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The change of seasons is almost upon us, and what better activity to spark creativity and innovation in a storage developer’s mind than the SNIA Storage Developer Conference!  Now in its 18th year, our conference, created by developers for developers, is renowned for its highly technical content – no marketing hype here- spanning a range of storage and IT topics.  This year, you can choose from over 100 sessions on Cloud, NVMe over Fabrics, Persistent Memory, Software Defined Storage, Hyperscalers, Object Storage, Cold Storage Data, Data Preservation, Security, and many more.

Check out our lineup of keynote speakers – they’ll inspire you with their journeys! Dan Maslowski, Global Engineering Head at Citigroup CATE,will lead us on a dive down the software-defined storage rabbit hole to define cloud architecture in the data center. Gary Grider, HPC Director at the Los Alamos National Labs, will take us on a “Data Lake” cruise, and how to navigate requirements for long-term retention of mostly cold data. And Stephen Bates, Technical Director at Microsemi, will steer us on the Persistent Memory path, with the stones to step on and the boulders to avoid.

SDC also includes two plugfests. Participants at the Cloud Interoperability Plugfest will test the interoperability of well adopted cloud storage interfaces. We always have a large showing of CDMI implementations at this event, but are also looking for implementations of S3 and Swift (and Cinder/Manila) interfaces. You can register for the Cloud Plugfest here. The SMB3 Plugfest enables vendors to bring their implementations of SMB3 to test, identify, and fix bugs in a collaborative setting with the goal of providing a forum in which companies can develop interoperable products.  You can sign up for the SMB3 Plugfest here.

Sound overwhelming? Don’t worry, relax, there will be plenty of time to network with technical leaders representing the 160+ SNIA member companies and to tour the SDC exhibitors adjacent to the sessions for new applications and solutions.

SNIA Storage Developer Conference is September 19-22, 2016 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. Check out the latest Agenda, read more about the Plugfests, and Register for SDC today!

SNIA welcomes their friends and colleagues to join them at one or more upcoming conferences in May and June 2016.

The second annual In-Memory Computing Summit is May 23-24, 2016 at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco. This conference is the only industry-wide event of its kind, tailored to in-memory computing-related technologies and solutions. The IMC Summit is a multi-track conference that brings together in-memory computing visionaries, decision makers, experts and developers for the purpose of education, discussion and networking. SNIA’s Solid State Storage Initiative’s NVDIMM SIG Co-Chair Arthur Sainio will deliver a keynote, and the SIG will feature an NVDIMM demonstration in their booth. As a friend and colleague of SNIA, you are eligible for a 20% discount on the ticket price. Just register with the discount code: SNIA20 to receive your discount.

Next is SNIA’s 4th annual Data Storage Innovation (DSI) Conference June 13-15, 2016 in San Mateo CA. The 3-day conference agenda features over 80 sessions spanning 20 themed topics reflecting the leading edge IT trends for next generation data center networked storage and file system solutions, the continued shift of enterprise computing to hybrid cloud, increased business driven big data analytics projects, and managing and optimizing these strategic IT investments. The full agenda is now posted and features SNIA tutorials and sessions from industry leaders and a busy Innovation Expo. Register here using this special code DSI16SocialMedia and receive $100 off the non-member registration fee. And here’s a tip – extend your stay and prepare for one of the IT industry’s most in-demand technical certifications – the SNIA Storage Professional Certification – with a Storage Foundations certification training class June 16-17 in San Mateo. Learn more at http://www.snia.org/education/courses/training_tc.

Finally, SNIA will wrap up June at the Creative Storage Conference in Culver City June 24, 2016, where digital storage aficionados will gather to explore the conference theme of “The Art of Storage”.  Attendees will find out the latest developments in digital storage for media and entertainment and network with industry professionals.  Six sessions and four keynotes will cover topics like tomorrow’s blockbusters, storage for artists, content on the move, archiving, accelerating workflows and a conversations with independent storytellers.  Join SNIA in the exhibit area to discuss long term file storage, data protection and capacity optimization, and solid state storage data recovery and erase.  Register at http://www.creativestorage.org.

There is a sense of anticipation that awaits the unveiling of SNIA’s Data Storage Innovation (DSI)  conference agenda. DSI is unique in its focus as a conference for those that use information technology.  Each year, the agenda expands as hundreds of submissions are received, reviewed, and considered for addition to the schedule.

2016 brings the most extensive topic agenda to date for DSI, set for June 13-15, 2016 and newly located in San Mateo for the convenience of those flying in to SFO, San Francisco and East Bay attendees, as well as those in Silicon Valley.  DSI’s agenda committee, comprised of SNIA volunteer leaders from leading IT organizations, are attuned to the changing needs of an IT audience confronting next generation data centers, enterprise computing’s shift to the cloud, and the drive to data analytics for business decisions. The agenda’s 20 themed topics include hyperconvergence, cloud, data protection, big data, security, cloud, persistent memory, software defined storage, containers, and distributed storage.   And the 75 sessions within these topics are a mix of industry leadership, SNIA’s vendor neutral tutorial education, and sponsored sessions.

