Whether storage is already a main focus of your career or may be advancing toward you, you’ll definitely want to attend the flagship event for storage developers – and those involved in storage operations, decision making, and usage – SNIA’s 19th annual Storage Developer Conference (SDC), September 11-14, 2017 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, California. Read More
Author: khauser
SNIA Highlights Persistent Memory and Scalable Storage Management at Storage Field Day 13
Following enthusiastic response to their first Storage Field Day in March, SNIA is returning to the lineup on June 15, 2017. Storage Field Day events bring together innovative IT organizations and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation format that is lively – and live streamed.
SNIA will present Storage Field Day #13 at their Technology Center in Colorado Springs, CO where organizer Stephen Foskett and a dozen delegates will tour the facility and interact with SNIA members on persistent memory and scalable storage management – two hot storage topics that consumers and the industry want to learn more about.
Managing Your Computing Ecosystem Part Two
by George Ericson, Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC; Member,
SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group,
@GEricson
Introduction
This blog is part two of a three-part series by George Ericson, a distinguished engineer at Dell EMC. If you missed part one, you can read it here. George is an active participant on the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group which has been developing the SNIA Swordfish™ storage management specification.
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Registration Now Open for Storage Developer Conference India – May 25-26 in Bangalore
For the third consecutive year, SNIA will present their highly successful Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in Bangalore, India, on May 25-26, 2017 at the My Fortune Hotel. The 2017 agenda, developed under the supervision of the SNIA India agenda committee, leads off with a keynote by Indian Institute of Science Professor P. Vijay Kumar on Codes for Big Data: Error-Correction for Distributed Storage, followed by Amar Tunballi, Engineering Manager at Red Hat, speaking on Software Defined Storage and Why It Will Continue To Be Relevant. Thursday keynotes will feature Anand Ghatnekar, Country Read More
Managing Your Computing Ecosystem
By George Ericson, Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC; Member, SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group, @GEricson
Introduction
This blog is part one of a three-part series recently published on “The Data Cortex”, which represents the thoughts and opinions from members of the CTO Team of Dell EMC’s Data Protection Division. The author, George Ericson, has been actively participating on the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group which has been developing the SNIA Swordfish™ storage management specification. Read More
SNIA Ranked #2 for Storage Certifications – and Now You Can Take Exams at 900 Locations Worldwide
The SNIA Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP) provides a strong foundation of vendor-neutral, systems-level credentials that integrate with and complement individual vendor certifications. Its four credentials – SNIA Certified Storage Professional; SNIA Certified Storage Engineer; SNIA Certified Storage Architect; and SNIA Certified Storage Networking Expert – reflect the advancement and growth of storage networking technologies, and establish a uniform standard by which individual knowledge and skill sets can be evaluated, thereby providing employers in the storage industry with an independent assessment of the individual. Read More
SNIA Activities in Security, Containers, and File Storage on Tap at Three Bay Area Events
SNIA will be out and about in February in San Francisco and Santa Clara, CA, focused on their security, container, and file storage activities.
February 14-17 2017, join SNIA in San Francisco at the RSA Conference in the OASIS Interop: KMIP & PKCS11 booth S2115. OASIS and SNIA member companies will be demonstrating OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) through live interoperability across all participants. SNIA representatives will be on hand in the booth to answer questions about the Storage Security Industry Forum KMIP Conformance Test Program, which enables organizations with KMIP implementations to validate the protocol conformance of those products and meet market requirements for secure, plug-and-play storage solutions. And Eric Hibbard, Chair of the SNIA Security Technical Work Group and CTO Security and Privacy, HDS Corporation, will participate in the “Can I Get a Witness? Technical Witness Bootcamp” session on February 17.
The following week, February 21-23, join SNIA at Container World in Santa Clara CA. Enabling access to memory is an important concern to container designers, and Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group Co-Chair from SMART Modular, will speak on Boosting Performance of Data Intensive Applications via Persistent Memory. Integrating containers into legacy solutions will be a focus of a panel where Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair from Toshiba, will speak on Container Adoption Paths into Legacy Infrastructure. SNIA experts will be joined by other leaders in the container ecosystem like Docker, Twitter, ADP, Google, and Expedia . The SNIA booth will feature cloud infrastructure and storage discussions and a demonstration of a multi-vendor persistent memory solution featuring NVDIMM! (P.S. – Are you new to containers? Get a head start on conference discussions by checking out a December 2016 SNIA blog on Containers, Docker, and Storage.)
Closing out February, find SNIA at their booth at USENIX FAST from February 27-March 2 in Santa Clara, CA, where you can engage with SNIA Technical Council leaders on the latest activities in file and storage technologies.
We look forward to seeing you at one (or more) of these events!
