Data Reduction: Don’t Be Too Proud to Ask

John Kim
It’s back! Our SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast series “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage but Were Too Proud to Ask” will return on August 18, 2020. After a little hiatus, we are going to tackle the topic of data reduction. Everyone knows data volumes are growing rapidly (25-35% per year according to many analysts), far faster than IT budgets, which are constrained to flat or minimal annual growth rates. One of the drivers of such rapid data growth is storing multiple copies of the same data. Developers copy data for testing and analysis. Users email and store multiple copies of the same files. Administrators typically back up the same data over and over, often with minimal to no changes. To avoid a budget crisis and paying more than once to store the same data, storage vendors and customers can use data reduction techniques such as deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, clones, and snapshots. On August 18th, our live webcast “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage but Were Too Proud to Ask – Part Onyx” will focus on the fundamentals of data reduction, which can be performed in different places and at different stages of the data lifecycle. Like most technologies, there are related means to do this, but with enough differences to cause confusion. For that reason, we’re going to be looking at: Read More

Think your Backup is Your Archive? Think Again!

Mounir Elmously Leave a comment

The challenges of archiving structured and unstructured data

Traditionally, organizations had two electronic storage technologies: disk and tape. Whilst disk became the primary storage media, tape offered a cost-effective media to store infrequently accessed contents.

This led organizations to consider tape as not just a backup media but as the organization’s archive which then resulted in using monthly full system backups over extended durations to support archiving requirements. 

Over time, legislative and regulatory bodies began to accept extended time delays for inquiries and investigations caused by tape restore limitations.

Since the beginning of this century, the following trends have impacted the IT industry:

  • Single disk drive capacity has grown exponentially to multi-TB delivering cost effective performance levels.
  • The exponential growth of unstructured data due to the introduction of social media networks, Internet of Things, etc. have exceeded all planned growth.
  • The introduction of cloud storage (storage as a service) that offer an easy way to acquire storage services with incremental investment that fits any organization’s financial planning at virtually infinite scalability.
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A Q&A on Protecting Data-at-Rest

Steve Vanderlinden
One of the most important aspects of security is how to protect the data that is just “sitting there” called data-at-rest. There are many requirements for securing data-at-rest and they were discussed in detail at our SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast Storage Networking Security: Protecting Data-at-Rest. If you missed the live event, you can watch it on-demand and access the presentation slides here. As we promised during the webcast, here are our experts’ answers to the questions from this presentation: Q. If data is encrypted at rest, is it still vulnerable to ransomware attacks? A. Yes, encrypted data is still vulnerable to ransomware attacks as the attack would simply re-encrypt the encrypted data with a key known only to the attacker. Q. The data at rest is best implemented at the storage device. The Media Encryption Key (MEK) is located in the devices per the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) spec. NIST requires the MEK to be sanitized before decommissioning the devices. But devices do fail, because of a 3-5 year life span. Would it be better to manage the MEK in the Key Management System (KMS) or Hardware Security Module (HSM) in cloud/enterprise storage? Read More

Standards Watch: Blockchain Storage

Olga Buchonina Leave a comment

Is there a standard for Blockchain today? Not really. What we are attempting to do is to build one.

Since 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto’s White Paper was published and Bitcoin emerged, we have been learning about a new solution using a decentralized ledger and one of its applications: Blockchain.

Wikipedia defines Blockchain as follows:  “A blockchain, originally block chain, is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree).”

There are certain drawbacks which are significant in today’s applications for Blockchain solutions:

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The Role of AIOps in IT Modernization

Alex McDonald
The almost overnight shift of resources toward remote work has introduced the need for far more flexible, dynamic and seamless end-to-end applications, putting us on a path that requires autonomous capabilities using AIOps – Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations. It’s the topic that the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative is going to cover on August 25, 2020 at our live webcast, “IT Modernization with AIOps: The Journey.” Our AI expert, Parviz Peiravi, will provide an overview of concepts and strategies to accelerate the digitalization of critical enterprise IT resources, and help architects rethink what applications and underlying infrastructure are needed to support an agile, seamless data centric environment. This session will specifically address migration from monolithic to microservices, transition to Cloud Native services, and the platform requirements to help accelerate AIOps application delivery within our dynamic hybrid and multi-cloud world. Join this webcast to learn: Read More

Are We at the End of the 2.5-inch Disk Era?