The DSI General Sessions emcee, reprising her highly received 2015 role, will be Camberley Bates, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, the Evaluator Group, who will also co-host a keynote on enterprise storage architectures.  Additional keynotes at this time include “Storage Architectures for Next Generation Cognitive Analytics” presented by Huawei, and an IBM industry perspective on Enterprise Computing and Data Storage.

New also for 2016 will be a session on results from a new survey co-sponsored by SNIA and the Evaluator group on enterprise deployment of hyperconverged solutions.

We invite you to peruse the DSI Conference agenda online, and make your plans to attend and participate in a conference rich in one-on-one discussions, lots of opportunities for “hallway networking”, and up-to-date technical knowledge presented without vendor bias. Register here.  If you want to understand more about how DSI works, a new video available on the DSI conference website walks you through the highlights of the conference, with perspectives from Wayne Adams, DSI Conference agenda chair, on how the sessions provide a roadmap of where the industry is going.  Camberley Bates also offers her feedback on why the conference is important in the ability to communicate with peers and learn firsthand their approaches to solving today’s enterprise issues.

From SNIA Event Partner, Interop

Leadership isn’t jut for managers and executives – it’s also an essential skill for technologists who want to have a positive impact on their businesses. Interop Las Vegas provides a wide range of programs, including its IT Leadership Summit, workshops, and extensive conference track, that can help IT professionals find their voices and advocate for innovation. Check out the following videos on Network Computing:

In this video, Co-Founder and CEO at Creativity profiles, Rob Cordova provides a sneak peek into what attendees will learn at his workshops: Fueling Innovation and Leading Innovation.

In this video, Dan Roberts, leader of Interop’s IT Leadership Summit and CEO and President of Ouellette & Associates Consulting, discusses how to be successful in a world of increased complexity, rising expectations, and accelerating change. Find out how and why you can move away from the tired idea of “aligning business with IT” toward a place where IT is integral to your business and driving new initiatives forward.

Learn more about the IT Leadership Track and register for Interop, May 2-6 in Las Vegas. Use discount code SNIA20 to claim your Free Expo Pass or save 20% off Conference Passes.

From SNIA Event Partner, Interop

The skyrocketing increase in data, and the desire to better understand and use that data, has focused new attention on storage technologies with higher performance and capacity. Flash, cloud storage, software-defined storage, and converged and hyper-converged infrastructure offer new opportunities for businesses but also change the way organizations must plan for and manage storage. And businesses still must ensure they provide the critical services of backup, disaster recovery, and data protection in the most reliable way for the least cost possible. Interop’s Storage track presents independent experts who will help IT organizations understand the new technologies available and evaluate how and why they might fit into their enterprise storage strategy
Want to learn more about balancing real-world storage needs? Watch this video from Network Computing with Greg Schulz, chair of Interop’s Storage Track and Founder and Sr. Analyst of independent IT advisory consultancy firm Server and StorageIO. Greg talks about the perennial challenges of enterprise storage, how software abstraction fits in, managing legacy technology while unlocking the potential of new developments. Learn more about the Storage Track and register for Interop, May 2-6 in Las Vegas. Use discount code SNIA20 to claim your Free Expo Pass or save 20% off Conference Passes.

by Marty Foltyn

SNIA on Storage continues its preview of SNIA Tutorials at the Storage Visions Conference, a partner program of CES held on January 3-5, 2016 at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.  “SNIA Education Day” is held on afternoon of the pre-conference day at Storage Visions – January 3, 2016 – and is designed to give attendees the opportunity to learn about important storage topics on depth with leading industry speakers.

In the December 17th SNIA on Storage blog, we featured a tutorial which examines the conflict between privacy and data protection as illustrated in the European Union, but really applicable worldwide. In the December 18 blog, we previewed the Practical Online Cache Analysis and Optimization tutorial. In the December 21 blog, we examined Massively Scalable File Storage – the Key to the Internet of Things.

