Category: SNIA Swordfish

Scaling Management of Storage and Fabrics

Richelle Ahlvers
Composable disaggregated infrastructures (CDI) provide a promising solution to address the provisioning and computational efficiency limitations, as well as hardware and operating costs, of integrated, siloed, systems. But how do we solve these problems in an open, standards-based way? DMTF, SNIA, the OFA, and the CXL Consortium are working together to provide elements of the overall solution, with Redfish® and SNIA Swordfish™ manageability providing the standards-based interface. The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is developing an OpenFabrics Management Framework (OFMF) designed for configuring fabric interconnects and managing composable disaggregated resources in dynamic HPC infrastructures using client-friendly abstractions. Want to learn more? Read More

Using SNIA Swordfish™ to Manage Storage on Your Network

Barry Kittner
Consider how we charge our phones: we can plug them into a computer’s USB port, into a wall outlet using a power adapter, or into an external/portable power bank. We can even place them on top of a Qi-enabled pad for wireless charging. None of these options are complicated, but we routinely charge our phones throughout the day and, thanks to USB and standardized charging interfaces, our decision boils down to what is available and convenient. Now consider how a storage administrator chooses to add storage capacity to a datacenter.  There are so many ways to do it:  Add one or more physical drives to a single server; add additional storage nodes to a software-defined storage cluster; add additional storage to a dedicated storage network device that provides storage to be used by other (data) servers. These options all require consideration as to the data protection methods utilized such as RAID or Erasure Coding, and the performance expectations these entail. Complicating matters further are the many different devices and standards to choose from, including traditional spinning HDDs, SSDs, Flash memory, optical drives, and Persistent Memory. Each storage instance can also be deployed as file, block, or object storage which can affect performance. Selection of the communication protocol such as iSCSI and FC/FCoE can limit scalability options. And finally, with some vendors adding the requirement of using their management paradigm to control these assets, it’s easy to see how these choices can be daunting. But… it doesn’t need to be so complicated! Read More

How SNIA Swordfish™ Expanded with NVMe® and NVMe-oF™

Linda Capcara
The SNIA Swordfish™ specification and ecosystem are growing in scope to include full enablement and alignment for NVMe® and NVMe-oF client workloads and use cases. By partnering with other industry-standard organizations including DMTF®, NVM Express, and OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group has updated the Swordfish bundles from version 1.2.1 and later to cover an expanding range of NVMe and NVMe-oF functionality including NVMe device management and storage fabric technology management and administration. The Need Large-scale computing designs are increasingly multi-node and linked together through high-speed networks. These networks may be comprised of different types of technologies, fungible, and morphing. Over time, many different types of high-performance networking devices will evolve to participate in these modern, coupled-computing platforms. New fabric management capabilities, orchestration, and automation will be required to deploy, secure, and optimally maintain these high-speed networks. Read More

Notable Questions on NVMe-oF 1.1

Tim Lustig
At our recent SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast, “Notable Updates in NVMe-oF™ 1.1” we explored the latest features of NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), discussing what’s new in the NVMe-oF 1.1 release, support for CMB and PMR, managing and provisioning NVMe-oF devices with SNIA Swordfish™, and FC-NVMe-2. If you missed the live event, you can watch it here. Our presenters received many interesting questions on NVMe-oF and here are answers to them all: Read More

Storage Management – Standards Matter

SNIA Storage Management Blog

By Don Deel, Senior Standards Technologist, NetApp; SNIA SMI Governing Board Chair, SMI Technical Development Committee Chair

By 2025, IDC says worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Now multiply that 175 times. It’s mind boggling. And with the explosion in data, IDC states that businesses are looking to centralize data management and delivery, as well as to leverage data to control their businesses and the user experience. The Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is a SNIA group that helps unify the storage industry to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies for today’s IT environments and next generation data centers. It supports the development of storage management solutions based upon standard interfaces instead of proprietary interfaces.  Standard storage interfaces lower costs, make integration efforts easier and provide increased reliability, security and manageability. Read More

An Introduction: What is Swordfish?

Diane Marsili
Barry Kittner, Technology Initiatives Manager, Intel and SNIA Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Member

To understand Swordfish, let’s start with the basics to examine how modern data centers are managed.

A user of a PC/notebook is assumed to be in control of that PC.  What happens when there are two? Or 10? Or 1,000? Today’s modern data centers can have 100,000 computers (servers) or more! That requires the ability to be in control or “manage” them from a central location.  How does one do that?  It is done via a protocol that enables remote management; today that standard is IPMI, an acronym for Intelligent Platform Management Interface, and which has existed for 20 years.  Among issues with IPMI is that the scale of today’s data centers was not fully envisioned 20 years ago, so some of the components of IPMI cannot cover the tens of thousands of servers it is expected to manage.  The developers also did not foresee the stringent security and increased privacy requirements expected in modern data centers.

