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
Category: cloud
Security and Privacy in the Cloud
When it comes to the cloud, security is always a topic for discussion. Standards organizations like SNIA are in the vanguard of describing cloud concepts and usage, and (as you might expect) are leading on how and where security fits in this new world of dispersed and publicly stored and managed data. On July 20th, the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative is hosting a live webcast “The State of Cloud Security.” In this webcast, I will be joined by SNIA experts Eric Hibbard and Mark Carlson who will take us through a discussion of existing cloud and emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Analytics & Big Data, and more, and explain how we’re describing and solving the significant security concerns these technologies are creating. They will discuss 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!
Learn How to Develop Interoperable Cloud Encryption and Access Control
SNIA Cloud is hosting a live webcast on December 20th, “Developing Interoperable Cloud Encryption and Access Control,” to discuss and demonstrate encrypted objects and delegated access control. For the data protection needs of sharing health and other data across different cloud services, this webcast will explore the capabilities of the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) in addressing these requirements and show implementations of CDMI extensions for a health care example.
See it in action! This webcast will include a demonstration by Peter van Liesdonk of Philips who will share the results of testing at the SDC 2016 Cloud Plugfest for Encrypted Objects and Delegated Access Control extensions to CDMI 1.1.1.
You’ll will see and learn:
- New CDMI features (Encrypted Objects and Delegated Access Control)
- Implementation experiences with new features
- A live demo of a healthcare-based example
Register today. My colleagues, Peter van Liesdonk, David Slik and I will be on-hand to answer any questions you may have. We hope to see you there.
The Next Step for Containers: Best Practices and Data Management Services
In our first SNIA Cloud webcast on containers, we provided a solid foundation on what containers are, container storage challenges and Docker. If you missed the live event, it’s now available on-demand. I encourage you to check it out, as well as our webcast Q&A blog.
So now that we have set the stage and you’ve become acquainted with basic container technologies and the associated storage challenges in supporting applications running within containers in production, we will be back on December 7th. This time we will take a deeper dive into what differentiates this technology from what you are used to with virtual machines. Containers can both complement virtual machines and also replace them, as they promise the ability to scale exponentially higher. They can easily be ported from one physical server to another or to one platform—such as on-premise—to another—such as public cloud providers like Amazon AWS.
At our December 7th webcast, “Containers: Best Practices and Data Management Services,” we’ll explore container best practices to address the various challenges around networking, security and logging. We’ll also look at what types of applications more easily lend themselves to a microservice architecture versus which applications may require additional investments to refactor/re-architect to take advantage of microservices.
On December 7th, we’ll be on hand to answer your questions on the spot. I encourage you to register today. We hope you can attend!
Need a Primer on Cloud Object Storage?
There has been a lot of buzz around cloud object storage recently. But before you get deep into all that cloud object storage can do, it’s good to take a step back and make sure you understand the basics. That’s what the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative is planning to do on July 14th at our live Webcast “Cloud Object Storage 101.”
Many organizations, like large service providers, have already begun to leverage software-defined object storage to support new application development and DevOps projects. Meanwhile, legacy enterprise companies are in the early stages of exploring the benefits of object storage for their particular business and are searching for how they can use cloud object storage to modernize their IT strategies, store and protect data, while dramatically reducing the costs associated with legacy storage sprawl.
This Webcast will highlight the market trends towards the adoption of object storage, the definition and benefits of object storage, and the use cases that are best suited to leverage an underlying object storage infrastructure.
Join us on July 14th to learn:
- How to accelerate the transition from legacy storage to a cloud object architecture
- Understand the benefits of object storage
- Primary use cases
- How an object storage can enable your private, public or hybrid cloud strategy without compromising security, privacy or data governance
I hope you’ll register today to join my colleague, Nancy Bennis, Director of Alliances at Cleversafe (an IBM company), and me for this tutorial on cloud object storage.
