Category: Data Protection

Security Watch

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

Issues related to security have great importance in IT today. SNIA is participating in the creation of international standards with leading security-focused industry organizations. Here’s an update on recent activities from the SNIA Security Technical Work Group (TWG):

Transport Layer Security

  • The SNIA Security TWG is keeping a keen eye on the TLS 1.3 landscape, which is starting to get interesting since the IETF approved RFC 8446 last August. TLS 1.3 is significantly different from previous versions and it is expected to have an impact on the mandatory elements for the SNIA TLS Specification for Storage and ISO/IEC 20648:2016, which are based on TLS 1.2. While TLS 1.2 is still valid and will be for some time, it is important to keep in mind that ISO standards like ISO/IEC 20648:2016 have a 5-year shelf life. SNIA plans to work on an update later this year so that a new specification is in place in 2021.

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Security GDPR, SNIA and You

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

In April 2016, the European Union (EU) approved a new law called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This coming May 25th, however, is the start of enforcement, meaning that any out-of-compliance organization that does business in the EU could face large fines. Some companies are choosing to not conduct business in the EU as a result, including email services and online games.

The GDPR is applicable to any information classified as personal or that can be used to determine your identity, including your name, photo, email address, social media post, personal medical information, IP addresses, bank details and more. Read More

Data Security is an Integral Part of any Business Endeavor

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

In the wake of all the data breaches, privacy scandals, and cybercrime in the world these days, it can be worrisome if you’re responsible for keeping your company and customer data safe. Sure, there are standards to help you plan and implement policies and procedures around data security, like the ISO/IEC 27040:2015 document. It provides detailed technical guidance on how organizations can be consistent in their approach to plan, design, document and implement data storage security.

While the ISO/IEC 27040 standard is fairly thorough, there are some specific elements in the area of data protection — including data preservation, data authenticity, archival security and data disposition — that the ISO document doesn’t fully get into. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Security Technical Working Group (TWG) has released a whitepaper that addresses these specific topics in data protection. One of a series of educational documents provided by the TWG, this one extends, builds on, and complements the ISO 27040 standard, while also suggesting best practices. Read More

Take the 2017 Archive Requirements Survey!

khauser Leave a comment

 

by Samuel A. Fineberg, Co-chair, SNIA LTR TWG

Ten years ago, a SNIA Task Force undertook a 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey with a goal to determine requirements for long-term digital retention in the data center.  The Task Force hypothesized that the practitioner survey respondents would have experiences with terabyte archive systems that would be adequate to define business and operating system requirements for petabyte-sized information repositories in the data center. Read More

Security and Privacy in the Cloud

Alex McDonald
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

Learn How to Develop Interoperable Cloud Encryption and Access Control

mac

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.

 

SNIA Storage Developer Conference-The Knowledge Continues

khauser Leave a comment

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.

Q&A – OpenStack Mitaka and Data Protection

Thomas Rivera

At our recent SNIA Webcast “Data Protection and OpenStack Mitaka,” Ben Swartzlander, Project Team Lead OpenStack Manila (NetApp), and Dr. Sam Fineberg, Distinguished Technologist (HPE), provided terrific insight into data protection capabilities surrounding OpenStack. If you missed the Webcast, I encourage you to watch it on-demand at your convenience. We did not have time to get to all of out attendees’ questions during the live event, so as promised, here are answers to the questions we received.

Q. Why are there NFS drivers for Cinder?

 A. It’s fairly common in the virtualization world to store virtual disks as files in filesystems. NFS is widely used to connect hypervisors to storage arrays for the purpose of storing virtual disks, which is Cinder’s main purpose.

 Q. What does “crash-consistent” mean?

 A. It means that data on disk is what would be there is the system “crashed” at that point in time. In other words, the data reflects the order of the writes, and if any writes are lost, they are the most recent writes. To avoid losing data with a crash consistent snapshot, one must force all recently written data and metadata to be flushed to disk prior to snapshotting, and prevent further changes during the snapshot operation.

Q. How do you recover from a Cinder replication failover?

 A. The system will continue to function after the failover, however, there is currently no mechanism to “fail-back” or “re-replicate” the volumes. This function is currently in development, and the OpenStack community will have a solution in a future release.

 Q. What is a Cinder volume type?

 A. Volume types are administrator-defined “menu choices” that users can select when creating new volumes. They contain hidden metadata, in the cinder.conf file, which Cinder uses to decide where to place them at creation time, and which drivers to use to configure them when created.

 Q. Can you replicate when multiple Cinder backends are in use?

 A. Yes

 Q. What makes a Cinder “backup” different from a Cinder “snapshot”?

 A. Snapshots are used for preserving the state of a volume from changes, allowing recovery from software or user errors, and also allowing a volume to remain stable long enough for it to be backed up. Snapshots are also very efficient to create, since many devices can create them without copying any data. However, snapshots are local to the primary data and typically have no additional protection from hardware failures. In other words, the snapshot is stored on the same storage devices and typically shares disk blocks with the original volume.

Backups are stored in a neutral format which can be restored anywhere and typically on separate (possibly remote) hardware, making them ideal for recovery from hardware failures.

 Q. Can you explain what “share types” are and how they work?

 A. They are Manila’s version of Cinder’s volume types. One key difference is that some of the metadata about them is not hidden and visible to end users. Certain APIs work with shares of types that have specific capabilities.

 Q. What’s the difference between Cinder’s multi-attached and Manila’s shared file system?

A. Multi-attached Cinder volumes require cluster-aware filesystems or similar technology to be used on top of them. Ordinary file systems cannot handle multi-attachment and will corrupt data quickly if attached more than one system. Therefore cinder’s multi-attach mechanism is only intended for fiesystems or database software that is specifically designed to use it.

Manilla’s shared filesystems use industry standard network protocols, like NFS and SMB, to provide filesystems to arbitrary numbers of clients where shared access is a fundamental part of the design.

 Q. Is it true that failover is automatic?

 A. No. Failover is not automatic, for Cinder or Manila

 Q. Follow-up on failure, my question was for the array-loss scenario described in the Block discussion. Once the admin decides the array has failed, does it need to perform failover on a “VM-by-VM basis’? How does the VM know to re-attach to another Fabric, etc.?

A. Failover is all at once, but VMs do need to be reattached one at a time.

 Q. What about Cinder? Is unified object storage on SHV server the future of storage?

 A. This is a matter of opinion. We can’t give an unbiased response.

 Q. What about a “global file share/file system view” of a lot of Manila “file shares” (i.e. a scalable global name space…)

 A. Shares have disjoint namespaces intentionally. This allows Manila to provide a simple interface which works with lots of implementations. A single large namespace could be more valuable but would preclude many implementations.