Category: Cloud APIs

Dive into Orchestration at SDC – a Chat with Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair

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The SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is coming up September 24-27, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara CA.  The agenda is now live!

SNIA on Storage is teaming up with the SNIA Technical Council to dive into major themes of the 2018 conference.  The SNIA Technical Council takes a leadership role to develop the content for each SDC, so SNIA on Storage spoke with Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba Memory America, to understand why SDC is bringing Orchestration to conference attendees.

SNIA On Storage (SOS):  When I think of “orchestration”, my first vision is of a conductor with a magnificent symphony.  Am I on the right track in thinking this way?

Mark Carlson (MC):  If you think of the conductor as the “automator” of the symphony, you’re right on!  Orchestration for computing is the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of computer systems, middleware, and services.  For example, cloud orchestration technology helps to manage the interconnections and interactions among public and private cloud infrastructure workloads.

SOS:  What are some examples of orchestration? Read More

SNIA Storage Developer Conference-The Knowledge Continues

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SNIA’s 18th Storage Developer Conference is officially a success, with 124 general and breakout sessions;  Cloud Interoperability, Kinetiplugfest 5c Storage, and SMB3 plugfests; ten Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions, and amazing networking among 450+ attendees.  Sessions on NVMe over Fabrics won the title of most attended, but Persistent Memory, Object Storage, and Performance were right behind.  Many thanks to SDC 2016 Sponsors, who engaged attendees in exciting technology discussions.

For those not familiar with SDC, this technical industry event is designed for a variety of storage technologists at various levels from developers to architects to product managers and more.  And, true to SNIA’s commitment to educating the industry on current and future disruptive technologies, SDC content is now available to all – whether you attended or not – for download and viewing.

20160919_120059You’ll want to stream keynotes from Citigroup, Toshiba, DSSD, Los Alamos National Labs, Broadcom, Microsemi, and Intel – they’re available now on demand on SNIA’s YouTube channel, SNIAVideo.

All SDC presentations are now available for download; and over the next few months, you can continue to download SDC podcasts which combine audio and slides. The first podcast from SDC 2016 – on hyperscaler (as well as all 2015 SDC Podcasts) are available here, and more will be available in the coming weeks.

SNIA thanks all its members and colleagues who contributed to make SDC a success! A special thanks goes out to the SNIA Technical Council, a select group of acknowledged industry experts who work to guide SNIA technical efforts. In addition to driving the agenda and content for SDC, the Technical Council oversees and manages SNIA Technical Work Groups, reviews architectures submitted by Work Groups, and is the SNIA’s technical liaison to standards organizations. Learn more about these visionary leaders at http://www.snia.org/about/organization/tech_council.

And finally, don’t forget to mark your calendars now for SDC 2017 – September 11-14, 2017, again at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. Watch for the Call for Presentations to open in February 2017.

Podcasts Bring the Sounds of SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference to Your Car, Boat, Train, or Plane!

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SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference (SDC) offers exactly what a developer of cloud, solid state, security, analytics, or big data applications is looking  for – rich technical content delivered in a no-vendor bias manner by today’s leading technologists.  The 2016 SDC agenda is being compiled, but now yousdc podcast pic can get a “sound bite” of what to expect by downloading  SDC podcasts via iTunes, or visiting the SDC Podcast site at http://www.snia.org/podcasts to download the accompanying slides and/or listen to the MP3 version.

Each podcast has been selected by the SNIA Technical Council from the 2015 SDC event, and include topics like:

  • Preparing Applications for Persistent Memory from Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • Managing the Next Generation Memory Subsystem from Intel Corporation
  • NVDIMM Cookbook – a Soup to Nuts Primer on Using NVDIMMs to Improve Your Storage Performance from AgigA Tech and Smart Modular Systems
  • Standardizing Storage Intelligence and the Performance and Endurance Enhancements It Provides from Samsung Corporation
  • Object Drives, a New Architectural Partitioning from Toshiba Corporation
  • Shingled Magnetic Recording- the Next Generation of Storage Technology from HGST, a Western Digital Company
  • SMB 3.1.1 Update from Microsoft

Eight podcasts are now available, with new ones added each week all the way up to SDC 2016 which begins September 19 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.  Keep checking the SDC Podcast website, and remember that registration is now open for the 2016 event at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer/registration.  The SDC conference agenda will be up soon at the home page of http://www.storagedeveloper.org.

Enjoy these great technical sessions, no matter where you may be!

Embrace the Cloud at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference With These Top-Notch Speakers and Sessions!

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For the next two weeks, SNIA on Storage will highlight exciting interest areas in the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) agenda. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit www.storagedeveloper.org to see the four day overview and sign up.

Cloud storage is hot, and whether you are new to the cloud or an experienced developer, SDC has a great lineup of speakers and sessions. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.SDC15_WebHeader3_999x188

If you are just dipping your toes into cloud technology, you will want to check out the SDC Pre-Conference Primer on Sunday September 20. These sessions are included with full conference registration.