The DMTF created, and continues to improve upon, a modern alternative standard for remote or centralized management of data centers called Redfish®.  For those familiar with server management, Redfish is referred to as “schema-based,” meaning that engineers have carefully organized many different categories of information as well as the relationships between them.  Schema are structured to manage the millions of bits of information and operating characteristics that data centers create and report on a continuous basis and that managers monitor to understand the status of the datacenter.  In this way, information on the operational parameters of the machines in the data center is provided, when and where needed, in a consistent, organized and reliable way.

Unlike IPMI, the new Redfish standard uses modern tools, allowing it to scale to the size of today’s modern data centers. Redfish has output language readable by datacenter operators, works across the wide variety of servers and datacenter equipment that exists today, and is extensible for the new hardware of tomorrow.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a global non-profit organization dedicated to developing standards and education programs to advance storage and information technology. SNIA created the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) currently in use in datacenters to manage interoperable storage. SNIA immediately recognized the value of the new Redfish standard and created SNIA Swordfish™, which is an extension to Redfish that seamlessly manages storage equipment and storage services in addition to the server management of Redfish.  Just as most PC’s have one or more storage devices, so do most servers in datacenters, and Swordfish can manage storage devices and allocation across all of the servers in a datacenter in the same structured and organized fashion.

A summary and additional information for the more technical readers is below. If you want to learn more, all the items underlined and in bold below yield more information. You can click them, or type them into your internet browser for more information on the terms used in this tutorial:

  • For security, Swordfish employs HTTPS, a well-known and well-tested protocol that is used for secure communications over the World Wide Web.
  • JavaScript and ODATA increase the readability, compatibility and integration of RESTful API’s that manage data collected from datacenter devices and covers a range of information useful for beginners through experienced engineers.
  • Interoperability exists due to the use of a common schema definition language (CSDL) and common APIs from eco-system partners including the Open Compute Project (OCP).
  • Redfish and Swordfish were created and are maintained by industry leaders that meet weekly to tune and extend management capabilities. (See DMTF.ORG, SNIA.ORG)
  • These schema work together to allow full network discovery, provisioning, volume mapping and monitoring of block, file and object storage for all the systems in a modern datacenter.

There is so much to learn beyond this brief tutorial.  Start at DMTF.ORG to learn about Redfish.  Then surf over to SNIA.ORG/SWORDFISH to see how Swordfish brings the benefits of schema-based management to all your storage devices.  You will learn how Swordfish works in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments and enables a scalable solution that grows as your datacenter requirements grow.

By Barry Kittner, Technology Initiatives Manager, Intel and SNIA Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Member

An Introduction: What is Swordfish?

Diane Marsili

Barry Kittner, Technology Initiatives Manager, Intel and SNIA Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Member

To understand Swordfish, let’s start with the basics to examine how modern data centers are managed.

A user of a PC/notebook is assumed to be in control of that PC.  What happens when there are two? Or 10? Or 1,000? Today’s modern data centers can have 100,000 computers (servers) or more! That requires the ability to be in control or “manage” them from a central location.  How does one do that?  It is done via a protocol that enables remote management; today that standard is IPMI, an acronym for Intelligent Platform Management Interface, and which has existed for 20 years.  Among issues with IPMI is that the scale of today’s data centers was not fully envisioned 20 years ago, so some of the components of IPMI cannot cover the tens of thousands of servers it is expected to manage.  The developers also did not foresee the stringent security and increased privacy requirements expected in modern data centers.

The DMTF created, and continues to improve upon, a modern alternative standard for remote or centralized management of data centers called Redfish®.  For those familiar with server management, Redfish is referred to as “schema-based,” meaning that engineers have carefully organized many different categories of information as well as the relationships between them.  Schema are structured to manage the millions of bits of information and operating characteristics that data centers create and report on a continuous basis and that managers monitor to understand the status of the datacenter.  In this way, information on the operational parameters of the machines in the data center is provided, when and where needed, in a consistent, organized and reliable way.

Unlike IPMI, the new Redfish standard uses modern tools, allowing it to scale to the size of today’s modern data centers. Redfish has output language readable by datacenter operators, works across the wide variety of servers and datacenter equipment that exists today, and is extensible for the new hardware of tomorrow.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a global non-profit organization dedicated to developing standards and education programs to advance storage and information technology. SNIA created the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) currently in use in datacenters to manage interoperable storage. SNIA immediately recognized the value of the new Redfish standard and created SNIA Swordfish™, which is an extension to Redfish that seamlessly manages storage equipment and storage services in addition to the server management of Redfish.  Just as most PC’s have one or more storage devices, so do most servers in datacenters, and Swordfish can manage storage devices and allocation across all of the servers in a datacenter in the same structured and organized fashion.

A summary and additional information for the more technical readers is below. If you want to learn more, all the items underlined and in bold below yield more information. You can click them, or type them into your internet browser for more information on the terms used in this tutorial:

  • For security, Swordfish employs HTTPS, a well-known and well-tested protocol that is used for secure communications over the World Wide Web.
  • JavaScript and ODATA increase the readability, compatibility and integration of RESTful API’s that manage data collected from datacenter devices and covers a range of information useful for beginners through experienced engineers.
  • Interoperability exists due to the use of a common schema definition language (CSDL) and common APIs from eco-system partners including the Open Compute Project (OCP).
  • Redfish and Swordfish were created and are maintained by industry leaders that meet weekly to tune and extend management capabilities. (See DMTF.ORG, SNIA.ORG)
  • These schema work together to allow full network discovery, provisioning, volume mapping and monitoring of block, file and object storage for all the systems in a modern datacenter.

