audience asked a lot of interesting questions. As promised, here are answers to them all. Q. How often are iSCSI offload adapters used in customer environments as compared to software initiators?  Can these adapters be used for all IP traffic or do they only run iSCSI? Read More

Storage Controllers – Your Questions Answered

J Metz
The term controller is used constantly, but often has very different meanings. When you have a controller that manages hardware, there are very different requirements than a controller that manages an entire system-wide control plane. You can even have controllers managing other controllers. It can all get pretty confusing very quickly. That’s why the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) hosted our 9th “Too Proud to Ask” webcast. This time it was “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage but were Too Proud to Ask: Part Aqua – Storage Controllers.” Our experts from Microsemi, Cavium, Mellanox and Cisco did a great job explaining the differences between the many types of controllers, but of course there were still questions. Here are answers to all that we received during the live event which you can now view on-demand.  Read More

File, Block and Object Storage: Real-world Questions, Expert Answers

John Kim
More than 1,200 people have already watched our Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) Great Storage Debate webcast “File vs. Block vs. Object Storage.” If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s available on demand. This great debate generated many interesting questions. As promised, our experts have answered them all here. Q. What about the encryption technologies on file storage? Do they exist, and how do they affect the performance compared to unencrypted storage? Read More

FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER: Get Ready for Another Great Storage Debate

AlexMcDonald
As a follow up our first two hugely successful “Great Storage Debate” webcasts, Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI and File vs. Block vs. Object Storage, the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum will be presenting another great storage debate on June 21, 2018. This time we’ll take on FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER. For those of you who’ve seen these webcasts, you know that the goal of these debates is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide unbiased education on the capabilities and use cases of these technologies so that attendees can become more informed and make educated decisions. Here’s what you can expect from this session: Read More

Benchmarking Workload Storage Performance – An Expert Q&A

Tim Lustig
Nearly 1,000 people have watched our most recent SNIA ESF webcast, Storage Performance Benchmarking: Workloads. We hope you didn’t miss this 5th and final installment of the now famous Storage Performance Benchmarking webcast series where our experts, Mark Rogov and Chris Coniff, explained how to measure and optimize storage performance of workloads. If you haven’t seen it, it’s available on-demand. The live audience had many great questions. Here are answers to them all. Read More