Category: snia

Taking SDC to New Territories

Serena White Leave a comment

You may have seen recently that the successful SNIA Storage Developer Conference is expanding into new regions and will be held in Tel Aviv later this month in addition to the annual event in Bangalore.

These regions are largely uncharted waters for SNIA, let alone a technical conference, but the thought process in selecting the locations is obvious… where is the majority of the technical innovation and development happening in the world?  Israel has been at the forefront of the storage technology Read More

Around the World, It’s a Persistent Memory Summer

Marty Foltyn
This summer, join SNIA as they evangelize members’ industry activity to advance the convergence of storage and memory. SNIA is participating in the first annual European In-Memory Computing Summit, June 20-21, 2017 at the Movenpick Hotel in Amsterdam.  SNIA Europe Vice-Chair and SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) Co-Chair Alex McDonald of NetApp keynotes a session on SNIA and Persistent Memory, highlighting SNIA work on an NVM programming model and persistent memory solutions available today and SNIA is a sponsor in the exhibit hall. Read More

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

khauser Leave a comment

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!

Meet Michael Oros – SNIA’s New Executive Director

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

Michael-Oros-resize120x149SNIA is pleased to announce the appointment of its new Executive Director, Michael Oros. A 20-year industry veteran, Michael comes to SNIA from Intel where he was instrumental in overseeing a wide range of strategic industry initiatives, and for the development and deployment of storage, backup, and disaster recovery services. He also led the formation of the Open Data Center Alliance and with the Board of Directors, established the organization’s presence and reach across six continents, with world leading members accelerating cloud adoption and transformation of the IT landscape.

David Dale, SNIA Chairman, recently sat down with Michael to discuss his vision for the future of SNIA.

Dale: Michael, welcome to SNIA. We’re excited to have you on board.

Oros: Thank you David. I am honored and thrilled to be here! These are exciting times for the storage industry, and I strongly believe SNIA and the member companies are poised to be at the center of this transformation.

Dale: How long have you been involved with SNIA?

Oros: I’ve been involved with SNIA indirectly since 2000, when fibre channel interoperability was an industry challenge that I had to address for Intel’s managed storage service offerings. Since 2004, I have participated more directly starting with my first SNW event in Phoenix.

Dale: What attracted you to the Executive Director position and what excites you the most about SNIA? 

Oros: The opportunity to lead, facilitate and be part of the storage industry transformation. The great people that make up the storage industry – an amazing SNIA Board of Directors that’s passionate and cares deeply, great staff and incredible volunteers; these were key attributes that I personally value and sought out.

Dale: What are the major changes forthcoming in the storage industry that SNIA needs to be actively involved with?

Oros: The flurry of M&A activity over the past couple years has already changed the storage industry landscape, and we can expect to see over the next couple years the impact and innovation coming out from these mergers/acquisitions. SNIA needs to be nimble; continue to deliver value through standards and initiatives that are of high importance and relevancy to the storage industry and the implementers/consumers of enterprise storage technologies: enterprise IT, cloud service providers and hyperscalers. 

Dale: What do you think the impact of the 3rd Platform will be to the industry?

Oros: Huge! The analyst terminology referring to the third computing platform that encompasses mobile, social, cloud computing, and Internet of Things, is driving an increase in both storage demand and efficiency. As billions of users/devices and millions of apps interact on this “3rd Platform”, IT organizations have to change how they do business and manage this exponential increase in assets, data they are generating and its security. The storage industry and vendors have to innovate and deliver solutions that are lower touch to deploy and manage, more flexible and adaptable to an array of applications and security requirements.

Dale: What do you see as SNIA’s top goals for 2016? 

Oros: Continue to be relevant in our work to the industry and our member companies, execute on the technology specifications, and grow the organization.

Dale: One week in the role, what are your initial thoughts and plans?

Oros: First, a big thank you to everyone for their help and support as I’ve come on board! I’ve started working with the team to ensure the member companies have the best resources and tools available to collaborate on technology specifications and initiatives – myself and all SNIA staff are here to support our members and delight our wonderful industry volunteers. Business development and outreach will see an increase in activity. And marketing programs are being planned in addition to our events, to promote loudly and with clarity the vital work SNIA and member companies are doing!

