Registration is now open for the upcoming Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) Conference – July 22-23, 2019 on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD).
The 2019 PIRL event features a collaboration between UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the SNIA to bring industry leaders in programming and developing persistent memory applications together for a two-day discussion on their experiences.
PIRL is a small conference, with attendance limited to under 100 people, including speakers. It will discuss what real developers have done, and want to do, with persistent memory. Most of the presentations will include demonstrations of live code showing new concepts. The conference is designed to be a meet-up for developers seeking to gain and share knowledge in the growing area of Persistent Memory development.
PIRL features a program of 18 presentations and 5 keynotes from industry-leading developers who have built real systems using persistent memory. They will share what they have done (and want to do) with persistent memory, what worked, what didn’t, what was hard, what was easy, what was surprising, and what they learned.
This year’s keynote presentations will be:
* Pratap Subrahmanyam (Vmware): Programming Persistent Memory In A Virtualized Environment Using Golang
* Zuoyu Tao (Oracle): Exadata With Persistent Memory – An Epic Journey
* Dan Williams (Intel Corporation): The 3rd Rail Of Linux Filesystems: A Survival Story
* Stephen Bates (Eideticom): Successfully Deploying Persistent Memory and Acceleration Via Compute Express Link
* Scott Miller (Dreamworks): Persistent Memory In Feature Animation Production
Other speakers include engineers from NetApp, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oracle, Sandia National Labs, Intel, SAP, Red Hat, and universities from around the world. Full details are available at the PIRL website.
PIRL will be held on the University of California San Diego campus at Scripps Forum, a state-of-the-art conference facility just a few meters from the beach. Discounted early registration ends July 10, so register today to ensure your seat.
Registration is now open for the upcoming Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) Conference – July 22-23, 2019 on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD).
The 2019 PIRL event features a collaboration between UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the SNIA to bring industry leaders in programming and developing persistent memory applications together for a two-day discussion on their experiences. Read More
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a webcast on how increases in networking speeds are impacting storage. If you missed the live webcast, New Landscape of Network Speeds, it’s now available on-demand. We received several interesting questions on this topic. Here are our experts’ answers:
Q. What are the cable distances for 2.5 and 5G Ethernet?
A. 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T Ethernet are designed to run on existing UTP cabling, so it should reach 100 meters on both Cat5e and Cat6 cabling. Reach of 5GBASE-T on Cat 5e may be less under some conditions, for example if many cables are bundled tightly together. Cabling guidelines and field test equipment are available to aid in the transition. Read More
Video streaming is an easy-to-understand workload from the I/O perspective, right? It’s pretty obvious that it’s a workload heavy on long, streaming reads. The application can be modeled with a consistent read flow, and the software tests should be easy. However, an analysis of the real-world workload shows something very different. At the disk level, the reads turn out to be a rapid flow of 4k and 8k block reads from a solid-state-disk. Further, other processes on the system also add in a small amount of 4k and 8k writes in the midst of the reads. All of this impacts the application –and an SSD — which was likely heavily tested on the basis of long, streaming reads.
Understanding the real-world characteristics of a workload can be a significant advantage in the development of new hardware, new systems, and new applications. The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) and SSSI member company Calypso Systems are providing an opportunity to build a repository of workloads for the industry to use for real-world testing, as outlined in a new SSSI white paper How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution. This paper is also available in Chinese at the SSSI Knowledge Center White Papers page.
By going to the TestMyWorkload site, anyone can participate by providing a trace capture of an I/O workload that can be used by others to develop better products. The capture itself traces the block transfers, but does not capture actual data. Any workload replay would use representative blocks, so there are no concerns about data security or integrity from these captures.
The repository can be used by any participant to test hardware and software, and can help system vendors and users optimize configurations for the best performance based on real-world data. By participating in this effort, organizations and individuals can provide insight and gain from the knowledge of all the contributors.
Follow these three steps to be a part of the revolution today!
Video streaming is an easy-to-understand workload from the I/O perspective, right? It’s pretty obvious that it’s a workload heavy on long, streaming reads. The application can be modeled with a consistent read flow, and the software tests should be easy. However, an analysis of the real-world workload shows something very different. At the disk level, the reads turn out to be a rapid flow of 4k and 8k block reads from a solid-state-disk. Further, other processes on the system also add in a small amount of 4k and 8k writes in the midst of the reads. All of this impacts the application –and an SSD — which was likely heavily tested on the basis of long, streaming reads.
Understanding the real-world characteristics of a workload can be a significant advantage in the development of new hardware, new systems, and new applications. The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) and SSSI member company Calypso Systems are providing an opportunity to build a repository of workloads for the industry to use for real-world testing, as outlined in a new SSSI white paper How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution. Read More
As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. In addition to decisions surrounding what technologies to use, they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. Storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in week, days or hours but in minutes.
That’s why the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) is hosting another live webcast on Kubernetes in the Cloud (Part 2) on July 17, 2019. In part one of this three part series, we covered the high level aspects of Kubernetes. This presentation will discus key capabilities IT vendors are creating based on open source technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes to build self-service infrastructure to support hybrid multi-cloud deployments. We’ll cover:
Persistent storage and how to specify it
Ensuring application portability between Private and Public Clouds
Building a self-service infrastructure (Helm, Operators)
As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. In addition to decisions surrounding what technologies to use, they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. Storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in week, days or hours but in minutes.
