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

Q&A on Data Movement and Computational Storage

SNIA CMSI
Recently, the SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative hosted a live webcast “Data Movement and Computational Storage”, moderated by Jim Fister of The Decision Place with Nidish Kamath of KIOXIA, David McIntyre of Samsung, and Eli Tiomkin of NGD Systems as panelists. We had a great discussion on new ways to look at storage, flexible computer systems, and how to put on your security hat. During our conversation, we answered audience questions, and raised a few of our own!  Check out some of the back-and-forth, and tune in to the entire video for customer use cases and thoughts for the future. Read More

The Confidential Computing Webcast Series

Jim Fister
The need for improved data security and privacy seems to grow bigger every day. The continuous attacks and bad actors from hackers and rogue governments are increasing the demand from businesses and consumers alike to make stronger data protection a top priority. In the midst of this need, Confidential Computing has emerged as a solution for stronger data security and is gaining traction from a variety of start-ups and established companies. Read More

What is Confidential Computing?

Jim Fister
While data security in the enterprise has never been for the faint of heart, the move to a more contiguous enterprise/cloud workflow as well as the increase in Edge data processing has significantly impacted the work (and the blood pressure) of security professionals. In the “arms race” of security, new defensive tactics are always needed. One significant approach is Confidential Computing: a technology that can isolate data and execution in a secure space on a system, which takes the concept of security to new levels. This SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webcast “What is Confidential Computing and Why Should I Care?” will provide an introduction and explanation of Confidential Computing and will feature a panel of industry architects responsible for defining Confidential Compute. It will be a lively conversation on topics including: Read More

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