What Secure Data Deletion Means

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

The European Commission, Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs has issued COMMISSION REGULATION (EU) 2019/424 on 15 March 2019 laying down eco-design requirements for servers and data storage products pursuant to Directive 2009/125/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council and amending Commission Regulation (EU) No 617/2013.

While the focus is energy-related requirements, embedded in this regulation is a requirement for servers and storage systems having 4-400 drives (systems with less or more are exempted) to have an ability to perform secure data deletions; this functionality is required from 1 March 2020.

“Secure data deletion” means the effective erasure of all traces of existing data from a data storage device, overwriting the data completely in such a way that access to the original data, or parts of them, becomes infeasible for a given level of effort. Read More

Security Watch

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

Issues related to security have great importance in IT today. SNIA is participating in the creation of international standards with leading security-focused industry organizations. Here’s an update on recent activities from the SNIA Security Technical Work Group (TWG):

Transport Layer Security

  • The SNIA Security TWG is keeping a keen eye on the TLS 1.3 landscape, which is starting to get interesting since the IETF approved RFC 8446 last August. TLS 1.3 is significantly different from previous versions and it is expected to have an impact on the mandatory elements for the SNIA TLS Specification for Storage and ISO/IEC 20648:2016, which are based on TLS 1.2. While TLS 1.2 is still valid and will be for some time, it is important to keep in mind that ISO standards like ISO/IEC 20648:2016 have a 5-year shelf life. SNIA plans to work on an update later this year so that a new specification is in place in 2021.

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Intro to Incast, Head of Line Blocking, and Congestion Management

Tim Lustig
For a long time, the architecture and best practices of storage networks have been relatively well-understood. Recently, however, advanced capabilities have been added to storage that could have broader impacts on networks than we think. The three main storage network transports – Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and InfiniBand – all have mechanisms to handle increased traffic, but they are not all affected or implemented the same way. For instance, utilizing a protocol such as NVMe over Fabrics will offer very different methodologies for handling congestion avoidance, burst handling, and queue management when looking at one networking in comparison to another. Read More

New Conference Seeking PIRLs of Wisdom

Marty Foltyn
UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) are inviting submissions of proposals for presentation at the first annual Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) conference.  PIRL brings together software development leaders interested in learning about programming methodologies for persistent memories and sharing their experiences with others. This is a meeting for developer project leads on the front lines of persistent programming; not sales, marketing, or non-technical management. Read More

The Impact of New Network Speeds on Storage

John Kim
In the last few years, Ethernet equipment vendors have announced big increases in line speeds, shipping 25, 50, and 100 Gigabits-per -second (Gb/s) speeds and announcing 200/400 Gb/s. At the same time Fibre Channel vendors have launched 32GFC, 64GFC and 128GFC technology while InfiniBand has reached 200Gb/s (called HDR) speed. But who exactly is asking for these faster new networking speeds, and how will they use them? Are there servers, storage, and applications that can make good use of them? How are these new speeds achieved? Are new types of signaling, cables and transceivers required? How will changes in PCIe standards and bandwidth keep up? And do the faster speeds come with different distance limitations? Read More

Join the Conversation at the Open Infrastructure Summit

Kristen Hauser

Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems.

On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish™, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.”

To kick things off, Richelle Ahlvers, SNIA board member, chair of the Scalable Storage Management TWG, and storage management architect, Broadcom, will provide a brief overview of the SNIA Swordfish storage management specification. Swordfish is an extension to the DMTF Redfish® specification that provides a unified approach for the management of storage equipment and services in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.  Swordfish is built using a RESTful interface over HTTPS in JSON format, and also provides support for OpenAPI.

Richelle will also discuss the lifecycle of creating consistent open standard interfaces, from definition to implementations, and how the open source ecosystem plays a role in open infrastructure management.

Xing Yang, principal architect at Huawei Technologies, and project and architecture lead in OpenSDS, will explain how the open source community addresses storage integration challenges in scale-out cloud native environments and connects siloed data solutions.

The session will be interactive and attendees will be encouraged to join in the conversation, get their questions answered and share their knowledge while making valuable new connections. Add the BoF to your conference schedule here.

While visiting the summit, stop by to see SNIA in booth #B13 in the Open Infrastructure Marketplace and pick up the latest Swordfish swag!

Join the Conversation at the Open Infrastructure Summit

Kristen Hauser

Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems.

On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish™, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.”

To kick things off, Richelle Ahlvers, SNIA board member, chair of the Scalable Storage Management TWG, and storage management architect, Broadcom, will provide a brief overview of the SNIA Swordfish storage management specification. Swordfish is an extension to the DMTF Redfish® specification that provides a unified approach for the management of storage equipment and services in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.  Swordfish is built using a RESTful interface over HTTPS in JSON format, and also provides support for OpenAPI.

Richelle will also discuss the lifecycle of creating consistent open standard interfaces, from definition to implementations, and how the open source ecosystem plays a role in open infrastructure management.

Xing Yang, principal architect at Huawei Technologies, and project and architecture lead in OpenSDS, will explain how the open source community addresses storage integration challenges in scale-out cloud native environments and connects siloed data solutions.

The session will be interactive and attendees will be encouraged to join in the conversation, get their questions answered and share their knowledge while making valuable new connections. Add the BoF to your conference schedule here.

While visiting the summit, stop by to see SNIA in booth #B13 in the Open Infrastructure Marketplace and pick up the latest Swordfish swag!

Join the Conversation at the Open Infrastructure Summit

khauser Leave a comment

Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems.

On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish™, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.” Read More

Everything You Wanted to Know about Memory

John Kim
Many followers (dare we say fans?) of the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) are familiar with our popular webcast series “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask.” If you’ve missed any of the nine episodes we’ve done to date, they are all available on-demand and provide a 101 lesson on a range of storage related topics like buffers, storage controllers, iSCSI and more. Our next “Too Proud to Ask” webcast on May 16, 2019 will be “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Taupe – The Memory Pod.” Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components. Read More

Trends in Media and Entertainment Storage – Your Questions Answered from Our Webcast

Marty Foltyn
Thanks to all who attended or listened on-demand to our recent SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) webcast on Trends in Worldwide Media and Entertainment Storage. Motti Beck of Mellanox Technologies and Tom Coughlin, SSSI Education Chair and analyst with Coughlin Associates, got rave reviews for their analysis of this important market.  Feedback comments included “Good overview with enough details for me to learn something”; “Really appreciate the insight into the ME businesses”; and “Just in time for the upcoming NAB Show!”.  We appreciate your interest and enthusiasm! Important to every SNIA webcast are the Questions – and we got quite a few on this one.  Thanks in advance to Tom Coughlin, who provided the answers below.  Send any more questions to us at asksssi@snia.org with the subject- M&E Webcast Questions.  Happy reading, and we hope to see you at one of our upcoming webcasts or events. Read More