Author: John Kim

Data Reduction: Don’t Be Too Proud to Ask

John Kim
It’s back! Our SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast series “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage but Were Too Proud to Ask” will return on August 18, 2020. After a little hiatus, we are going to tackle the topic of data reduction. Everyone knows data volumes are growing rapidly (25-35% per year according to many analysts), far faster than IT budgets, which are constrained to flat or minimal annual growth rates. One of the drivers of such rapid data growth is storing multiple copies of the same data. Developers copy data for testing and analysis. Users email and store multiple copies of the same files. Administrators typically back up the same data over and over, often with minimal to no changes. To avoid a budget crisis and paying more than once to store the same data, storage vendors and customers can use data reduction techniques such as deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, clones, and snapshots. On August 18th, our live webcast “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage but Were Too Proud to Ask – Part Onyx” will focus on the fundamentals of data reduction, which can be performed in different places and at different stages of the data lifecycle. Like most technologies, there are related means to do this, but with enough differences to cause confusion. For that reason, we’re going to be looking at: Read More

Object Storage Questions: Asked and Answered

John Kim
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast, “Object Storage: What, How and Why.” As the title suggests, our NSF members and invited guest experts delivered foundational knowledge on object storage, explaining how object storage works, use cases, and standards. They even shared a little history on how object storage originated.  If you missed the live event, you can watch the on-demand webcast or find it on our SNIAVideo YouTube Channel. We received some great questions from our live audience. As promised, here are the answers to them all. Read More

Why Object Storage is Important

John Kim
Object storage is a secure, simple, scalable, and cost-effective means of embracing the explosive growth of unstructured data enterprises generate every day. Object storage adoption is on the rise. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting “Object Storage: What, How and Why.”  This webcast, with experts Chris Evans of Bookend LTD, Rick Vanover of Veeam, and Alex McDonald, Vice Chair of SNIA NSF and NetApp, the will explain how object storage works, its benefits and why it’s important. Like other storage technologies, object storage brings its own set of unique characteristics to the market. Join us on February 19th at 10:00 am PT/1:00 pm ET to learn: Read More

The Blurred Lines of Memory and Storage – A Q&A

John Kim
The lines are blurring as new memory technologies are challenging the way we build and use storage to meet application demands. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a “Memory Pod” webcast is our series, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage, but were too Proud to Ask.” If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand here along with the presentation slides. We promised Q. Do tools exist to do secure data overwrite for security purposes? A. Most popular tools are cryptographic signing of the data where you can effectively erase the data by throwing away the keys. There are a number of technologies available; for example, the usual ones like BitLocker (part of Windows 10, for example) where the NVDIMM-P is tied to a specific motherboard. There are others where the data is encrypted as it is moved from NVDIMM DRAM to flash for the NVDIMM-N type. Other forms of persistent memory may offer their own solutions. SNIA is working on a security model for persistent memory, and there is a presentation on our work here. Read More

Network Speeds Questions Answered

John Kim
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a webcast on how increases in networking speeds are impacting storage. If you missed the live webcast, New Landscape of Network Speeds, it’s now available on-demand. We received several interesting questions on this topic. Here are our experts’ answers: Q. What are the cable distances for 2.5 and 5G Ethernet? A. 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T Ethernet are designed to run on existing UTP cabling, so it should reach 100 meters on both Cat5e and Cat6 cabling. Reach of 5GBASE-T on Cat 5e may be less under some conditions, for example if many cables are bundled tightly together. Cabling guidelines and field test equipment are available to aid in the transition. Read More

The Impact of New Network Speeds on Storage

John Kim
In the last few years, Ethernet equipment vendors have announced big increases in line speeds, shipping 25, 50, and 100 Gigabits-per -second (Gb/s) speeds and announcing 200/400 Gb/s. At the same time Fibre Channel vendors have launched 32GFC, 64GFC and 128GFC technology while InfiniBand has reached 200Gb/s (called HDR) speed. But who exactly is asking for these faster new networking speeds, and how will they use them? Are there servers, storage, and applications that can make good use of them? How are these new speeds achieved? Are new types of signaling, cables and transceivers required? How will changes in PCIe standards and bandwidth keep up? And do the faster speeds come with different distance limitations? Read More

Everything You Wanted to Know about Memory

John Kim
Many followers (dare we say fans?) of the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) are familiar with our popular webcast series “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask.” If you’ve missed any of the nine episodes we’ve done to date, they are all available on-demand and provide a 101 lesson on a range of storage related topics like buffers, storage controllers, iSCSI and more. Our next “Too Proud to Ask” webcast on May 16, 2019 will be “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Taupe – The Memory Pod.” Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components. Read More

Scale-Out File Systems FAQ

John Kim
On February 28th, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) took at look at what’s happening in Scale-Out File Systems. We discussed general principles, design considerations, challenges, benchmarks and more. If you missed the live webcast, it’s now available on-demand. We did not have time to answer all the questions we received at the live event, so here are answers to them all. Q. Can scale-out file systems do Erasure coding? A. Indeed, Erasure coding is a common method to improve resilience. Q. How does one address the problem of a specific disk going down? Where does scale-out architecture provide redundancy? A. Disk failures typically are covered by RAID software. Some of scale-out software also use multiple replicators to mitigate the impact of disk failures. Read More

The Ins and Outs of a Scale-Out File System Architecture

John Kim
To meet the increasingly higher demand on both capacity and performance in large cluster computing environments, the storage subsystem has evolved toward a modular and scalable design. The scale-out file system has emerged as one implementation of the trend, in addition to scale-out object and block storage solutions. What are the key principles when architecting a scale-out file system? Find out on February 28th when the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosts The Scale-Out File System Architecture Overview, a live webcast where we will present an overview of scale-out file system architectures. This presentation will provide an introduction to scale-out-file systems and cover: Read More

RDMA for Persistent Memory over Fabrics – FAQ

John Kim
In our most recent SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast Extending RDMA for Persistent Memory over Fabrics, our expert speakers, Tony Hurson and Rob Davis outlined extensions to RDMA protocols that confirm persistence and additionally can order successive writes to different memories within the target system. Hundreds of people have seen the webcast and have given it a 4.8 rating on a scale of 1-5! If you missed, it you can watch it on-demand at your convenience. The webcast slides are also available for download. We had several interesting questions during the live event. Here are answers from our presenters:  Read More