Author: Michael Hoard

Solving Cloud Object Storage Incompatibilities in a Multi-Vendor Community

Michael Hoard
The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) conducted a poll early in 2024 during a live webinar “Navigating Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility,” citing 72% of organizations have encountered incompatibility issues between various object storage implementations. These results resulted in a call to action for SNIA to create an open expert community dedicated to resolving these issues and building best practices for the industry. Since then, SNIA CSTI has partnered with the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) and successfully organized, hosted, and completed the first SNIA Cloud Object Storage Plugfest (multi-vendor interoperability testing), co-located at SNIA Developer Conference (SDC), September 2024, in Santa Clara, CA. Participating Plugfest companies included engineers from Dell, Google, Hammerspace, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, VAST Data, and Versity Software. Three days of Plugfest testing discovered and resolved issues, and included a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session to gain consensus on next steps for the industry. Plugfest contributors are now planning two 2025 Plugfest events in Denver in April and Santa Clara in September. It’s a collaborative effort that we’ll discuss in detail on November 21, 2024 at our next live SNIA CSTI webinar, “Building a Community to Tackle Cloud Object Storage Incompatibilities.” At this webinar, we will share insights into industry best practices, explain the benefits your implementation may gain with improved compatibility, and provide an overview of how a wide range of vendors is uniting to address real customer issues, discussing: Read More

AIOps: The Undeniable Paradigm Shift

Michael Hoard
AI has entered every aspect of today’s digital world. For IT, AIOps is creating a dramatic shift that redefines how IT approaches operations. On April 9, 2024, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will host a live webinar, “AIOps: Reactive to Proactive – Revolutionizing the IT Mindset.” In this webinar, Pratik Gupta, one of the industry’s leading experts in AIOps, will delve beyond the tools of AIOps to reveal how AIOps introduces intelligence into the very fabric of IT thinking and processes, discussing:
  • From Dev to Production and Reactive to Proactive: Revolutionizing the IT Mindset: We’ll move beyond the “fix it when it breaks” mentality, embracing a future-proof approach where AI analyzes risk, anticipates issues, prescribes solutions, and learns continuously.
  • Beyond Siloed Solutions: Embracing Holistic Collaboration:  AIOps fosters seamless integration across departments, applications, and infrastructure, promoting real-time visibility and unified action.
  • Automating the Process: From Insights to Intelligent Action: Dive into the world of self-healing IT, where AI-powered workflows and automation resolve issues and optimize performance without human intervention.
Read More

Namespace Management Q&A

Michael Hoard
The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) recently hosted a live webinar, “Simplified Namespace Management – The Open Standards Way,” where David Slik, Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) provided a fascinating overview of how to tackle the complexities of dynamic namespaces. If you missed the live webinar, you can view it on-demand and access a copy of the webinar slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Attendees at the live event asked several interesting questions. Here are answers to them all. Q. How are the queues assigned to individual namespaces? How many queues are assigned for a particular namespace, can we customize it and if so, how? What is the difference between normal namespace and SR-IOV enabled namespace? Can you please explain sets domain and endurance group? Read More

It’s All About Cloud Object Storage Interoperability

Michael Hoard
Object storage has firmly established itself as a cornerstone of modern data centers and cloud infrastructure. Ensuring API compatibility has become crucial for object storage developers who want to benefit from the wide ecosystem of existing applications. However, achieving compatibility can be challenging due to the complexity and variety of the APIs, access control mechanisms, and performance and scalability requirements. The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative, together with the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, is working to address the issues of cloud object storage complexity and interoperability. We’re kicking off 2024 with two exciting initiatives: 1) a webinar on June 9, 2024, and 2) a Plugfest in September of 2024. Here are the details: Read More

