Category: software defined storage

Software Defined Storage Q&A

Tim Lustig
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) recently hosted a live webcast, What Software Defined Storage Means for Storage Networking where our experts, Ted Vojnovich and Fred Bower explained what makes software defined storage (SDS) different from traditional storage. If you missed the live event, you can watch it on-demand at your convenience. We had several questions at the live event and here are our experts’ answers to them all: Q. Are there cases where SDS can still work with legacy storage so that high priority flows, online transaction processing (OLTP) can use SAN for the legacy storage while not so high priority and backup data flows utilize the SDS infrastructure? Read More

What Does Software Defined Storage Means for Storage Networking?

Tim Lustig

Software defined storage (SDS) is growing in popularity in both cloud and enterprise accounts. But why is it appealing to some customers and what is the impact on storage networking? Find out at our SNIA Networking Storage Forum webcast on October 22, 2019 “What Software Defined Storage Means for Storage Networking” where our experts will discuss:

  • What makes SDS different from traditional storage arrays?
  • Does SDS have different networking requirements than traditional storage appliances?
  • Does SDS really save money?
  • Does SDS support block, file and object storage access?
  • How data availability is managed in SDS vs. traditional storage
  • What are potential issues when deploying SDS?

Register today to save your spot on Oct. 22nd.  This event is live, so as always, our SNIA experts will be on-hand to answer your questions.

What the “T” Means in SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies

Alex McDonald
The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) has had a rebrand; we’ve added a T for Technologies into our name, and we’re now officially the Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI). That doesn’t seem like a significant change, but there’s a good reason. Our old name reflected the push to getting acceptance of cloud storage, and that specific cloud storage debate has been won, and big time. One relatively small cloud service provider is currently storing 400PB of clients’ data. Twitter alone consumes 300PB of data on Google’s cloud offering. Facebook, Amazon, AliBaba, Tencent – all have huge data storage numbers. Enterprises of every size are storing data in the cloud. That’s why we added the word “technologies.” The expanded charter and new name reflect the need to support the evolving cloud business models and architectures such as OpenStack, software defined storage, Kubernetes and object storage. Read More

Too Proud to Ask Webcast Series Opens Pandora’s Box – Storage Management

J Metz
Storage can be something of a “black box,” a monolithic entity that is at once mysterious and scary. That’s why we created “The Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask” webcast series. So far, we’ve explored various and sundry aspects of storage, focusing on “the naming of the parts.” Our goal has been to break down some of the components of storage and explain how they fit into the greater whole. On September 28th, we’ll be hosting “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Cyan – Storage Management.” This time, we’re going to open up Pandora’s Box and peer inside the world of storage management, uncovering some of the key technologies that are used to manage devices, storage traffic, and storage architectures. In particular, we’ll be discussing: Read More

SNIA Storage Developer Conference-The Knowledge Continues

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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.

Need a Primer on Cloud Object Storage?

Alex McDonald

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!

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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!

Open Source Software-Only Storage – Really.

Mario Blandini

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.

 

Exploring the Software Defined Data Center – A SNIA Cloud Webcast

Glyn Bowden

SNIA Cloud is pleased to announce our next live Webcast, “Exploring the Software Defined Data Center.” A Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is a compute facility in which all elements of the infrastructure – networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualized and removed from proprietary hardware stacks. Deployment, provisioning and configuration as well as the operation, monitoring and automation of the entire environment is abstracted from hardware and implemented in software.

The results of this software-defined approach include maximizing agility and minimizing cost, benefits that appeal to IT organizations of all sizes. In fact, understanding SDDC concepts can help IT professionals in any organization better apply these software defined concepts to storage, networking, compute and other infrastructure decisions.

If you’re interested in Software Defined Data Centers and how such a thing might be implemented – and why this concept is important to IT professionals who aren’t involved with building data centers – then please join us on March 15th as Eric Slack, Sr. Analyst with Evaluator Group, will explain what “software defined” really means and why it’s important to all IT organizations. Eric will be joined by Alex McDonald, Chair for SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative who will talk about how these concepts apply to the modern data center.

Register now as we’ll explore:

  • How a SDDC leverages this concept to make the private cloud feasible
  • How we can apply SDDC concepts to an existing data center
  • How to develop your own software defined data center environment

As always, this Webcast will be live. Eric, Alex and I will be on hand to answer your questions. We hope you’ll join us on March 15th.