Dive – or Dip – into SNIA Persistent Memory + Computational Storage Summit Content

Marty Foltyn
SNIA’s 9th annual Summit was a success with a new name and an expanded focus – Persistent Memory + Computational Storage – from the data center to the edge. The Summit moved to a two-day virtual platform and drew twice as many attendees as the previous year. We experimented with 20-minute sessions to great success.  Attendees saw leading technology experts discussing real world applications and use cases, providing insights on technology trends and futures, and networking  in “live via the internet” panels and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. The recap of our 2021 event – agenda – abstracts – speaker bios – links to videos and presentations – is summarized on the PM+CS Summit home page. But we know your time is precious – so here are a few ways to sample a lot of great content presented over two full days. Read More

Q&A: Cloud Analytics Takes Flight

Jim Fister
Recently, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) hosted a live webcast “Cloud Analytics Drives Airplanes-as-a-Service” with Ben Howard, CTO of KinectAir. It was a fascinating discussion on how analytics is making this new commercial airline business take off.  Ben has a history of innovation with multiple companies working on new flight technology, analytics, and artificial intelligence. In this session, he provided several insights from his experiences on how analytics can have a significant impact on every business. In the course of the conversation, we covered several questions, all of which were answered in the webcast. Here’s a preview of the questions along with some brief answers. Take an hour of your time to listen to the entire presentation, we think you’ll enjoy it. Q: What’s different about capturing data for Machine Learning? Read More

Protecting NVMe over Fabrics Data from Day One, The Armored Truck Way

John Kim
With ever increasing threat vectors both inside and outside the data center, a compromised customer dataset can quickly result in a torrent of lost business data, eroded trust, significant penalties, and potential lawsuits. Potential vulnerabilities exist at every point when scaling out NVMe® storage, which requires data to be secured every time it leaves a server or the storage media, not just when leaving the data center. NVMe over Fabrics is poised to be the one of the most dominant storage transports of the future and securing and validating the vast amounts of data that will traverse this fabric is not just prudent, but paramount. Read More

Continuous Delivery Software Development Q&A

Alex McDonald
What’s the best way to make a development team lean and agile? It was a question we explored at length during our SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative live webcast “Continuous Delivery: Cloud Software Development on Speed.” During this session, continuous delivery expert, Davis Frank, Co-creator of the Jasmine Test Framework, explained why product development teams are adopting a continuous delivery (CD) model. If you missed the live event, you can watch it on-demand here. The webcast audience was highly engaged with this topic and asked some interesting questions. Here are Davis Frank’s answers: Q.  What are a few simple tests you can use to determine your team’s capability to deliver CD? Read More

A Q&A on NVMe-oF Performance Hero Numbers

Alex McDonald
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast “NVMe-oF: Looking Beyond Performance Hero Numbers.”It was extremely popular, in fact it has been viewed almost 800 times in just two weeks! If you missed it, it’s available on-demand, along with the presentation slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our audience asked several great questions during the live event and our expert presenters, Erik Smith, Rob Davis and Nishant Lodha have kindly answered them all here. Q. There are initiators for Linux but not for Windows? What are my options to connect NVMe-oF to Windows Server? Read More

Continuing to Refine and Define Computational Storage

SNIAOnStorage
The SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) has been hard at work on the SNIA Technical Document Computational Storage Architecture and Programming Model.  SNIAOnStorage recently sat down via zoom with the document editor Bill Martin of Samsung and TWG Co-Chairs Jason Molgaard of Arm and Scott Shadley of NGD Systems to understand the work included in the model and why definitions of computational storage are so important. SNIAOnStorage (SOS): Shall we start with the fundamentals?  Just what is the Computational Storage Architecture and Programming Model? Scott Shadley (SS): The SNIA Computational Storage Architecture and Programming Model (Model) introduces the framework of how to use a new tool to architect your infrastructure by deploying compute resources in the storage layer. Bill Martin (BM): The Model enables architecture and programming of computational storage devices. These kinds of devices include those with storage physically attached, and also those with storage not physically attached but considered computational because the devices are associated with storage. SOS: How did the TWG approach creating the Model and what does it cover? Read More

Another Great Storage Debate: Hyperconverged vs. Disaggregated vs. Centralized

David McIntyre
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum’s “Great Storage Debate” webcast series is back! This time, SNIA experts will be discussing the ongoing evolution of the data center, in particular how storage is allocated and managed. There are three competing visions about how storage should be done: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Disaggregated Storage, and Centralized Storage. Join us on May 4, 2021 for our live webcast Great Storage Debate: Hyperconverged vs. Disaggregated vs. Centralized. IT architects, storage vendors, and industry analysts argue constantly over which is the best approach and even the exact definition of each. Isn’t Hyperconverged constrained? Is Disaggregated designed only for large cloud service providers? Is Centralized storage only for legacy applications? Read More

Q&A on the Ethics of AI

Jim Fister
Earlier this month, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) hosted an intriguing discussion on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our expert, Rob Enderle, Founder of The Enderle Group, and Eric Hibbard, Chair of the SNIA Security Technical Work Group, shared their experiences and insights on what it takes to keep AI ethical. If you missed the live event, it Is available on-demand along with the presentation slides at the SNIA Educational Library. As promised during the live event, our experts have provided written answers to the questions from this session, many of which we did not have time to get to. Q. The webcast cited a few areas where AI as an attacker could make a potential cyber breach worse, are there also some areas where AI as a defender could make cybersecurity or general welfare more dangerous for humans? Read More

Continuous Delivery: Cloud Software Development on Speed

Alex McDonald
It happens with more frequency these days. Two companies merge, and the IT departments breathe a small sigh of relief as they learn that they both use the same infrastructure software, though one is on-premises and one is in the cloud. Their relief slowly dissolves, as they discover that the cloud-provisioned workers are using features in the software that have yet to be integrated into the on-prem version. Now both have to adapt and it seems that no one is happy. So, what’s the best way to get these versions in sync? A Continuous Delivery model is increasingly being adopted to get software development on a pace to keep up with business demands. The Continuous Delivery model results in a development organization that looks much like current manufacturing processes with effective workers, modern machines, and a just-in-time inventory. Even large software companies are starting to embrace this cloud delivery methodology to create a continuous stream of new revisions. Read More

Q&A from “SAS 201: An Introduction to Enterprise Features” Webcast

STA Forum Leave a comment

Questions from SAS 201 Webinar Answered

In an effort to provide ongoing educational content to the industry, the SCSI Trade Association (STA) tackled the basics of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) in a webinar titled “SAS 201: An Introduction to Enterprise Features,” now available on the STA YouTube channel here.

Immediately following their presentations, our experts Rick Kutcipal of Broadcom and Tim Symons of Microchip Technology held a Q&A session. In this blog, we’ve captured the questions asked and answers given to provide you with insight on the recent evolutions in SAS enterprise features including 24G SAS and what they mean to system designers.

Q1. Do you think 24G SAS will only be applicable to SSDs, and HDDs will remain at 12Gb/s?
A1. Rick: At this time, hard disk drives (HDDs) can’t take advantage of the bandwidth that’s available in 24G SAS. And right now, the technology itself is focused on the backbone and then solid-state drive (SSD) connectivity. Currently, that’s the way we see it shaping up. Read More