Addressing the Hidden Costs of AI

Erik Smith
The latest buzz around generative AI ignores the massive costs to run and power the technology. Understanding what the sustainability and cost impacts of AI are and how to effectively address them will be the topic of our next SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webinar, “Addressing the Hidden Costs of AI.” On December 12, 2023, our SNIA experts will offer insights on the potentially hidden technical and infrastructure costs associated with generative AI. You’ll also learn best practices and potential solutions to be considered as they discuss: Read More

An Open Standard for Namespace Management

Michael Hoard
The days of simple, static, self-contained file systems have long passed. Today, we have complex, dynamic namespaces, mixing block, file, object, key-value, queue, and graph-based resources, accessed via multiple protocols, and distributed across multiple systems and geographic sites. These complexities result in new challenges for simplifying management. There is good news on addressing this issue, and the  SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) will explain how in our live webinar “Simplified Namespace Management – The Open Standards Way” on October 18, 2023, where David Slik, Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, will demonstrate how the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI™), an open ISO standard (ISO/IEC 17826:2022) for managing data objects and containers, already includes extensive capabilities for simplifying the management of complex namespaces. In this webinar, you’ll learn Read More

Confidential AI Q&A

Erin Farr
Confidential AI is a new collaborative platform for data and AI teams to work with sensitive data sets and run AI models in a confidential environment. It includes infrastructure, software, and workflow orchestration to create a secure, on-demand work environment that meets organization’s privacy requirements and complies with regulatory mandates. It’s a topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) covered in depth at our webinar, “The Rise in Confidential AI.” At this webinar, our experts, Parviz Peiravi and Richard Searle provided a deep and insightful look at how this dynamic technology works to ensure data protection and data privacy. Here are their answers to the questions from our webinar audience. Q. Are businesses using Confidential AI today? A. Absolutely, we have seen a big increase in adoption of Confidential AI particularly in industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Government, where Confidential AI is helping these organizations enhance risk mitigation, including cybercrime prevention, anti-money laundering, fraud prevention and more. Q: With compute capabilities on the Edge increasing, how do you see Trusted Execution Environments evolving? Read More

How Edge Data is Impacting AI

Erin Farr

AI is disrupting so many domains and industries and by doing so, AI models and algorithms are becoming increasingly large and complex. This complexity is driven by the proliferation in size and diversity of localized data everywhere, which creates the need for a unified data fabric and/or federated learning. It could be argued that whoever wins the data race will win the AI race, which is inherently built on two premises: 1) Data is available in a central location for AI to have full access to it, 2) Compute is centralized and abundant.

The impact of edge AI is the topic for our next SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) live webinar, “Why Distributed Edge Data is the Future of AI,” on October 3, 2023. If centralized (or in the cloud), AI is a superpower and super expert, but edge AI is a community of many smart wizards with the power of cumulative knowledge over a central superpower.  In this webinar, our SNIA experts will discuss: Read More

Data Fabric Q&A

Michael Hoard

Unification of structured and unstructured data has long been a goal – and challenge for organizations. Data Fabric is an architecture, set of services and platform that standardizes and integrates data across the enterprise regardless of data location (On-Premises, Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud), enabling self-service data access to support various applications, analytics, and use cases. The data fabric leaves data where it lives and applies intelligent automation to govern, secure and bring AI to your data.

How a data fabric abstraction layer works and the benefits it delivers was the topic of our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webinar, “Data Fabric: Connecting the Dots between Structured and Unstructured Data.” If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand and access the presentations slides at the SNIA Educational Library.