Podcasts Bring the Sounds of SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference to Your Car, Boat, Train, or Plane!
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 you
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!
Open Source Software-Only Storage – Really.
Virtually any storage solution is more parts software than hardware. Having said this, users don’t care as much about the percentage of hardware vs. software. They want their consumption experience to be easy and fast to start up, with a pay-as-you-grow model and with the ability to scale without limits. So, it should not be a shock that real IT organizations are using software-only on standard servers to deliver storage to their customers. What’s more, this type of storage can be powered by open source.
At the upcoming SNIA Data Storage Innovation Conference, we are looking forward to discussing software-defined storage (SDS) from a user experience perspective with examples of OpenStack Swift providing an engine for building SDS clusters with any mixed combination of standard server and HDD hardware in a way that is simple enough for any enterprise to dynamically scale.
Swift is a highly available, distributed, scalable object store available as open source. It is designed to handle non-relational (that is, not just simple row-column data) or unstructured data at large scale with high availability and durability. For example, it can be used to store files, videos, documents, analytics results, Web content, drawings, voice recordings, images, maps, musical scores, pictures, or multimedia. Organizations can use Swift to store large amounts of data efficiently, safely, and cheaply. It scales horizontally without any single point of failure. It offers a single multi-tenant storage system for all applications, the ability to use low-cost industry-standard servers and drives, and a rich ecosystem of tools and libraries. It can serve the needs of any service provider or enterprise working in a cloud environment, regardless of whether the installation is using other OpenStack components.
I know what you are thinking, storage is too critical, so it will never work this way. But the same was said >25 years go when using RAID was seen as too risky given solutions would acknowledge writes while the data was in cache prior to being written to disk. The same was also said >15 years ago when VMware was seen as not robust enough to run any manner of demanding or critical application. Replicas and Erasure Codes are analogous to RAID 1 and RAID 5 respectively, and the uniquely as possible distribution of data behind a single namespace abstracts standard hardware like server virtualization.
Interested in hearing more? Come check out my DSI session, “Swift Use Cases with SwiftStack,” where we look forward to sharing how this new type of storage can work, and to suspend your disbelief that this storage can be enterprise-grade.
Next Live Webcast: NFS 101
Need a primer on NFS? On March 23, 2106, The Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) will present a live Webcast “What is NFS? An NFS Primer.” The popular and ubiquitous Network File System (NFS) is a standard protocol that allows applications to store and manage data on a remote computer or server. NFS provides two services; a network part that connects users or clients to a remote system or server; and a file-based view of the data. Together these provide a seamless environment that masks the differences between local files and remote files.
At this Webcast, Alex McDonald, SNIA ESF Vice Chair, will provide an introduction and overview presentation to NFS. Geared for technologists and tech managers interested in understanding:
- NFS history and development
- The facilities and services NFS provides
- Why NFS rose in popularity to dominate file based services
- Why NFS continues to be important in the cloud
As always, the Webcast will be live and Alex and I will be on hand to answer your questions. Register today. Alex and I look forward to hearing from you on March 23rd.
Mobile and Secure Healthcare: Encrypted Objects and Access Control Delegation
Healthcare privacy and data protection regulations are among the most stringent of any industry. On January 28th, SNIA Cloud Storage will host a live Webcast to discuss how healthcare organizations can securely share health data across different cloud services.
Hear experts Martin Rosner, Standardization Officer at Philips and David Slik, Co-Chair, SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group explore how Encrypted Objects and Delegated Access Control Extensions to the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard permits objects to freely and securely move between clouds and clients with enhanced security and auditability.
You’ll learn:
- Protecting health data from alteration or disclosure
- How Cloud Encrypted Objects work
- How Delegated Access Control works
- CDMI for Electronic Medical Records (EMR) applications
- Healthcare use cases for implementing securely sharing data in the cloud
This Webcast will be live, so please bring your questions. I encourage you register today. We hope to see you on the 28th.