SNIA Recognizes Outstanding Individual and Group Contributors
The backbone of SNIA is its passionate and dedicated volunteers – over 3,500 from 160 companies involved in storage and technology. At the end of each year, SNIA members vote anonymously to recognize both individuals and groups who have made significant contributions over that year to advancing SNIA’s mission to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards, and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement, and security of information. At the January 2017 Annual Members Symposium, SNIA was pleased to honor the following volunteer members and groups:
Individual Awards
Jim Pappas from Intel Corporation received the Exceptional Leadership Award for his outstanding leadership advancing the cause of persistent memory within SNIA leading to an impact both on the industry and the Association. The recent 5th annual SNIA Persistent Memory Summit, chaired by Pappas, drew over 500 attendees both live and online, and featured sessions demonstrating the deliverance of convergence of storage and memory.
Patrick Boyd from Dell Corporation received the Unsung Hero Award for working tirelessly under the radar, expecting no accolades for his major contributions to the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group.
Doug Voigt from Hewlett Packard Enterprise received the Volunteer of the Year Award for his consistent contributions during 2016 furthering the work of the SNIA Non-Volatile Memory Programming Technical Work Group.
Richel
le Ahlvers from Broadcom Limited received the New Contributor of the Year Award for her leadership of a new SNIA program within the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group and contributions to driving a new SNIA Swordfish v.1.0 specification in nine months.
Group Awards
The SNIA Storage Management Initiative received the Outstanding Achievement of a SNIA Technology Community Award for advancing for SNIA the cause of storage management with its achievements leading to an impact on the industry.
SNIA Japan received the Significant Contribution(s) by a Committee or Regional Affiliate Award for its work to advance data storage technology in the industry.
The SFF Task Force received the Significant Impact by a Previously Existing Technical Work Group (TWG) or Task Force Award for its member work and efforts to establish the SNIA SFF Technology Affiliate (TA) Technical Work Group to carry forth the longstanding SFF Committee work efforts that has operated since 1990 until mid-2016.
The SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group received the New SNIA Group of the Year Award for its innovative, groundbreaking work in providing a unified approach for the management of storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments, making it easier for IT administrators to integrate scalable solutions into their data centers.
Attend Live – or Live Stream – SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit January 18
by Marty Foltyn
SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit makes its fifth annual appearance in Silicon Valley next Wednesday, January 18, and if you are in the vicinity of the Westin San Jose, you owe it to yourself to check it out. 
SNIA is well known for its technology-focused, no vendor-hype conferences, and this one-day event will feature 12 presentations and two panels that will “level set” the discussion, review persistent memory usage, describe applications incorporating PM available today, discuss the infrastructure and implementation, and provide a vision of the “next generation” of persistent memory.
You’ll meet speakers from SNIA member companies Intel, Micron, Microsemi, VMware, Red Hat, Microsoft, AgigA Tech, Western Digital, and Spin Transfer. Live demonstrations of persistent memory solutions will be featured from Summit underwriters Intel and the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, and Summit sponsors Microsemi, VMware, AgigA Tech, SMART Modular, and Spin Transfer.
Registration is complimentary but limited -visit http://www.snia.org/pm-summit for the complete agenda and how to sign up. And, if your travels don’t permit you to attend in person, the Persistent Memory Summit will be live-streamed on the SNIAvideo channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/SNIAVideo.
Storage Training Your Way – Education for 21st Century Professional Development
By Paul Talbut, SNIA Global Education and Regional Affiliate Program Director
It is widely accepted that those who are considered knowledge workers (those who use a screen or the internet as a part of their daily work routine) face constant disruption and distractions. The constant flow of emails, online news feeds, social media, and personal interests tend to draw people away from the need to concentrate on the job at hand.
Recent studies suggest that workers are interrupted on average every five minutes, ironically often by work applications or collaboration tools. If this is happening to the work function, then it is not surprising that the opportunity to undergo training or personal development, where focus and concentration without distraction is key to learning, is severely restricted. The same studies suggest that around 1% of the working week is all that workers have to devote to focus on training and development.
This has led to a dramatic shift in the way people consume their training content. It is no longer practical or cost effective to lock people away in a training room for five days. Any such educational value is now much more likely to be absorbed on the train or the bus on the way to work, and so the nature of the content delivery has to change.
Educational content needs to be delivered in modules and in a variety of formats to match the plethora of personal devices and platforms available today. Even without the formality of instructional design and a comprehensive curriculum, content such as podcasts, webcasts, and training materials need to be accessible on the move and in such bite-size chunks that we can give people the information they need and make it available at the times that suit them best.
SNIA is changing the way study guides and materials are made available to our constituents by collaborating with our members and training partners to focus on a wide variety of educational channels. Materials and study guides are now available via e-book, PDF, YouTube, BrightTALK webcasts, podcasts, and online instructor led courses.
The challenge now is to make the content compelling and attractive enough to compete with all the other digital content available for consumption, and provide the opportunity to learn something new about storage rather than watching ice-buckets, mannequins or the latest cute cat.
To date, SNIA has certified over 12,000 storage professionals worldwide, and our vendor-neutral certification program continues to be the industry leader in the independent assessment of storage technology skills.