To learn more, read the official SNIA press release.

 

 

NVM Big at Storage Developer Conference SDC Precon

Jim Handy

Objective Analysis 3D XPoint Report GraphicI’ll be speaking at SNIA’s SDC Pre-Conference this Sunday, Sept 20, about the new Intel-Micron 3D XPoint memory.  I was surprised to find that my talk won’t be unique.  There are about 15 papers at this conference that will be discussing NVM, or persistent memory.

What’s all this fuss about?

Part of it has to do with the introduction by Micron & Intel of their 3D XPoint (pronounced “Crosspoint”) memory.  This new product will bring nonvolatility, or persistence, to main memory, and that’s big!

Intel itself will present a total of seven papers to tell us all how they envision this technology being used in computing applications.  Seven other companies, other than Objective Analysis (my company) will also discuss this hot new topic.

SNIA is really on top of this new trend.  This organization has been developing standards for nonvolatile memory for the past couple of years, and has published an NVM Programming Model to help software developers produce code that will communicate with nonvolatile memory no matter who supplies it.  Prior to SNIA’s intervention the market was wildly inconsistent, and all suppliers’ NVDIMMs differed slightly from one another, with no promise that this would become any better once new memory technologies started to make their way onto memory modules.

Now that Intel and Micron will be producing their 3D XPoint memory, and will be supplying it on industry-standard DDR4 DIMMs, it’s good to know that there will be a standard protocol to communicate with it.  This will facilitate the development of standard software to harness all that nonvolatile memory has to offer.

As for me, I will be sharing information from my company’s new report on the Micron-Intel 3D XPoint memory.  This is new, and it’s exciting.  Will it succeed?  I’ll discuss that with you there.

Outstanding Keynotes from Leading Storage Experts Make SDC Attendance a Must!

khauser Leave a comment

Posted by Marty Foltyn

Tomorrow is the last day to register online for next week’s Storage Developer Conference at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. What better incentive to click www.storagedeveloper.org and register than to read about the amazing keynote and featured speakers at this event – I think they’re the best since the event began in 1998! Preview sessions here, and click on the title to download the full description.SDC15_WebHeader3_999x188

Bev Crair, Vice President and General Manager, Storage Group, Intel will present Innovator, Disruptor or Laggard, Where Will Your Storage Applications Live? Next Generation Storage and discuss the leadership role Intel is playing in driving the open source community for software defined storage, server based storage, and upcoming technologies that will shift how storage is architected.

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis will report on The Long-Term Future of Solid State Storage, examining research of new solid state memory and storage types, and new means of integrating them into highly-optimized computing architectures. This will lead to a discussion of the way that these will impact the market for computing equipment.

Jim Pinkerton, Partner Architect Lead, Microsoft will present Concepts on Moving From SAS connected JBOD to an Ethernet Connected JBOD . This talk examines the advantages of moving to an Ethernet connected JBOD, what infrastructure has to be in place, what performance requirements are needed to be competitive, and examines technical issues in deploying and managing such a product.

Andy Rudoff, SNIA NVM Programming TWG, Intel will discuss Planning for the Next Decade of NVM Programming describing how emerging NVM technologies and related research are causing a change to the software development ecosystem. Andy will describe use cases for load/store accessible NVM, some transparent to applications, others non-transparent.

Richard McDougall, Big Data and Storage Chief Scientist, VMware will present Software Defined Storage – What Does it Look Like in 3 Years? He will survey and contrast the popular software architectural approaches and investigate the changing hardware architectures upon which these systems are built.

Laz Vekiarides, CTO and Co-founder, ClearSky Data will discuss Why the Storage You Have is Not the Storage Your Data Needs , sharing some of the questions every storage architect should ask.

Donnie Berkholz, Research Director, 451 Research will present Emerging Trends in Software Development drawing on his experience and research to discuss emerging trends in how software across the stack is created and deployed, with a particular focus on relevance to storage development and usage.

Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze will discuss Learnings from Nearly a Decade of Building Low-cost Cloud Storage. He will cover the design of the storage hardware, the cloud storage file system software, and the operations processes that currently store over 150 petabytes and 5 petabytes every month.

