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Posted by Marty Foltyn

In the two weeks leading up to the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference, which begins on September 21, SNIA on Storage is highlighting exciting interest areas in the SDC agenda. Our previous blog entries have covered File Systems, Cloud, Management, and New Thinking, and this week we continue with Disruptive Technologies. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit http://www.storagedeveloper.org/ to see the four day overview and sign up.

SDC’s “Disruptive Technologies” sessions highlight those new areas which are revolutionizing storage and the work of developers: Persistent Memory, Object Drives, and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SLR). Leading experts will do a deep dive with sixteen sessions spread throughout the conference agenda. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.

If you are just dipping your toes into disruptive technologies, you will want to check out the SDC Pre-Conference Primer on Sunday September 20. These sessions are included with full conference registration.

At the Primer, Thomas Coughlin, SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Governing Board and President, Coughlin Associates and Edward Grochowski, Storage Consultant, will present Advances in Non-Volatile Storage Technologies, where they will address the status of NVM device technologies and review requirements in process, equipment, and innovations.

Jim Handy, SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Member and General Director, Objective Analysis will discuss 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.

David Cohen, System Architect, and Brian Hausauer, Hardware Architect, at Intel will present Nonvolatile Memory (NVM), Four Trends in the Modern Data Center, and the Implications for the Design of Next Generation Distributed Storage Platforms. They will discuss increasing performance of network bandwidth; storage media approaching the performance of DRAM; OSVs optimizing the code path of their storage stacks; and single processor/core performance and their implications on the design of distributed storage platforms.

Dr. Thomas Willhalm and Karthik Kumar, Senior Application Engineers at Intel, will present Developing Software for Persistent Memory. They will discuss how to identify which data structures that are suited for this new memory tier, and which data structures are not. They will provide developers a systematic methodology to identify how their applications can be architected to take advantage of persistence in the memory tier

And you won’t want to miss the Wednesday evening September 23 Birds-Of-a-Feather (BOF) on Enabling Persistent Memory Applications with NVDIMMs! Come to this OPEN TO ALL IN THE INDUSTRY Birds of a Feather session for an interactive discussion on what customers, storage developers, and the industry would like to see to improve and enhance NVDIMM integration and optimization.

At the SDC Conference, sessions on “Disruptive Technologies – Persistent Memory” kick off with Doug Voigt, SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group Co-Chair and Distinguished Technologist, HP who will discuss Preparing Applications for Persistent Memory, using the concepts of the SNIA NVM Programming Model to explore the emerging landscape of persistent memory related software from an application evolution point of view.

Paul von Behren, SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group Co-Chair and Software Architect, Intel will present Managing the Next Generation Memory Subsystem, providing an overview of emerging memory device types, covering management concepts and features, and conclude with an overview of standards that drive interoperability and encourage the development of memory subsystem management tools.

SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group Co-Chairs Jeff Chang, VP Marketing and Business Development, AgigA Tech and Arthur Sainio, Senior Director Marketing, SMART Modular will present The NVDIMM Cookbook: A Soup-to-Nuts Primer on Using NVDIMMs to Improve Your Storage Performance. In this SNIA Tutorial, they will walk you through a soup-to-nuts description of integrating NVDIMMs into your system, from hardware to BIOS to application software, highlighting some of the “knobs” to turn to optimize use in your application as well as some of the “gotchas” encountered along the way.

Pete Kirkpatrick, Principal Engineer, Pure Storage will discuss Building NVRAM Subsystems in All-Flash Storage Arrays, including the hardware and software development of an NVDIMM using NVMe over PCIe-based NVRAM solutions and comparison of the performance of the NVMe-based solution to an SLC NAND Flash-based solution.

Tom Talpey, Architect, Microsoft, will discuss Remote Access to Ultra-low-latency Storage, exploring the issues and outlining a path-finding effort to make small, natural extensions to RDMA and upper layer storage protocols to reduce latencies to acceptable, minimal levels, while preserving the many advantages of the storage protocols they extend.

Sarah Jelinek, Senior SW Engineer, Intel, will present Solving the Challenges of Persistent Memory Programming, reviewing key attributes of persistent memory as well as outlining architectural and design considerations for making an application persistent memory aware.

Chet Douglas, Principal SW Architect, Intel will discuss RDMA with PM: Software Mechanisms for Enabling Persistent Memory Replication, reviewing key HW components involved in RDMA and introduce several SW mechanisms that can be utilized with RDMA with PM.

In the Disruptive Technology area of Object Drives, Mark Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba will present a SNIA Tutorial on Object Drives: A New Architectural Partitioning, discussing the current state and future prospects for object drives, including use cases, requirements, and best practices.