Here, SNIA Cloud Storage TWG Co-Chairs, David Slik and Mark Carlson, will explain all you Need to Know on Cloud Storage. You will come up to speed on the concepts, conventions, and standards in this space, and even see a live demo of an operating storage cloud. And Brian Mason, MTS-SW at NetApp, will review how to use REST API for Management Integration and how developers can use their best in class management tools and have various storage systems integrate into their management tools.

At the SDC Conference, the Cloud track kicks off with David Slik, SNIA Cloud Storage TWG Co-Chair and Technical Director at NetApp, discussing how to Use SNIA’s Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) to Manage Swift, S3, and Ceph Object Repositories, and how the use of CDMI as a management protocol adds value to multi-protocol systems.

Yong Chen, Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University will speak on Unistore: A Unified Storage Architecture for Cloud Computing. He will introduce an ongoing effort from Texas Tech University and Nimboxx Inc. to build an innovative unified storage architecture (Unistore) with the co-existence and efficient integration of heterogeneous HDD and SCM devices for Cloud storage.

Luke Behnke, VP of Products at Bitcasa will present The Developer’s Dilemma: Do-It-Yourself Storage or Surrender Your Data? He’ll discuss the choice between DIY or cloud storage APIs, and how this will impact future functionality and user experience.

Sachin Goswami, Solution Architect and Storage COE Head Hi Tech, Tata Consultancy Services ((TCS), will explain How to Test CDMI Extension Features Like LTFS, Data Deduplication, and OVF, Partial – Value Copy Functionality: Challenges, Solutions and Best Practices, sharing the approach TCS will adopt to overcome the challenges in testing of LTFS integration with CDMI, Data Deduplication, partial upload on Server and Open Vitalization format (OVF) of CDMI and Non-CDMI based scenarios of the cloud.

Speaking of the CDMI standard, join the Cloud Plugfest at SDC starting on September 21st to learn more about the CDMI Conformance Test Program and test your application for CDMI conformance.

And you won’t want to miss the  Birds-Of-a-Feather (BOF) Sessions on Cloud! The first is on Tuesday evening, September 22, on Getting Started with the CDMI Conformance Test Program! Come to this OPEN TO ALL Birds of a Feather session to learn what the CTP program entails, details on the testing service that is offered, and how to get the CTP process started.

On Wednesday evening, September 23, the Moving Data Protection to the Cloud: Trends, Challenges and Strategies BOF will discuss critical cloud data protection challenges, how to use the cloud for data protection, pros and cons of various cloud data protection strategies, experiences of others (good and bad) to avoid common pitfalls, and cloud standards in use – and why you need them! This BOF is open to all!

 

Register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog on Management topics at SDC!

Swift, S3 or CDMI – Your Questions Answered

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Last week’s live SNIA Cloud Webcast “Swift, S3 or CDMI – Why Choose?” is now available on demand. Thanks to all the folks who attended the live event. We had some great questions from attendees, in case you missed it, here is a complete Q&A.

Q. How do you tag the data? Is that a manual operation?

A. The data is tagged as part of the CDMI API by supplying key value pairs in the JSON Object. Since it is an API you can put a User Interface in front of it to manually tag the data. But you can also develop software to automatically tag the data. We envision an entire ecosystem of software that would use this interface to better manage data in the future

Q. Which vendors support CDMI today?

A. We have a page that lists all the publically announced CDMI implementations here. We also plan to start testing implementations with standardized tests to certify them as conformant. This will be a separate list.

Q. FC3 Common Services layer vs. SWIFT, S3, & CDMI – Will it fully integrate with encryption at rest vendors?

A. Amazon does offer encryption at rest for example, but does not (yet) allow you choose the algorithm. CDMI allows vendors to show a list of algorithms and pick the one they want.

Q. You’d mentioned NFS, other interfaces for compatibility – but often “native” NFS deployments can be pretty high performance. Object storage doesn’t really focus on performance, does it? How is it addressed for customers moving to the object model?

A. CDMI implementations are responsible for the performance not the standard itself, but there is nothing in an object interface that would make it inherently slower. But if the NFS interface implementation is faster, customers can use that interface for apps with those performance needs. The compatibility means they can use whatever interface makes sense for each application type.

Q. Is it possible to query the user-metadata on a container level for listing all the data objects that have that user-metadata set?

A. Yes. Metadata query is key and it can be scoped however you like. Data system metadata is also hierarchical and inherited – meaning that you can override the parent container settings.

Q. So would it be reasonable to say that any current object storage should be expected to implement one or more of these metadata models? What if the object store wasn’t necessarily meant to play in a cloud? Would it be at a disadvantage if its metadata model was proprietary?

A. Yes, but as an add-on that would not interfere with the existing API/access method. Eventually as CDMI becomes ubiquitous, products would be at a disadvantage if they did not add this type of interface.