Jonmichael Hands
The SNIA Solid State Storage Special Interest Group (SIG) recently updated the Solid State Drive Form Factor page to provide detailed information on dimensions; mechanical, electrical, and connector specifications; and protocols. On our August 4, 2020 SNIA webcast, we will take a detailed look at one of these form factors – Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) – challenging an expert panel to consider if we are at the end of the 2.5-in disk era. Enterprise and Data Center Form Factor (EFSFF) is designed natively for data center NVMe SSDs to improve thermal, power, performance, and capacity scaling. EDSFF has different variants for flexible and scalable performance, dense storage configurations, general purpose servers, and improved data center TCO.  At the 2020 Open Compute Virtual Summit, OEMs, cloud service providers, hyperscale data center, and SSD vendors showcased products and their vision for how this new family of SSD form factors solves real data challenges. Read More

Where Does Cyber Insurance Fit in Your Security Strategy?

Paul Talbut
Protection against cyber threats is recognized as a necessary component of an effective risk management approach, typically based on a well-known cybersecurity framework. A growing area to further mitigate risks and provide organizations with the high level of protection they need is cyber insurance. However, it’s not as simple as buying a pre-packaged policy. In fact, it’s critical to identify what risks and conditions are excluded from a cyber insurance policy before you buy. Determining what kind of cyber insurance your business needs or if the policy you have will really cover you in the event of an incident is challenging. On August 27, 2020 the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) will host a live webcast, “Does Your Storage Need a Cyber Insurance Tune-Up?” where we’ll examine how cyber insurance fits in a risk management program. We’ll identify key terms and conditions that should be understood and carefully negotiated as cyber insurance policies may not cover all types of losses. Read More

Applied Cryptography Techniques and Use Cases

AlexMcDonald
The rapid growth in infrastructure to support real time and continuous collection and sharing of data to make better business decisions has led to an age of unprecedented information storage and easy access. While collection of large amounts of data has increased knowledge and allowed improved efficiencies for business, it has also made attacks upon that information—theft, modification, or holding it for ransom — more profitable for criminals and easier to accomplish. As a result, strong cryptography is often used to protect valuable data. The SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) has recently covered several specific security topics as part of our Storage Networking Security Webcast Series, including Encryption101, Protecting Data at Rest, and Key Management 101. Now, on August 5, 2020, we are going to present Applied Cryptography. In this webcast, our SNIA experts will present an overview of cryptography techniques for the most popular and pressing use cases. We’ll discuss ways of securing data, the factors and trade-off that must be considered, as well as some of the general risks that need to be mitigated. We’ll be looking at: Read More

Notable Questions on NVMe-oF 1.1

Tim Lustig
At our recent SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast, “Notable Updates in NVMe-oF™ 1.1” we explored the latest features of NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), discussing what’s new in the NVMe-oF 1.1 release, support for CMB and PMR, managing and provisioning NVMe-oF devices with SNIA Swordfish™, and FC-NVMe-2. If you missed the live event, you can watch it here. Our presenters received many interesting questions on NVMe-oF and here are answers to them all: Read More

Kubernetes Business Resiliency FAQ

Jim Fister

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative continued our webcast series on Kubernetes last month with an interesting look at the business resiliency of Kubernetes. If you missed “A Multi-tenant, Multi-cluster Kubernetes Datapocalypse in Coming” it’s available along with the slide deck in the SNIA Educational Library here. In this Q&A blog, our Kubernetes expert, Paul Burt, answers some frequently asked questions on this topic.

Q: Multi-cloud: Departments might have their own containers; would they have their own cloud (i.e. Hybrid Cloud)?  Is that how multi-cloud might start in a company?

A: Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud is absolutely a result of different departments scaling containers in a deployment. Multi-cloud means multiple clusters, but those can be of various configurations. Different clusters and clouds need to be tuned for the needs of the organization.

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