Read More
By Don Deel, Senior Standards Technologist, NetApp; SNIA SMI Governing Board Chair, SMI Technical Development Committee Chair
By 2025, IDC says worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Now multiply that 175 times. It’s mind boggling. And with the explosion in data, IDC states that businesses are looking to centralize data management and delivery, as well as to leverage data to control their businesses and the user experience.
The Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is a SNIA group that helps unify the storage industry to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies for today’s IT environments and next generation data centers. It supports the development of storage management solutions based upon standard interfaces instead of proprietary interfaces. Standard storage interfaces lower costs, make integration efforts easier and provide increased reliability, security and manageability.
SNIA Swordfish
The SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) developed SNIA Swordfish, a standard that defines the management of data storage and services as an extension to the DMTF Redfish® specification, which uses JSON and OData to create an easy-to-use RESTful API. Swordfish was designed with IT administrators and DevOps engineers in mind, to provide simplified and scalable storage management for data center environments. Unlike proprietary interfaces, Swordfish is an open standard and has been developed with broad industry support, including some of the leading companies in the storage industry.
Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and pywbem
For storage equipment vendors, management software vendors and end-users seeking to address the day-to-day tasks of the IT environment, the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) is an ISO-approved international standard. It’s currently implemented in over 1,500 products that provide access to common storage management functions and features. Unlike proprietary management interfaces, using a standard interface allows management applications to support a wider range of storage equipment from multiple vendors.
For software developers and system administrators using the SMI-S specification, SMI also supports pywbem. Pywbem is an open source library written in Python that supports the quick and efficient development of higher-level interfaces to storage management services such as discovery, security, monitoring, performance, fault reporting and active management. It’s simple to use, easy to integrate into the SMI-S environment and also compliant with the Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards defined by the DMTF.
SNIA Swordfish and SMI-S
Although Swordfish and SMI-S are both supported by the SMI, industry needs are shifting from SMI-S to Swordfish. SMI-S is a mature standard based upon DMTF CIM and CIM-XML that defines a Client/Server API and favors an equipment-oriented management approach for networked storage. Swordfish is a newer SNIA standard based upon DMTF Redfish that defines an easy-to-use RESTful API. Swordfish manages block storage, file storage and storage services, supporting unified server, storage and network management in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments that demand a high degree of scalability.
Storage Management Lab
SMI makes the Storage Management Lab (SM Lab) program available to its members. This helps accelerate the implementation of SMI-S- and Swordfish-based client and provider products. Vendors are encouraged to place and maintain equipment in SM Lab at the SNIA Technology Center for both local and remote use by all SM Lab members. Equipment in SM Lab is accessible remotely via VPN, providing shared open access to all SM Lab members for ongoing testing.
Plugfest events are held multiple times each year, enabling engineers from SM Lab members to collaborate face-to-face with each other on interoperability testing, and this helps accelerate the development of interoperable implementations. Presentations given at plugfest events cover topics of primary interest to implementers, including product overviews, software tools, Swordfish, Pegasus, pywbem, security, and more.
Conformance Testing Program
The SMI-S Conformance Testing Program (CTP) is also supported by the SMI. Test results shown on the public CTP website provide verification that a vendor’s product has passed basic interoperability hurdles. Vendors can then promote their products as having passed the official SMI-S CTP test suite. This vendor independent, industry-vetted validation of conformance to the SMI-S standard reduces the cost of ownership, improves interoperability, and helps prevent vendor lock-in. A similar SNIA Swordfish CTP offering is being developed in the second half of 2019.
Education
The SMI strives to educate the industry about storage management technologies to help IT administrators and DevOps engineers better address their storage management needs. This is done through Swordfish School videos, presentations at industry conferences, published articles, blogs, ongoing webcasts, social media posts and news items. Online developer groups associated with SMI-S and Swordfish are also supported by the SMI and its members.
As the amount of data rapidly grows, the effects of this abundance have become a costly and difficult proposition for organizations worldwide. In order to reduce some of those costs and improve the storage management capabilities of storage solutions, SNIA and the SMI will continue to work towards establishing industry standards that help.
By Don Deel, Senior Standards Technologist, NetApp; SNIA SMI Governing Board Chair, SMI Technical Development Committee Chair
By 2025, IDC says worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Now multiply that 175 times. It’s mind boggling. And with the explosion in data, IDC states that businesses are looking to centralize data management and delivery, as well as to leverage data to control their businesses and the user experience.
The Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is a SNIA group that helps unify the storage industry to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies for today’s IT environments and next generation data centers. It supports the development of storage management solutions based upon standard interfaces instead of proprietary interfaces. Standard storage interfaces lower costs, make integration efforts easier and provide increased reliability, security and manageability. Read More
SNIA has a new specification in town – focused on key value storage. SNIA on Storage sat down with Bill Martin, Co-Chair of the SNIA Technical Council and Co-Chair of the SNIA Object Drive Technical Work Group, to understand why SNIA took on this project and what are the results.
SNIA On Storage (SOS): Bill, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. To get started, can you tell me what key value storage is and how it relates to the Technical Work charter that SNIA undertakes?
Bill Martin (BM): Key value storage is a new method of storing data when compared to the traditional block storage method. You store a “Value” related to a “key (address)”, with the ability to then look up the value in the future using the “key” of the associated object. Read More
Last month, the 
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SNIA has a new specification in town – focused on key value storage. SNIA on Storage sat down with Bill Martin, Co-Chair of the SNIA Technical Council and Co-Chair of the SNIA Object Drive Technical Work Group, to understand why SNIA took on this project and what are the results.