There is so much to learn beyond this brief tutorial.  Start at DMTF.ORG to learn about Redfish.  Then surf over to SNIA.ORG/SWORDFISH to see how Swordfish brings the benefits of schema-based management to all your storage devices.  You will learn how Swordfish works in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments and enables a scalable solution that grows as your datacenter requirements grow.

By Barry Kittner, Technology Initiatives Manager, Intel and SNIA Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Member

An Introduction: What is Swordfish?

Diane Marsili Leave a comment
Barry Kittner, Technology Initiatives Manager, Intel and SNIA Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Member

To understand Swordfish, let’s start with the basics to examine how modern data centers are managed.

A user of a PC/notebook is assumed to be in control of that PC.  What happens when there are two? Or 10? Or 1,000? Today’s modern data centers can have 100,000 computers (servers) or more! That requires the ability to be in control or “manage” them from a central location.  How does one do that?  It is done via a protocol that enables remote management; today that standard is IPMI, an acronym for Intelligent Platform Management Interface, and which has existed for 20 years.  Among issues with IPMI is that the scale of today’s data centers was not fully envisioned 20 years ago, so some of the components of IPMI cannot cover the tens of thousands of servers it is expected to manage.  The developers also did not foresee the stringent security and increased privacy requirements expected in modern data centers. Read More

Dive into NVMe at Storage Developer Conference – a Chat with SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair Bill Martin

khauser Leave a comment

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 Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and SSD I/O Standards at Samsung Electronics, to understand why SDC is bringing NVMe and NVMe-oF to conference attendees.

SNIA On Storage (SOS): What is NVMe and why is SNIA emphasizing it as one of their key areas of focus for SDC?

Bill Martin (BM):  NVMeTM, also known as NVM ExpressR, is an open collection of standards and information to fully expose the benefits of non-volatile memory (NVM) in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center.

SNIA is very supportive of NVMe.  In fact, earlier this year, SNIA, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and the NVM Express organizations formed a new alliance to coordinate standards for managing solid state drive (SSD) storage devices. This alliance brings together multiple standards for managing the issue of scale-out management of SSDs.  It’s designed to enable an all-inclusive management experience by improving the interoperable management of information technologies.

With interest both from within and outside of SNIA from architects, developers, and implementers on how these standards work, the SNIA Technical Council decided to bring even more sessions on this important area to the SDC audience this year. We are proud to include 16 sessions on NVMe topics over the four days of the conference.

SOS:  What will I learn about NVMe at SDC? Read More

SNIA Volunteer Work Wins Recognition at Flash Memory Summit

kristin.hauser
SNIA thanks and celebrates the many hardworking SNIA member volunteers whose technical work was awarded Best of Show at the recent Flash Memory Summit.

Jennifer Dietz and Eden Kim accept FMS award from Jay Kramer

SNIA won the FMS Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology Award, recognizing innovations that will change the way flash memory works and is used in products, for the SNIA Technical Position Real World Storage Workloads Performance Test Specification (RWSW PTS), developed by the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group (SSS TWG). “Real World Workloads are important for Data Center, IT, and Storage professionals,” said Eden Kim, Chair of the SSS TWG, and CEO of SNIA member company Calypso Systems “because real world workloads are very different from synthetic lab workloads and are key determinants in datacenter server and storage performance, optimization and qualification.”   Eden and Jennifer Dietz of SNIA member company Intel and Co-Chair of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Marketing Committee accepted the award from Jay Kramer of Flash Memory Summit.

Mark Carlson and Bill Martin accept award on behalf of SNIA from Jay Kramer

SNIA also won the FMS Best of show Technology Innovation Award, recognizing that cloud and other large data centers typically prioritize their selection criteria for storage solutions as those that can achieve the highest possible performance while avoiding proprietary vendor lock-in.  SNIA and EXTEN HyperDynamic™ NVMe over Fabrics high-performance storage software were recognized for creating an open storage management specification that works with EXTEN storage software for being the first in the industry to provide a solution based on SNIA Swordfish™ and DMTF Redfish® specifications. “We congratulate EXTEN Technologies for its innovation and well-deserved accolade,” said Don Deel, SNIA Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Chair. “By integrating SNIA Swordfish into its solution, EXTEN Technologies’ customers will benefit from a standards-based API that does not require learning the intricacies of storage infrastructure to handle day-to-day storage needs.” Accepting the award for SNIA at FMS were Mark Carlson of SNIA member company Toshiba Memory Systems and Bill Miller of SNIA member company Samsung Electronics, Co-Chairs of the SNIA Technical Council. Congratulations to all the SNIA volunteers who participated in the development of these award-winning specifications. SNIA Sessions at FMS Now Available for Viewing and Download Read More