You could wait and register onsite at the Hyatt, but why? If you need more reasons to attend, check out SNIA on Storage previous blog entries on File Systems, Cloud, Management, New Thinking, Disruptive Technologies, and Security sessions at SDC. See the full agenda and register now for SDC at http://www.storagedeveloper.org.

2013 in Review and the Outlook for 2014 – A SNIA ESF Perspective

Jason Blosil

Technology continues to advance rapidly. Making sense of it all can be a challenge. At the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum, we focus on storage technologies and solutions enabled by and associated with Ethernet Networks. Last year, we modified the charters of our two Special Interest Groups (SIG) to address topics about file protocols and storage over Ethernet. The File Protocols SIG includes the prior focus on Network File System (NFS) related topics and adds discussions around Server Message Block (SMB / CIFS). We had our first webcast last November on the topic of SMB 3.0 and it was our best attended webcast ever. The Storage over Ethernet SIG focuses on general Ethernet storage topics as well as more information about technologies like FCoE, iSCSI, Data Center Bridging, and virtual networking for storage. I encourage you to check out other articles on these hot topics in this SNIAESF blog to hear from our member experts as well as guest posts from leading analysts.

2013 was a busy year and we are already kickin’ it in 2014. This should be an exciting year in IT. Data storage continues to be a hot sector especially in the areas of All-Flash and Hybrid arrays. This year, we will expect to see new standards coming out of the T11 committee for Fibre Channel and possibly FCoE as well as progress in high speed Ethernet networks. Lower cost network interconnects will facilitate adoption of high speed networks in the small to midsize business segment. And a new conversation around “Software Defined…” should push a lot of ink in trade rags and other news sources. Oh, and don’t forget about the “Internet of Things”, mobile solutions, and all things Cloud.

The ESF will be addressing the impact on Ethernet storage solutions from these hot technologies. Next month, on February 18th, experts from the ESF, along with industry analysts from Dell’Oro Group will speak to the benefits and best practices of deploying FCoE and iSCSI storage protocols. This presentation “Use Cases for iSCSI and Fibre Channel: Where Each Makes Sense” will be part of an upcoming BrightTalk Summit on Storage Networking. I encourage you to register for this session. Additionally, we will be publishing a couple of white papers on file-based storage and a review of FCoE and iSCSI in storage applications.

Finally, SNIA will be kicking off its first year of the new user conference, Data Storage Innovation Conference. This will be one of the few storage focused user conferences in the market and should be quite interesting.

We’re excited about our growing membership and our plans for 2014. Our goal is to advance application of innovative technologies and we encourage you to send us mail or comment below with topics that are of interest to you.

Here’s to an exciting 2014!

SNIA’s Events Strategy Today and Tomorrow

khauser Leave a comment

David Dale, SNIA Chairman

Last month Computerworld/IDG and the SNIA posted a notice to the SNW website stating that they have decided to conclude the production of SNW.  The contract was expiring and both parties declined to renew.  The IT industry has changed significantly in the 15 years since SNW was first launched, and both parties felt that their individual interests would be best served by pursuing separate events strategies.

For the SNIA, events are a strategically important vehicle for fulfilling its mission of developing standards, maintaining an active ecosystem of storage industry experts, and providing vendor-neutral educational materials to enable IT professions to deal with and derive value from constant technology change.  To address the first two categories, SNIA has a strong track record of producing Technical Symposia throughout the year, and the successful Storage Developer Conference in September.

To address the third category, IT professionals, SNIA has announced a new event, to be held in Santa Clara, CA, from April 22-24 – the Data Storage Innovation Conference. This event is targeted at IT decision-makers, technology implementers, and those expected to influence, implement and support data storage innovation as actual production solutions.  See the press release and call for presentations for more information.  We are excited to embark on developing this contemporary new event into an industry mainstay in the coming years.

Outside of the USA, events are also critically important vehicles for the autonomous SNIA Regional Affiliates to fulfill their mission.  The audience there is typically more biased towards business executives and IT managers, and over the years their events have evolved to incorporate adjacent technology areas, new developments and regional requirements.

