Category: Networked Storage

The Impact of New Network Speeds on Storage

John Kim
In the last few years, Ethernet equipment vendors have announced big increases in line speeds, shipping 25, 50, and 100 Gigabits-per -second (Gb/s) speeds and announcing 200/400 Gb/s. At the same time Fibre Channel vendors have launched 32GFC, 64GFC and 128GFC technology while InfiniBand has reached 200Gb/s (called HDR) speed. But who exactly is asking for these faster new networking speeds, and how will they use them? Are there servers, storage, and applications that can make good use of them? How are these new speeds achieved? Are new types of signaling, cables and transceivers required? How will changes in PCIe standards and bandwidth keep up? And do the faster speeds come with different distance limitations? Read More

Everything You Wanted to Know about Memory

John Kim
Many followers (dare we say fans?) of the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) are familiar with our popular webcast series “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask.” If you’ve missed any of the nine episodes we’ve done to date, they are all available on-demand and provide a 101 lesson on a range of storage related topics like buffers, storage controllers, iSCSI and more. Our next “Too Proud to Ask” webcast on May 16, 2019 will be “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Taupe – The Memory Pod.” Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components. Read More

What Are the Networking Requirements for HCI?

J Metz
Hyperconverged infrastructures (also known as “HCI”) are designed to be easy to set up and manage. All you need to do is add networking. In practice, the “add networking” part has been more difficult than most anticipated. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast “The Networking Requirements for Hyperconverged Infrastructure” where we covered what HCI is, storage characteristics of HCI, and important networking considerations. If you missed it, it’s available on-demand. We had some interesting questions during the live webcast and as we promised during the live presentation, here are answers from our expert presenters: Read More

Experts Answer Virtualization and Storage Networking Questions

J Metz
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) kicked off the New Year with a live webcast “Virtualization and Storage Networking Best Practices.” We guessed it would be popular and boy, were we right! Nearly 1,000 people registered to attend. If you missed out, it’s available on-demand. You can also download a copy of the webcast slides. Our experts, Jason Massae from VMware and Cody Hosterman from Pure Storage, did a great job sharing insights and lessons learned on best practices on configuration, troubleshooting and optimization. Here’s the blog we promised at the live event with answers to all the questions we received. Q. What is a fan-in ratio? A. fan-in ratio (sometimes also called an “oversubscription ratio”) refers to the number of hosts links related to the links to a storage device. Using a very simple example can help understand the principle: Say you have a Fibre Channel network (the actual speed or protocol does not matter for our purposes here). You have 60 hosts, each with a 4GFC link, going through a series of switches, connected to a storage device, just like in the diagram below: Read More

Networking for Hyperconvergence

AlexMcDonald
“Why can’t I add a 33rd node?” One of the great advantages of Hyperconverged infrastructures (also known as “HCI”) is that, relatively speaking, they are extremely easy to set up and manage. In many ways, they’re the “Happy Meals” of infrastructure, because you have compute and storage in the same box. All you need to do is add networking. In practice, though, many consumers of HCI have found that the “add networking” part isn’t quite as much of a no-brainer as they thought it would be. Because HCI hides a great deal of the “back end” communication, it’s possible to severely underestimate or misunderstand the requirements necessary to run a seamless environment. At some point, “just add more nodes” becomes a more difficult proposition. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a live webcast “Networking Requirements for Hyperconvergence” on February 5, 2019. At this webcast, we’re going to take a look behind the scenes, peek behind the GUI, so to speak. We’ll be talking about what goes on back there, and shine the light behind the bezels to see: Read More

When NVMe™ over Fabrics Meets TCP

Tom Reu
In the storage world, NVMe™ is arguably the hottest thing going right now. Go to any storage conference – either vendor-related or vendor-neutral, and you’ll see NVMe as the latest and greatest innovation. It stands to reason, then, that when you want to run NVMe over a network, you must understand NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). Meanwhile, TCP is by far the most popular networking transport protocol both for storage and non-storage traffic. TCP – the long-standing mainstay of networking – is the newest transport technology to be approved by the NVM Express® organization, enabling NVMe/TCP. This can mean really good things for storage and storage networking – but what are the tradeoffs? Read More

Networking Questions for Ethernet Scale-Out Storage

Fred Zhang
Unlike traditional local or scale-up storage, scale-out storage imposes different and more intense workloads on the network. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast “Networking Requirements for Ethernet Scale-Out Storage.” Our audience had some insightful questions. As promised, our experts are answering them in this blog. Q. How does scale-out flash storage impact Ethernet networking requirements? A. Scale-out flash storage demands higher bandwidth and lower latency than scale-out storage using hard drives. As noted in the webcast, it’s more likely to run into problems with TCP Incast and congestion, especially with older or slower switches. For this reason it’s more likely than scale-out HDD storage to benefit from higher bandwidth networks and modern datacenter Ethernet solutions–such as RDMA, congestion management, and QoS features. Read More

Virtualization and Storage Networking Best Practices from the Experts

J Metz
Ever make a mistake configuring a storage array or wonder if you’re maximizing the value of your virtualized environment? With all the different storage arrays and connectivity protocols available today, knowing best practices can help improve operational efficiency and ensure resilient operations. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum is kicking off 2019 with a live webcast “Virtualization and Storage Networking Best Practices.” In this webcast, Jason Massae from VMware and Cody Hosterman from Pure Storage will share insights and lessons learned as reported by VMware’s storage global services by discussing: Read More

How Scale-Out Storage Changes Networking Demands

Fred Zhang
Scale-out storage is increasingly popular for Cloud, High-Performance Computing, Machine Learning, and certain Enterprise applications. It offers the ability to grow both capacity and performance at the same time and to distribute I/O workloads across multiple machines. But unlike traditional local or scale-up storage, scale-out storage imposes different and more intense workloads on the network. Clients often access multiple storage servers simultaneously; data typically replicates or migrates from one storage node to another; and metadata or management servers must stay in sync with each other as well as communicating with clients. Due to these demands, traditional network architectures and speeds may not work well for scale-out storage, especially when it’s based on flash. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a live webcast “Networking Requirements for Scale-Out Storage” on November 14th. I hope you will join my NSF colleagues and me to learn about: Read More

Introducing the Networking Storage Forum

John Kim

At SNIA, we are dedicated to staying on top of storage trends and technologies to fulfill our mission as a globally recognized and trusted authority for storage leadership, standards, and technology expertise. For the last several years, the Ethernet Storage Forum has been working hard to provide high quality educational and informational material related to all kinds of storage.

From our “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” series, to the absolutely phenomenal (and required viewing) “Storage Performance Benchmarking” series to the “Great Storage Debates” series, we’ve produced dozens of hours of material.

Technologies have evolved and we’ve come to a point where there’s a need to understand how these systems and architectures work – beyond just the type of wire that is used. Today, there are new systems that are bringing storage to completely new audiences. From scale-up to scale-out, from disaggregated to hyperconverged, RDMA, and NVMe-oF – there is more to storage networking than just your favorite transport. Read More