Abhijeet Gole, Senior Director of Engineering, Toshiba will present Beyond LBA: New Directions in the Storage Interface, exploring the paradigm shift introduced by these new interfaces and modes of operation of storage devices.

In the Disruptive Technology area of Shingled Magnetic Recording, Jorge Campello, Director of Systems – Architecture and Solutions, HGST will discuss SMR – The Next Generation of Storage Technology articulating the difference in SMR drive architectures and performance characteristics, and illustrating how the open source community has the distinct advantage of integrating a host-managed platform that leverages SMR HDDs

Albert Chen Engineering Program Director and Jim Malina, Technologist, WDC, will discuss Host Managed SMR, going over the various SW/FW paradigms that attempt to abstract away SMR behavior (e.g. user space library, device mapper, SMR aware file system, enlightened application). Along the way, they will also explore what deficiencies (e.g. ATA sense data reporting) are holding back SMR adoption in the data center.

Join your peers – register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog on Security topics at SDC!

 

Posted by Marty Foltyn

In the two weeks leading up to the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference, which begins on September 21, SNIA on Storage is highlighting exciting interest areas in the SDC agenda. Our previous blog entries have covered File Systems, Cloud, and Management, and this week we begin with New Thinking. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit http://www.storagedeveloper.org/ to see the four day overview and sign up.

SDC’s “New Thinking” track has traditionally been a highlight of the conference, bringing to attendees leading academic research and industry practices as selected by a team of renowned academic and industry leaders. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.

Satadru Pan of Facebook’s session on f4: Facebook’s Warm BLOB Storage System will examine the underlying access patterns of Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) and identify temperature zones that include hot BLOBs that are accessed frequently and warm BLOBs that are accessed far less often. He will discuss Facebook’s overall BLOB storage system designed to isolate warm BLOBs and enabling them to use a specialized warm BLOB storage system, and introduce f4, a new system that lowers the effective-replication-factor of warm BLOBs while remaining fault tolerant and able to support the lower throughput demands.

Austin Donnelly, Principal Research Software Development Engineer, Microsoft will present Pelican: A Building Block for Exascale Cold Data Storage, exploring this rack-scale design for cheap storage of data which is rarely accessed (cold data). He will evaluate Pelican both in simulation and with a full rack, and show how Pelican delivers both high throughput and acceptable latency.

Mai Zheng, Assistant Professor Computer Science Department – College of Arts and Sciences, New Mexico State University will speak on Torturing Databases for Fun and Profit, proposing a method to expose and diagnose violations of the ACID properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, and studying 8 widely-used databases ranging from open-source key-value stores to high-end commercial OLTP servers.

Peter Desnoyers, Professor College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University will discuss Skylight — A Window on Shingled Disk Operation, introducing this novel methodology that combines software and hardware techniques to reverse engineer key properties of drive-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives. He will show the generality and efficacy of their techniques by running them on top of three emulated and two real SMR drives, discovering valuable performance-relevant details of the behavior of the real SMR drives.

Join your peers at SDC – register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for our next blog on Disruptive Technologies topics at SDC!

Posted by Marty Foltyn

For the next two weeks leading up to the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference, SNIA on Storage will highlight exciting interest areas in the SDC agenda. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit http://www.storagedeveloper.org/ to see the four day overview and sign up.

Mastering Management is a top priority for Storage Developers, and you’ll find the answers you need at SDC.  Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.

Jeff Autor, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, will present a DMTF Redfish Overview, covering the design tenets, protocol and payload, expected deliverables and time frames of this open industry standard specification.

Chris Lionetti, Reference Architect at NetApp, will discuss The State of SMI-S – The Standards Based Approach for Managing Infrastructure, providing the fundamentals of the SNIA Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S) and a clear understanding of its value in a production environment. This session will also address the newly created SMI-S getting started guide.

Amit Virmani and Jeff Li, Senior Software Engineers at Microsoft Corporation, will present Enterprise-Grade Array-Based Replication and Disaster Recovery with SMI-S, Windows Server, System Center and Azure Site Recovery. Attendees will understand what ASR Disaster Recovery solution means, how the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine manager leverages a replication discovery and management profile, and take a deep dive into the Virtual Machine Manager.

Join your peers at SDC – register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for our next blog on New Thinking topics at SDC!

