Category: Storage

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

SMI-S Storage Management Quick Start Guide Series Kicks-Off

Linda Capcara
Twenty-year SNIA veteran Mike Walker has created a series of videos titled “SMI-S Quick Start Guides” that provides developers using the SMI-S storage management specification instructions on how to find useful information in a SMI-S server using the python-based PyWBEM open source tool. “Using the PyWBEM tool, I created a set of mock SMI-S 1.8 servers which I have shared with the world on GitHub,” said Walker. “I also created a set of PDFs called ‘Quick Start Guides’ and a series of videos demonstrating some of the most recent capabilities of the SMI-S 1.8 specification. Storage equipment vendors and management software vendors seeking to address the day-to-day tasks of the IT environment can use this information to work with SMI-S 1.8.” Read More

Wish You Knew More About Storage? Geek Out with SNIA

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

Are you a storage geek at heart? Or perhaps an aspiring one? Here’s your chance to “Geek Out” on all the storage basics. Whether you need a refresh on a foundational storage technology or want a 101 lesson on something new, SNIA has you covered.

Visit our “Geek Out on Storage” page for a unique lesson on storage basics. We call it “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask.” Here you’ll find videos that clearly define and explain storage terminology and technologies.

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Trends in Media and Entertainment Storage – Your Questions Answered from Our Webcast

Marty Foltyn
Thanks to all who attended or listened on-demand to our recent SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) webcast on Trends in Worldwide Media and Entertainment Storage. Motti Beck of Mellanox Technologies and Tom Coughlin, SSSI Education Chair and analyst with Coughlin Associates, got rave reviews for their analysis of this important market.  Feedback comments included “Good overview with enough details for me to learn something”; “Really appreciate the insight into the ME businesses”; and “Just in time for the upcoming NAB Show!”.  We appreciate your interest and enthusiasm! Important to every SNIA webcast are the Questions – and we got quite a few on this one.  Thanks in advance to Tom Coughlin, who provided the answers below.  Send any more questions to us at asksssi@snia.org with the subject- M&E Webcast Questions.  Happy reading, and we hope to see you at one of our upcoming webcasts or events. Read More

RDMA for Persistent Memory over Fabrics – FAQ

John Kim
In our most recent SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast Extending RDMA for Persistent Memory over Fabrics, our expert speakers, Tony Hurson and Rob Davis outlined extensions to RDMA protocols that confirm persistence and additionally can order successive writes to different memories within the target system. Hundreds of people have seen the webcast and have given it a 4.8 rating on a scale of 1-5! If you missed, it you can watch it on-demand at your convenience. The webcast slides are also available for download. We had several interesting questions during the live event. Here are answers from our presenters:  Read More

Accelerating the Adoption of Next-Generation Storage Technologies

Michael Oros Leave a comment

Introduction to the Storage Networking Industry Association

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is the largest storage industry association in existence, and one of the largest in IT. It is comprised of over 170 leading industry organizations, and 2,500 contributing members that serve more than 50,000 IT and storage professionals worldwide.

During the nineties, the nascent storage networking field needed a strong voice to communicate the value of storage area networks (SANs) and the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. SNIA emerged in 1997 when a handful of storage experts realized that there was a need for a unified voice and vendor-neutral education on these emerging technologies to ensure that storage networks became feature complete, interoperable and trusted solutions across the IT landscape.

Since then, SNIA has earned a reputation for developing technologies that have emerged as industry standards. There standards relate to data, storage and information management, and address such challenges as interoperability, usability, complexity and security. Read More

Why is Blockchain Storage Different?

J Metz
The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF), specifically ESF Vice Chair, Alex McDonald, spent Halloween explaining storage requirements for modern transactions in our webcast, “Transactional Models & Their Storage Requirements.” Starting with the fascinating history of the first transactional system in a bakery in 1951 (really!), to a discussion on Bitcoin, it was an insightful look at the changing role of storage amid modern transactions. If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand at your convenience. We received some great questions during the live event. Here are answers to them all: Q. How many nodes are typical in the blockchain ledger? A. As many as are required to ensure that a single node or small number of nodes can’t crack the hard problem that gives you the right to add your blockchain as the next. There are estimated to be more than 11,000 Bitcoin nodes right now (see https://bitnodes.earn.com/), but not all blockchain systems have as many nodes (or such a hard problem to crack!) Read More