As an example of this evolution, SNIA Europe’s events partner, Angel Business Communications, recently announced that its very successful October event, SNW Europe/Datacenter Technologies/Virtualization World, will be simply known as Powering the Cloud starting in 2014, in order to unite the conference program and to be more clearly relevant to today’s IT industry. See the press release for more details.

Other Regional Affiliates have followed a similar path with events such as Implementing Information Infrastructure Summit and Information Infrastructure Conference – both tailored to meet regional needs.

The bottom line on this is that the SNIA is absolutely committed to a global events strategy to enable it to carry out its mission.  We are excited about the evolution of our various events to meet the changing needs of the market and continue to deliver unique vendor-neutral content. IT professionals, partners, vendors and their customers around the globe can continue to rely on SNIA events to inform them about new technologies and developments and help them navigate the rapidly changing world of IT.

Ethernet Storage Forum – 2012 Year in Review and What to Expect in 2013

Jason Blosil

As we come to a close of the year 2012, I want to share some of our successes and briefly highlight some new changes for 2013. Calendar year 2012 has been eventful and the SNIA-ESF has been busy. Here are some of our accomplishments:

  • 10GbE – With virtualization and network convergence, as well as the general availability of LOM and 10GBASE-T cabling, we saw this is a “breakout year” for 10GbE. In July, we published a comprehensive white paper titled “10GbE Comes of Age.” We then followed up with a Webcast “10GbE – Key Trends, Predictions and Drivers.” We ran this live once in the U.S. and once in the U.K. and combined, the Webcast has been viewed by over 400 people!
  • NFS – has also been a hot topic. In June we published a white paper “An Overview of NFSv4” highlighting the many improved features NFSv4 has over NFSv3. A Webcast to help users upgrade, “NFSv4 – Plan for a Smooth Migration,” has also been well received with over 150 viewers to date.  A 4-part Webcast series on NFS is now planned. We kicked the series off last month with “Reasons to Start Working with NFSv4 Now” and will continue on this topic during the early part of 2013. Our next NFS Webcast will be “Advances in NFS – NFSv4.1 and pNFS.” You can register for that here.
  • Flash – The availability of solid state devices based on NAND flash is changing the performance efficiencies of storage. Our September Webcast “Flash – Plan for the Disruption” discusses how Flash is driving the need for 10GbE and has already been viewed by more than 150 people.

We have also added to expand membership and welcome new membership from Tonian and LSI to the ESF. We expect with this new charter to see an increase in membership participation as we drive incremental value and establish ourselves as a leadership voice for Ethernet Storage.

As we move into 2013, we expect two hot trends to continue – the broader use of file protocols in datacenter applications, and the continued push toward datacenter consolidation with the use of Ethernet as a storage network. In order to better address these two trends, we have modified our charter for 2013. Our NFS SIG will be renamed the File Protocol SIG and will focus on promoting not only NFS, but also SMB / CIFS solutions and protocols. The iSCSI SIG will be renamed to the Storage over Ethernet SIG and will focus on promoting data center convergence topics with Ethernet networks, including the use of block and file protocols, such as NFS, SMB, FCoE, and iSCSI, over the same wire. This modified charter will allow us to have a richer conversation around storage trends relevant to your IT environment.

So, here is to a successful 2012, and excitement for the coming year.

NFSv4.1 Webcast-Tuesday, August 28th

Gary Gumanow

NFSv4.1 is a mature and stable protocol with many advantages over NFSv3 in meeting the demands being placed on storage by exploding data growth. Now is the time to plan for a smooth migration. I encourage you to register for our live Webcast  on August 28th at http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/52927.

My colleague, Alex McDonald, and I will review what makes NFSv4.1 ideally suited to a wide range of data center and HPC uses. We’ll discuss how careful planning can result in a migration that does not require modification to applications, and that utilizes existing operational infrastructure in its deployment. You’ll see why you should be evaluating and using NFSv4.1 in 2012. And because it’s live, Alex and I will answer your questions on the spot. We hope to see you there. Here are the details:

Date: Thursday, August 28, 2012
Time: 8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 3:00 pm GMT / 5:00 pm CET
Register: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/52927
We hope to see you there.