Since the release of SNIA Emerald measurement test specification v2.0.2 in 2013 and the EnergyStar Data Center Storage Program V1.0 going into effect in 2013, storage system vendors across the industry have been testing their systems throughout 2014 and into 2015.  Over 100 EnergyStar storage system test reports are available for public access at http://www.energystar.gov/productfinder/product/certified-data-center-storage/results from vendors including Dell, DotHill, EMC, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NEC, NetApp and Symantec.  For data center owners procuring storage systems, there is a comprehensive repository of information to further a company’s IT energy efficiency improvement program when making new storage system decisions.  Coupled with other ENERGYSTAR programs such as Servers and UPS, and TheGreenGrid PUE data center metric, CIOs have  more cross-industry energy-related metrics and product specifics to make informed decisions for upgrades.  Additionally for storage systems, using a several capacity optimization technologies can further reduce the total physical amount of storage required, further translating into energy savings.  To learn more visit www.sniaemerald.com

The SNIA Green TWG (Technical Work Group) and Green Storage Initiative (GSI) will deliver 6 hours of training through a webinar format on July 20th and July 21st. Each day will feature a 3 hour segment from 1PM–4PM Pacific time; July 20th will cover the technical details of the SNIA Emerald v2.1 Specification and supporting test tools; and July 21st will cover the program details for SNIA Emerald Programs, USA EPA EnergyStar Program, and supplementary sessions by testing services and certifying body services.

A highlight of the changes in the V2.1 Specification include:

• Corrections and clarity to the V2.0.2 specification
• Required use of Vdbench and a SNIA provided Vdbench test script
• Improvements in COM testing
• Changes in pre–fill criteria percentages
• Change in metric stability criterion
• Online and near–online categories are combined

To RSVP for the July 20–21 webinar training, please send an email no later than July 16th with your name, title, email address, company name to emerald-training@snia.org. There is no fee to register and attend the training. After the training sessions, training materials will be posted to www.sniaemerald.com. A detailed training agenda along with the webinar details will be emailed to those who have registered.

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a growing area of investment for many companies; the DRaaS market will be worth $5.7 billion by 2018. IT professionals with experience implementing a business continuity plan are painstakingly aware that disaster recovery can be a very manual and complex workflow. Automation and orchestration can help simplify the experience, eliminate human error, minimize complexity, and reduce downtime. However, to achieve this promise, vendors must work together to ensure maximum interoperability between software and devices in the data center.

Maximum Interoperability

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a consortium of storage manufacturers and management software vendors actively contributing to the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) to ensure maximum interoperability. The Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is the set of working groups that define SMI-S. Management software vendors can manage any SMI-S–compliant storage devices in the data center using a consistent interface. Common tasks include discovering storage devices, configuring features, provisioning storage, monitoring health and operational status, and collecting performance information. With the latest version of SMI-S 1.6.1, management software can orchestrate failover of storage between two sites using synchronous or asynchronous replication.

Microsoft supports the latest version of SMI-S 1.6.1 for managing storage across many storage devices in the data center. Windows Server and System Center manage private cloud storage. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR) orchestrates storage replication failover for disaster recovery. The primary method for SCVMM to talk to external storage is using SMI-S, this is the industry default.

Consistent DR Experience

Management software that supports SMI-S–compliant devices can present a consistent experience across many devices without resorting to lowest-common-denominator capabilities. Storage manufacturers implement rich features in the devices and make them easy to manage using SMI-S. Management software can quickly identify the capabilities of each device using SMI-S and optimize the experience accordingly.

ASR is the latest Microsoft product that integrates with SMI-S–complaint devices to present a consistent experience for planned, unplanned, and test failovers of storage and workloads between sites. ASR and System Center experiences focus on enabling protection at the workload level, under the covers, while the storage is configured and replication is enabled using SMI-S.

Quality and Scale

Data centers with multiple storage devices more than likely use storage from multiple manufacturers and storage management products from multiple vendors. Although SMI-S ensures that the interfaces are well known, the quality of the interfaces must be tested. Members of SMI participate in multiple plugfests every year to test product functionality and scalability. Plug-fest attendees work side by side for a week in a lab to identify implementation issues and required updates to SMI-S and to work with companies new to SMI-S. Investing in plugfests ensures that customers receive the best quality product that works out of the box.

The SNIA SMI-S organization offers a comprehensive Conformance Testing Program (CTP) to test adherence to the protocol which offers independent verification of compliance that customers can view directly on the SNIA website. In Addition, Microsoft worked with multiple SMI members for over a year to integrate storage replication management into System Center and Azure Site Recovery for site-to-site workloads and storage, planned, unplanned, and test failover. Microsoft provided each storage manufacturer with test suites to exercise functionality, scale, and stress of the end-to-end solution.

