Virtualization and Storage Networking Best Practices from the Experts

Ever make a mistake configuring a storage array or wonder if you’re maximizing the value of your virtualized environment? With all the different storage arrays and connectivity protocols available today, knowing best practices can help improve operational efficiency and ensure resilient operations. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum is kicking off 2019 with a live webcast “Virtualization and Storage Networking Best Practices.” In this webcast, Jason Massae from VMware and Cody Hosterman from Pure Storage will share insights and lessons learned as reported by VMware’s storage global services by discussing: Read More

Introducing the Networking Storage Forum

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

We’re Debating Again: Centralized vs. Distributed Storage

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

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

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

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

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

Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI – The Great Debate Generates Questions Galore

The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum recently hosted the first of our “Great Debates” webcasts on Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI. The goal of this series is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide vendor-neutral education on the capabilities and use cases of these technologies so that attendees can become more informed and make educated decisions. And it worked! Over 1,200 people have viewed the webcast in the first three weeks! And the comments from attendees were exactly what we had hoped for:

“A good and frank discussion about the two technologies that don’t always need to compete!”

Really nice and fair comparison guys. Always well moderated, you hit a lot of material in an hour. Thanks for your work!” 

“Very fair and balanced overview of the two protocols.”

“Excellent coverage of the topic. I will have to watch it again.”

If you missed the webcast, you can watch it on-demand at your convenience and download a copy of the slides. The debate generated many good questions and our expert speakers have answered them all: Read More

The Great Debates – Our Next Webcast Series

The SNIA ESF is announcing a new series of webcasts, following our hugely successful “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcasts. Those focussed on explaining storage technology from the ground up, and while they were pretty all encompassing in their storage technology coverage, they didn’t compare or contrast similar technologies that perform broadly similar functions. That’s what we’re going to do in our new “Great Debates” series, the first of which was “FC vs. iSCSI.” It’s now available on-demand. I encourage you to check it out. It’s a great debate with experts who really know their stuff. But wait… FC vs. iSCSI? That “versus” sounds more like an argument than a discussion. Was there a winner? Was this a technology fight, with a clear-cut winner and a loser? The answer is an emphatic “No!” Read More

Comparing iSCSI, iSER, and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF): Ecosystem, Interoperability, Performance, and Use Cases

iSCSI is one of the most broadly supported storage protocols, but traditionally has not been associated with the highest performance. Newer protocols like iSER and NVMe over Fabrics promise extreme performance but are still maturing and lack the broad feature and platform support of iSCSI. Storage vendors and customers face interesting tradeoffs and options when evaluating how to achieve the highest block storage performance on Ethernet networks, while preserving the major software and hardware investment in iSCSI. Read More