AIOps: The Undeniable Paradigm Shift

Michael Hoard
AI has entered every aspect of today’s digital world. For IT, AIOps is creating a dramatic shift that redefines how IT approaches operations. On April 9, 2024, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will host a live webinar, “AIOps: Reactive to Proactive – Revolutionizing the IT Mindset.” In this webinar, Pratik Gupta, one of the industry’s leading experts in AIOps, will delve beyond the tools of AIOps to reveal how AIOps introduces intelligence into the very fabric of IT thinking and processes, discussing:
  • From Dev to Production and Reactive to Proactive: Revolutionizing the IT Mindset: We’ll move beyond the “fix it when it breaks” mentality, embracing a future-proof approach where AI analyzes risk, anticipates issues, prescribes solutions, and learns continuously.
  • Beyond Siloed Solutions: Embracing Holistic Collaboration:  AIOps fosters seamless integration across departments, applications, and infrastructure, promoting real-time visibility and unified action.
  • Automating the Process: From Insights to Intelligent Action: Dive into the world of self-healing IT, where AI-powered workflows and automation resolve issues and optimize performance without human intervention.
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Emerging Memories Branch Out – a Q&A

SNIA CMS Community
Our recent SNIA Persistent Memory SIG webinar explored in depth the latest developments and futures of emerging memories – now found in multiple applications both as stand-alone chips and embedded into systems on chips. We got some great questions from our live audience, and our experts Arthur Sainio, Tom Coughlin, and Jim Handy have taken the time to answer them in depth in this blog. And if you missed the original live talk, watch the video and download the PDF here. Q:  Do you expect Persistent Memory to eventually gain the speeds that exist today with DRAM? A:  It appears that that has already happened with the hafnium ferroelectrics that SK Hynix and Micron have shown.Ferroelectric memory is a very fast technology and with very fast write cycles there should be every reason for it to go that way. With the hooks that are in CXL™,  though, that shouldn’t be that much of a Read More

Here’s Why Ceph is the Linux of Storage Today

Erin Farr
Data is one of the most critical resources of our time. Storage for data has always been a critical architectural element for every data center, requiring careful considerations for storage performance, scalability, reliability, data protection, durability and resilience. A decade ago, the market was aggressively embracing public storage because of its agility and scalability. In the last few years, people have been rethinking that approach, moving toward on-premises storage with cloud consumption models. The new cloud native architecture on-premises has the promise of the traditional data center’s security and reliability with cloud agility and scalability. Ceph, an Open Source project for enterprise unified software-defined storage, represents a compelling solution for this cloud native on-premises architecture and will be the topic of our next SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webinar, “Ceph: The Linux of Storage Today.” This webinar will discuss: Read More

Throughput, IOPs, and Latency Q&A

Erik Smith
Throughput, IOPs, and latency are three terms often referred to as storage performance metrics. But the exact definitions of these terms and how they differ can be confusing. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) brought back our popular webinar series, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage, But Were Too Proud to Ask,” with a live webinar, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Throughput, IOPs, and Latency But Were Too Proud to Ask.” The live session was a hit with over 850 views in the first 48 hours. If you missed the live event, you can watch it on-demand. Our audience asked several interesting questions, here are our answer to them. Q: Discussing congestion and mechanisms at play in RoCEv2 (DCQCN and delay-change control) would be more interesting than legacy BB_credit handling in FC SAN… Read More

Power Efficiency Measurement – Our Experts Make It Clear – Part 2

Eden Kim, Keith Orsak and Chuck Paradon
Measuring power efficiency in datacenter storage is a complex endeavor. A number of factors play a role in assessing individual storage devices or system-level logical storage for power efficiency. Luckily, our SNIA experts make the measuring easier! In this SNIA Experts on Data blog series, our experts in the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group and the SNIA Green Storage Initiative explore factors to consider in power efficiency measurement, including the nature of application workloads, IO streams, and access patterns; the choice of storage products (SSDs, HDDs, cloud storage, and more); the impact of hardware and software components (host bus adapters, drivers, OS layers); and access to read and write caches, CPU and GPU usage, and DRAM utilization. Join us on our journey to better power efficiency as we continue with Part 2: Impact of Workloads on Power Efficiency Measurement.  And if you missed Part 1: Key Issues in Power Efficiency Measurement, you can find it here.  Bookmark this blog  and check back in March and April for the continuation of our four-part series. And explore the topic further in the SNIA Green Storage Knowledge Center. Part 2: Impact of Workloads on Power Efficiency Measurement Read More

Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility Q&A

Gregory Touretsky
72% of organizations have encountered incompatibility issues between various object storage implementations according to a poll at our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webinar, “Navigating the Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility.” If you missed the live presentation or you would like to see the answers to the other poll questions we asked the audience, you can view it on-demand at the SNIA Educational Library. The audience was highly-engaged during the live event and asked several great questions. Here are answers to them all. Q. Do you see the need for fast object storage for AI kind of workloads? A. Yes, the demand for fast object storage in AI workloads is growing. Initially, object storage was mainly used for backup or archival purposes. However, its evolution into Data Lakes and the introduction of features like the S3 SELECT API have made it more suitable for data analytics. The launch of Amazon’s S3 Express, a faster yet more expensive tier, is a clear indication of this trend. Other vendors are following suit, suggesting a shift towards object storage as a primary data storage platform for specific workloads. Q. As Object Storage becomes more prevalent in the primary storage space, could you talk about data protection, especially functionalities like synchronous replication and multi-site deployments – or is your view that this is not needed for object storage deployments? Read More

Here’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Throughput, IOPs, and Latency

Erik Smith
Any discussion about storage systems is incomplete without the mention of Throughput, IOPs, and Latency. But what exactly do these terms mean, and why are they important? To answer these questions, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is bringing back our popular webinar series, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage, But Were Too Proud to Ask.” Collectively, these three terms are often referred to as storage performance metrics. Performance can be defined as the effectiveness of a storage system to address I/O needs of an application or workload. Different application workloads have different I/O patterns, and with that arises different bottlenecks, so there is no “one-size fits all” in storage systems. These storage performance metrics help with storage solution design and selection based on application/workload demands. Join us on February 7, 2024, for “Everything You Wanted to Know About Throughput, IOPS, and Latency, But Were Too Proud to Ask.” In this webinar, we’ll cover: Read More

Power Efficiency Measurement – Our Experts Make It Clear – Part 1

Eden Kim, Keith Orsak and Chuck Paradon
Measuring power efficiency in datacenter storage is a complex endeavor. A number of factors play a role in assessing individual storage devices or system-level logical storage for power efficiency. Luckily, our SNIA experts make the measuring easier! In this SNIA Experts on Data blog series, our experts in the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group and the SNIA Green Storage Initiative explore factors to consider in power efficiency measurement, including the nature of application workloads, IO streams, and access patterns; the choice of storage products (SSDs, HDDs, cloud storage, and more); the impact of hardware and software components (host bus adapters, drivers, OS layers); and access to read and write caches, CPU and GPU usage, and DRAM utilization. Join us on our journey to better power efficiency as we begin with Part 1: Key Issues in Power Efficiency Measurement. Bookmark this blog and check back in February, March, and April for the continuation of our four-part series. And explore the topic further in the SNIA Green Storage Knowledge Center. Part 1: Key Issues in Power Efficiency Measurement Read More

Accelerating Generative AI

David McIntyre
Workloads using generative artificial intelligence trained on large language models are frequently throttled by insufficient resources (e.g., memory, storage, compute or network dataflow bottlenecks). If not identified and addressed, these dataflow bottlenecks can constrain Gen AI application performance well below optimal levels. Given the compelling uses across natural language processing (NLP), video analytics, document resource development, image processing, image generation, and text generation, being able to run these workloads efficiently has become critical to many IT and industry segments. The resources that contribute to generative AI performance and efficiency include CPUs, DPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, plus memory and storage controllers. Read More

Namespace Management Q&A

Michael Hoard
The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) recently hosted a live webinar, “Simplified Namespace Management – The Open Standards Way,” where David Slik, Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) provided a fascinating overview of how to tackle the complexities of dynamic namespaces. If you missed the live webinar, you can view it on-demand and access a copy of the webinar slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Attendees at the live event asked several interesting questions. Here are answers to them all. Q. How are the queues assigned to individual namespaces? How many queues are assigned for a particular namespace, can we customize it and if so, how? What is the difference between normal namespace and SR-IOV enabled namespace? Can you please explain sets domain and endurance group? Read More