Today’s blog provides a research perspective on “Fog” Computing and its Ecosystem – providing data, compute, storage, and applications services to end users – presented by Professor Ramin Elahi of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The distinguishing Fog characteristics are its proximity to end-users, its dense geographical distribution, and its support for mobility. This SNIA Tutorial will discuss how services are hosted at the network edge or even end devices such as set-top-boxes or access points, which therefore alleviates issues the IoT (Internet of Things) is expected to produce, such as reducing service latency and improving QoS, resulting in a superior user-experience. Fog Computing supports the emerging Internet of Everything (IoE) applications that demand real-time/predictable latency (industrial automation, transportation, networks of sensors and actuators). Thanks to its wide geographical distribution the Fog paradigm is well positioned for real time big data and real time analytics. Fog supports densely distributed data collection points, hence adding a fourth axis to the often mentioned Big Data dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity)

SNIA Tutorial presenter Ramin Elahi, MSEE, is an Adjunct Professor and Advisory Board Member at UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley. He has taught Data Center Storage, Unix Networking and System Administration at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley Ext. since 1996. He is also a Sr. Education Consultant at EMC Corp. He has also served as a Training Solutions Architect at NetApp, where he managed the engineering on-boarding and training curricula development. Prior to NetApp, he was Training Site Manager at Hitachi Data Systems Academy in charge of development and delivery of enterprise storage arrays certification programs. He also was the global network storage curricula manager at Hewlett-Packard. His areas of expertise are data center storage design and architecture, Data ONTAP, cloud storage, and virtualization. He has also held variety of positions at Cisco, Novell and SCO as a consultant and escalation engineer. He implemented the first university-level Data Storage and Virtualization curriculum in Northern California back in 2007.

SNIA is a proud sponsor of the Storage Visions Conference, a partner program of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  Storage Visions, held in Las Vegas right before CES on January 3-5, 2016, is the place to explore the latest information on the rapidly evolving technology of digital storage and how it impacts consumer electronics, the internet of things, and storage in the cloud. If you have not registered for Storage Visions, head over to http://www.storagevisions.com for the conference preview.  Take $100 off your registration with the link:  https://sv2016.eventbrite.com/?discount=onehundredoff_67349921

by Marty Foltyn

SNIA on Storage continues its preview of SNIA Tutorials at the Storage Visions Conference. SNIA is a proud sponsor of the Storage Visions Conference, a partner program of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  Storage Visions, held in Las Vegas right before CES on January 3-5, 2016, is the place to explore the latest information on the rapidly evolving technology of digital storage and how it impacts consumer electronics, the internet of things, and storage in the cloud. If you have not registered for Storage Visions, head over to http://www.storagevisions.com for the conference preview.  Take $100 off your registration with the link:  https://sv2016.eventbrite.com/?discount=onehundredoff_67349921

“SNIA Education Day” is held on the afternoon of the pre-conference day at Storage Visions – January 3, 2016 – and is designed to give attendees the opportunity to learn about important storage topics on depth with leading industry speakers.

In the SNIA on Storage December 17th blog, we featured a tutorial which examines the conflict between privacy and data protection as illustrated in the European Union, but really applicable worldwide. In the December 18 blog, we previewed the Practical Online Cache Analysis and Optimization tutorial.

Today’s blog highlights a topic of key interest to those building Internet of Things (IoT) applications – Massively Scalable File Storage which will be presented by Philippe Nicholas on SNIA Education Day at Storage Visions.

The Internet has changed the world and continues to revolutionize how people are connected, exchange data, and do business. This radical change is one of the causes of the rapid explosion of data volume that required a new data storage approach and design. One of the common elements is that unstructured data rules the IT world. How can famous Internet services we all use everyday support and scale with thousands of new users added daily and continue to deliver an enterprise-class SLA? What are the various technologies behind a Cloud Storage service to support hundreds of millions of users? This tutorial covers technologies introduced by famous papers about Google File System and BigTable, Amazon Dynamo, and Apache Hadoop. In addition, Parallel, Scale-out, Distributed, and P2P approaches with Lustre, PVFS, and pNFS with several proprietary ones are presented. This tutorial also discusses some key features such as erasure coding which are essential at this large scale to help understand and differentiate industry vendor offerings.

Tutorial presenter Philippe Nicolas is a recognized storage industry expert with more than 20 years of experience. He is currently an advisor for companies including Rozo Systems, Guardtime, and Solix Technologies. Philippe drove the Industry Strategy at Scality after leading the Product Strategy since 2011. He was at Brocade for 2 years as technology evangelist and strategist and spent nearly 10 years at Veritas Software and Symantec in different technology and product roles. Philippe started the SNIA Europe France regional committee in 2001, and served as Chairman for France until February 2010. He served twice on the SNIA Europe Board of Directors and was a founder of the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative. He is the author of four SNIA Tutorials on Data Sharing, File Storage, Massive Scalability, and Cloud Storage. In 2005, Philippe received the Outstanding Service Award from the SNIA Europe for his industry and association contribution. He holds an engineering degree in computer sciences from ESI.

by Marty Foltyn

SNIA on Storage continues its preview of SNIA Tutorials at the Storage Visions Conference. “SNIA Education Day” is held on the afternoon of the pre-conference day at Storage Visions – January 3, 2016 – and is designed to give attendees the opportunity to learn about important storage topics on depth with leading industry speakers.