An Open Standard for Namespace Management

Michael Hoard
The days of simple, static, self-contained file systems have long passed. Today, we have complex, dynamic namespaces, mixing block, file, object, key-value, queue, and graph-based resources, accessed via multiple protocols, and distributed across multiple systems and geographic sites. These complexities result in new challenges for simplifying management. There is good news on addressing this issue, and the  SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) will explain how in our live webinar “Simplified Namespace Management – The Open Standards Way” on October 18, 2023, where David Slik, Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, will demonstrate how the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI™), an open ISO standard (ISO/IEC 17826:2022) for managing data objects and containers, already includes extensive capabilities for simplifying the management of complex namespaces. In this webinar, you’ll learn Read More

Data Fabric Q&A

Michael Hoard

Unification of structured and unstructured data has long been a goal – and challenge for organizations. Data Fabric is an architecture, set of services and platform that standardizes and integrates data across the enterprise regardless of data location (On-Premises, Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud), enabling self-service data access to support various applications, analytics, and use cases. The data fabric leaves data where it lives and applies intelligent automation to govern, secure and bring AI to your data.

How a data fabric abstraction layer works and the benefits it delivers was the topic of our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webinar, “Data Fabric: Connecting the Dots between Structured and Unstructured Data.” If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand and access the presentations slides at the SNIA Educational Library.

We did not have time to answer audience questions at the live session. Here are answers from our expert, Joseph Dain. Read More

Storage Threat Detection Q&A

Michael Hoard
Stealing data, compromising data, and holding data hostage have always been the main goals of cybercriminals. Threat detection and response methods continue to evolve as the bad guys become increasingly sophisticated, but for the most part, storage has been missing from the conversation. Enter “Cyberstorage,” a topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative recently covered in our live webinar, “Cyberstorage and XDR: Threat Detection with a Storage Lens.” It was a fascinating look at enhancing threat detection at the storage layer. If you missed the live event, it’s available on-demand along with the presentation slides. We had some great questions from the live event as well as interesting results from our audience poll questions that we wanted to share here. Q. You mentioned antivirus scanning is redundant for threat detection in storage, but could provide value during recovery. Could you elaborate on that? Read More

Survey Says…Here are Data & Cloud Storage Trends Worth Noting

Michael Hoard
With the move to cloud continuing, application modernization, and related challenges such as hybrid and multi-cloud adoption and regulatory compliance requirements, enterprises must ensure they understand the current data and storage landscape. The SODA Foundation’s annual comprehensive global survey on data and storage trends does just that, providing a comprehensive look at the intersection of cloud computing, data and storage management, the configuration of environments that end-user organizations are gravitating to, and priorities of selected capabilities over the next several years On April 13, 2023, SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) is pleased to host SODA in a live webcast “Top 12 Trends in Data and Cloud Storage” where SODA members who led this research will share key findings. I hope you will join us for a live discussion and in-depth look at this important research to hear the trends that are driving data and storage decisions, including: Read More

Digital Twins Q&A

Michael Hoard
A digital twin (DT) is a virtual representation of an object, system or process that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning and reasoning to help decision-making. Digital twins can be used to help answer what-if AI-analytics questions, yield insights on business objectives and make recommendations on how to control or improve outcomes. It’s a fascinating technology that the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) discussed at our live webcast “Journey to the Center of Massive Data: Digital Twins.” If you missed the presentation, you can watch it on-demand and access a PDF of the slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our audience asked several interesting questions which are answered here in this blog. Q. Will a digital twin make the physical twin more or less secure? Read More

Kubernetes Trials & Tribulations Q&A: Cloud, Data Center, Edge

Michael Hoard
Kubernetes cloud orchestration platforms offer all the flexibility, elasticity, and ease of use — on premises, in a private or public cloud, even at the edge. The flexibility of turning on services when you want them, turning them off when you don’t, is an enticing prospect for developers as well as application deployment teams, but it has not been without its challenges. At our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webcast “Kubernetes Trials & Tribulations: Cloud, Data Center, Edge” our experts, Michael St-Jean and Pete Brey, debated both the challenges and advantages of Kubernetes. If you missed the session, it is available on-demand along with the presentation slides. The live audience raised several interesting questions. Here are answers to them from our presenters. Q: Are all these trends coming together? Where will Kubernetes be in the next 1-3 years? Read More