5G Streaming Questions Answered

Michael Hoard

The broad adoption of 5G, internet of things (IOT) and edge computing are reshaping the nature and role of enterprise and cloud storage. Preparing for this significant disruption is important. It’s a topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative covered in our recent webcast “Storage Implications at the Velocity of 5G Streaming,” where my colleagues, Steve Adams and Chip Maurer, took a deep dive into the 5G journey, streaming data and real-time edge AI, 5G use cases and much more. If you missed the webcast, it’s available on-demand along with a copy of the webcast slides.

As you might expect, this discussion generated some intriguing questions. As promised during the live presentation, our experts have answered them all here.

Q. What kind of transport do you see that is going to be used for those (5G) use-cases?

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Why Cloud Standards Matter

Alex McDonald
Effective cloud data management and interoperability is critical for organizations looking to gain control and security over their cloud usage in hybrid and multicloud environments. The Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI™), also known as the ISO/IEC 17826 International Standard, is intended for application developers who are implementing or using cloud storage systems, and who are developing applications to manage and consume cloud storage. It specifies how to access cloud storage namespaces and how to interoperably manage the data stored in these namespaces. Standardizing the metadata that expresses the requirements for the data, leads to multiple clouds from different vendors treating your data the same. Read More

A New Wave of Video Analytics

Jim Fister

Adoption of cognitive services based on video and image analytics is on the rise. It’s an intriguing topic that the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will dive into on December 2, 2020 at our live webcast, “How Video Analytics is Changing the Way We Store Video.” In this webcast, we will look at some of the benefits and factors driving this adoption, as well as explore compelling projects and required components for a successful video-based cognitive service. This includes some great work in the open source community to provide methods and frameworks, some standards that are being worked on to unify the ecosystem and allow interoperability with models and architectures. Finally, we’ll cover the data required to train such models, the data source and how it needs to be treated.

 

As you might guess, there are challenges in how we do all of this. Read More

NVMe Key-Value Standard Q&A

John Kim
Last month, Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair, presented a detailed update on what’s happening in the development and deployment of the NVMe Key-Value standard. Bill explained where Key Value fits within an architecture, why it’s important, and the standards work that is being done between NVM Express and SNIA. The webcast was one of our highest rated. If you missed it, it’s available on-demand along with the webcast slides. Attendees at the live event had many great questions, which Bill Martin has answered here: Q. Two of the most common KV storage mechanisms in use today are AWS S3 and RocksDB. How does NVMe KV standards align or differ from them? How difficult would it be to map between the APIs and semantics of those other technologies to NVMe KV devices? A. KV Storage is intended as a storage layer that would support these and other object storage mechanisms. There is a publicly available KVRocks: RocksDB compatible key value store and MyRocks compatible storage engine designed for KV SSDs at GitHub. There is also a Ceph Object storage design available. These are example implementations that can help an implementer get to an efficient use of NVMe KV storage. Q. At which layer will my app stack need to change to take advantage of KV storage?  Will VMware or Linux or Windows need to change at the driver level?  Or do the apps need to be changed to treat data differently?  If the apps don’t need to change doesn’t this then just take the data layout tables and move them up the stack in to the server? Read More

A SNIA Superpower: PAS submitter to ISO

Linda Capcara
SNIA’s Technical Council is one of the crown jewels of the organization. Made up of a group of acknowledged storage experts, the Technical Council oversees and manages SNIA Technical Work Groups, reviews architectures submitted by work groups, and is SNIA’s technical liaison to standards organizations. One of the Council’s superpowers is its ISO JTC-1 designation as an ARO and a PAS submitter. What does that actually mean? It’s a very big deal! SNIA is only one of 13 organizations worldwide that have the PAS submission capability, putting it in exclusive company. The list includes: Read More

Data Compression Q&A

Ilker Cebeli
Everyone is looking to squeeze more efficiency from storage. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum hosted a live webcast last month “Compression: Putting the Squeeze on Storage.” The audience asked many great questions on compression techniques. Here are answers from our expert presenters, John Kim and Brian Will: Q. When multiple unrelated entities are likely to compress the data, how do they understand that the data is already compressed and so skip the compression? A. Often they can tell from the file extension or header that the file has already been compressed. Otherwise each entity that wants to compress the data will try to compress it and then discard the results if it makes the file larger (because it was already compressed). Read More

Answering Your Questions on EDSFF

Jonmichael Hands
We had a tremendous response to our webcast asking if we were truly at the end of the 2.5-inch disk era. SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative SSD Special Interest Group brought together experts from Dell, Facebook, HPE, JEDEC, KIOXIA, Lenovo, and Microsoft in a lively follow on to the Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) May 2020 discussions at OCP Summit,. If you missed our live webcast – watch it on demand. Webcast attendees raised a variety of questions.  Our experts provide answers to them here: Q:  SFF_TA_1006 suggests E1.S can support max 25W for 25mm asymmetric heat-sink. What are the air-flow assumptions for this estimate? Are there any thermal models and test guidelines available for EDSFF form-factors? Read More

An FAQ on RAID on the CPU

Paul Talbut Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, SNIA EMEA hosted a webcast to introduce the concept of RAID on CPU. The invited experts, Fausto Vaninetti from Cisco, and Igor Konopko from Intel, provided fascinating insights into this exciting new technology.

The webcast created a huge amount of interest and generated a host of follow-up questions which our experts have addressed below. If you missed the live event “RAID on CPU: RAID for NVMe SSDs without a RAID Controller Card” you can watch it on-demand.

Q. Why not RAID 6?

A. RAID on CPU is a new technology. Current support is for the most-used RAID levels for now, considering this is for servers not disk arrays. RAID 5 is primary parity RAID level for NVMe with 1 drive failure due to lower AFRs and faster rebuilds.

Q. Is the XOR for RAID 5 done in Software?

A.Yes, it is done in software on some cores of the Xeon CPU.

Q. Which generation of Intel CPUs support VROC?

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How Can You Keep Data in Transit Secure?

AlexMcDonald
It’s well known that data is often considered less secure while in motion, particularly across public networks, and attackers are finding increasingly innovative ways to snoop on and compromise data in flight. But risks can be mitigated with foresight and planning. So how do you adequately protect data in transit? It’s the next topic the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) will tackle as part of our Storage Networking Security Webcast Series.  Join us October 28, 2020 for our live webcast Securing Data in Transit. In this webcast, we’ll cover what the threats are to your data as it’s transmitted, how attackers can interfere with data along its journey, and methods of putting effective protection measures in place for data in transit. We’ll discuss: Read More

Not Again! Data Deduplication for Storage Systems

AlexMcDonald
As explained in our webcast on Data Reduction, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask: Data Reduction,” organizations inevitably store many copies of the same data. Intentionally or inadvertently, users and applications copy and store the same files over and over; with developers, testers and analysts keeping many more copies. And backup programs copy the same or only slightly modified files daily, often to multiple locations and storage devices.  It’s not unusual to end up with some data replicated thousands of times, enough to drive storage administrators and managers of IT budgets crazy. So how do we stop the duplication madness? Join us on November 10, 2020 for a live SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast, “Not Again! Data Deduplication for Storage Systems”  where our SNIA experts will discuss how to reduce the number of copies of data that get stored, mirrored, and backed up. Attend this sanity-saving webcast to learn more about: Read More