SNIA will exhibit at Storage Visions January 4-5, 2016 in booths 204-208, featuring the latest on Solid State Storage and certification activities.

If you have not registered for Storage Visions, head over to http://www.storagevisions.com for the conference preview and registration.

In December 17th SNIA on Storage blog, we reviewed a tutorial which examines the conflict between privacy and data protection as illustrated in the European Union, but really applicable worldwide. Today, we take a look at a SNIA Tutorial #2 in the SNIA Education Day Agenda – Practical Online Cache Analysis and Optimization.

This tutorial will take a technical dive into how to analyze and optimize high-performance storage caches using lightweight, continuously-updated miss ratio curves (MRCs). The benefits of storage caches have been notoriously difficult to model and control, varying widely by workload, and exhibiting complex, nonlinear behaviors. Now, however, MRCs (previously relegated to offline modeling), can be computed so inexpensively that they are practical for dynamic, online cache management, even in the most demanding environments.

The tutorial will examine new opportunities afforded by MRCs to capture valuable information about locality that can be leveraged to guide efficient cache sizing, allocation, and partitioning, in order to support diverse goals such as improving performance, isolation, and quality of service. The presenters will also describhow multiple MRCs can be used to track different alternatives at various timescales, enabling online tuning of cache parameters and policies.

Tutorial presenter Carl Waldspurger has been leading research at CloudPhysics since its inception. He is active in the systems research community, and serves as a technical advisor to several startups. For over a decade, Carl was responsible for core resource management and virtualization technologies at VMware. Prior to VMware, he was a researcher at the DEC Systems Research Center. Carl holds a PhD in computer science from MIT.

Co-presenting with Carl is Irfan Ahmad, Chief Technology Officer of CloudPhysics which he cofounded in 2011. Prior to CloudPhysics, Irfan was at VMware, where he was R&D tech lead and co-inventor for flagship products. Irfan has worked extensively on interdisciplinary endeavors in memory, storage, CPU, and distributed resource management, and has developed a special interest in research at the intersection of systems.

SNIA is a proud sponsor of the Storage Visions Conference, a partner program of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  Storage Visions, held in Las Vegas right before CES on January 4-5, 2016, is the place to explore the latest information on the rapidly evolving technology of digital storage and how it impacts consumer electronics, the internet of things, and storage in the cloud.

SNIA is a proud sponsor of the Storage Visions Conference, a partner program of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  Storage Visions, held in Las Vegas right before CES on January 3-5, 2016, is the place to explore the latest information on the rapidly evolving technology of digital storage and how it impacts consumer electronics, the internet of things, and storage in the cloud.

SNIA will exhibit at Storage Visions on booths 204-208, featuring  the latest on Solid State Storage,  and certification activities.

Over the next week, the SNIA on Storage blog will highlight the sessions in SNIA Education Day, a pre-conference event on January 3, 2016 that gives Storage Visions attendees vendor-neutral technical education on key storage issues.  If you have not registered for Storage Visions, head over to http://www.storagevisions.com for the conference preview and registration.

SNIA Tutorial Privacy vs. Data Protection examines the impact of European Union data protection legislation. Attendees will learn how, after reviewing the diverging data protection legislation in the EU member states, the European Commission (EC) decided that this situation would impede the free flow of data within the EU zone.  The EC response was to undertake an effort to harmonize the data protection regulations and it started the process by proposing a new data protection framework.  The tutorial will discuss the impacts of this proposal on data handling practices, as it includes some significant changes like defining a data breach to include data destruction, adding the right to be forgotten, adopting the U.S. practice of breach notifications, and many other new elements.  Another major change is a shift from a directive to a rule which means the protections are the same for all 28 countries and includes significant financial penalties for infractions.

Tutorial presenter Thomas Rivera has over 29 years of experience in the storage industry, specializing in file services and data protection, and is a Senior Technology Associate with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). Thomas is an active member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), serving as secretary of the SNIA Board of Directors, participating as co-chair of the Data Protection & Capacity Optimization (DPCO) Committee, and is also a member of the Analytics & Big Data Committee, as well as the Storage Security Technical Working Group (TWG).

SNIA Tutorials are an important element of the SNIA Education continuum of Certification, Curriculum, and Tutorials.   SNIA Tutorials are educational materials developed by vendors, training companies, analysts, consultants, and end-users in the storage networking industry.  They are intended to present technical and business issues covering Information Technology in a fair and unbiased manner, and designed to give a consensus view of particular topics, from the viewpoint of the entire industry or a significant segment.  View the entire array of SNIA Education at http://www.snia.org/education.