Cost-Effective DR Solutions

The cost of implementing a disaster recovery plan includes building out a secondary data center. Customers that can afford this setup replicate storage between two sites so that workloads can fail over. With public and hosted clouds, the secondary site is provided by a different company. In this case, the local data center is primary. In both cases, by using SMI-S, the failover experience is consistent and works with all SMI-S 1.6.1–compliant storage devices.

Microsoft will demonstrate this exact scenario in Chicago at the Ignite Conference on May 4–May 8 using SMI-S–enabled storage devices. One of the advanced sessions will show how to mirror a virtual machine to a public cloud and replicate data drives to a cloud-adjacent storage device. This configuration enables DR without investing in a secondary data center with the added benefit of offering data sovereignty for applications that require it.

This session will include NetApp^® storage front and center and will show how NetApp can provide Hyper-V DR to cloud scenarios that maintain data sovereignty and enable elastic cloud compute. Please catch Hector Linares’s presentations as well as Barry Shilmover’s presentations regarding ASR.

• “Data Center Transformation: Head into the Cloud While Keeping Your Feet on the Ground”
  Barry Shilmover: Wednesday, May 6, 3:15–4:30 p.m.
• “Managing Storage with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager: a Deep Dive”
  Hector Linares: Friday, May 8, 9:00–10:15 a.m.

   An SMI-S representative will also give a Channel 9 interview regarding the use of SMI-S as a foundational technology and its deep integration with System Center. This is more than just a win for SNIA and the SMI-S protocol; it’s a win for customers who demand a choice in storage vendors and infrastructure while ensuring advanced feature enablement through SMI-S interoperability.

As a new SNIA fiscal year begins,  SNIA Business Development and Membership Services would like to express our sincere thanks to all SNIA members for making 2012 a great success.  Through your efforts, the SNIA achieved tremendous milestones, including:

• The SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface Specification Earned ISO/IEC Designation as an International Standard
• CompTIA Storage+ Powered by SNIA Certification Earned ISO Accreditation
• The SNIA announced new technical work groups in Linear Tape File System and Non Volatile Memory (NVM) programming
• An Updated Client Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification was released by the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative
• A NEW Service Provider category of membership was created
• An ever expanding set of educational and outreach summits, webcasts, white papers, and SNIA Tutorials by SNIA Forums,  Initiatives, and Committees dedicated to Analytics and Big Data, Cloud Storage, Data Protection and Capacity Optimization, Ethernet Storage, Green Storage, Solid State Storage, Storage Management, and Storage Security

Members of the SNIA share a common goal: advancing IT technologies, standards, and education programs for all IT professionals. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to connecting the IT industry with end-to-end storage and information management solutions and to delivering standards, education and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market.

Today, the SNIA has grown to over 400 member companies located all over the world. As we continue to expand into 2013, we invite you to continue your participation in our programs, and reap the benefits that SNIA brings to you and your organization.

Membership Categories & ROI

Membership in the SNIA offers a tremendous return on investment for individuals, companies, and organizations involved in the storage industry.

As a Vendor, your membership in the SNIA signals to customers that you are an industry leader driving specifications, architecture and standards.  Regardless of your company’s size, the SNIA has created an environment and pricing structure that encourages cross-company collaboration to develop real solutions that serve the ever expanding and ever changing needs of organizations.

As a Service Provider, the SNIA’s vendor-neutral environment provides the ideal backdrop for gaining insight into the storage, networking, and technology markets, essential for developing on-target sales and marketing strategies.  Access to equipment at the SNIA Technology Center in Colorado Springs allows you and fellow SNIA members in all membership categories to conduct in-depth evaluations of potential offerings, as well as analyses of future technologies.

Perhaps you are an Channel company.  The members-only area informs you quickly about market strategies and products in a vendor neutral atmosphere.  This is crucial when making planning and purchasing decisions for a diverse and technical customer base..

If you are a SNIA individual member, you stay current, connected and marketable.  Individuals in the SNIA have a clear, competitive edge.  Working along side of industry leaders, individual members have the opportunity to sharpen their professional skills, gaining both technical and/or marketing knowledge that otherwise could take years of on-the-job training.

The 2013 year holds bright promise, so don’t forget to renew your membership today.  Contact Lisa Mercurio, Membership Services Manager at (781) 293-9860 or email lisa.mercurio@snia.org.  And if you are a not yet a SNIA member, what are you waiting for?  Contact Marty Foltyn, SNIA Business Development Manager, at (858) 720-9780 or marty.foltyn@snia.org today!