We did not have time to answer audience questions at the live session. Here are answers from our expert, Joseph Dain. Read More

NVMe®/TCP Q&A

Erik Smith
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) had an outstanding response to our live webinar, “NVMe/TCP: Performance, Deployment, and Automation.” If you missed the session, you can watch it on-demand and download a copy of the presentation slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our live audience gave the presentation a 4.9 rating on a scale of 1-5, and they asked a lot of detailed questions, which our presenter, Erik Smith, Vice Chair of SNIA NSF, has answered here. Q: Does the Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) layer also provide drive access control or is it simply for discovery of drives visible on the network? A: As defined in TP8010, the CDC only provides transport layer discovery. In other words, the CDC will allow a host to discover transport layer information (IP, Port, NQN) about the subsystem ports (on the array) that each host has been allowed to communicate with. Provisioning storage volumes to a particular host is additional functionality that COULD be added to an implementation of the CDC. (e.g., Dell has a CDC implementation that we refer to as SmartFabric Storage Software (SFSS). Q: Can you provide some examples of companies that provide CDC and drive access control functionalities? Read More

Open Standards Featured at FMS 2023

SNIA CMSI
SNIA welcomes colleagues to join them at the upcoming Flash Memory Summit, August 8-10, 2023 in Santa Clara CA. SNIA is pleased to join standards organizations CXL Consortium™ (CXL™), PCI-SIG®, and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™ (UCIe™) in an Open Standards Pavilion, Booth #725, in the Exhibit Hall.  CMSI will feature SNIA member companies in a computational storage cross industry demo by Intel, MINIO, and Solidigm and a Data Filtering demo by ScaleFlux; a software memory tiering demo by VMware; a persistent memory workshop and hackathon; and the latest on SSD form factors E1 and E3 work by SNIA SFF TA Technical work group. SMI will showcase SNIA Swordfish® management of NVMe SSDs on Linux with demos by Intel Samsung and Solidigm. CXL will discuss their advances in coherent connectivity.  PCI-SIG will feature their PCIe 5.0 architecture (32GT/s) and PCIe 6.0 (65GT/s) architectures and industry adoption and the upcoming PCIe 7.0 specification development (128GT/s).  UCIe will discuss their new open industry standard establishing a universal interconnect at the package-level. SNIA STA Forum will also be in Booth #849 – learn more about the SCSI Trade Association joining SNIA. These demonstrations and discussions will augment FMS program sessions in the SNIA-sponsored System Architecture Track on memory, computational storage, CXL, and UCIe standards.  A SNIA mainstage session on Wednesday August 9 at 2:10 pm will discuss Trends in Storage and Data: New Directions for Industry Standards. SNIA colleagues and friends can receive a $100 discount off the 1-, 2-, or 3-day full conference registration by using code SNIA23. Visit snia.org/fms to learn more about the exciting activities at FMS 2023 and join us there! The post Open Standards Featured at FMS 2023 first appeared on SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Blog.

So Just What Is An SSD?

Jonmichael Hands
It seems like an easy enough question, “What is an SSD?” but surprisingly, most of the search results for this get somewhat confused quickly on media, controllers, form factors, storage interfaces, performance, reliability, and different market segments.  The SNIA SSD SIG has spent time demystifying various SSD topics like endurance, form factors, and the different classifications of SSDs – from consumer to enterprise and hyperscale SSDs. “Solid state drive is a general term that covers many market segments, and the SNIA SSD SIG has developed a new overview of “What is an SSD? ,” said Jonmichael Hands, SNIA SSD Special Interest Group (SIG)Co-Chair. “We are committed to helping make storage technology topics, like endurance and form factors, much easier to understand coming straight from the industry experts defining the specifications.”   The “What is an SSD?” page offers a concise description of what SSDs do, how they perform, how they connect, and also provides a jumping off point for more in-depth clarification of the many aspects of SSDs. It joins an ever-growing category of 20 one-page “What Is?” answers that provide a clear and concise, vendor-neutral definition of often- asked technology terms, a description of what they are, and how each of these technologies work.  Check out all the “What Is?” entries at https://www.snia.org/education/what-is And don’t miss other interest topics from the SNIA SSD SIG, including  Total Cost of Ownership Model for Storage and SSD videos and presentations in the SNIA Educational Library. Your comments and feedback on this page are welcomed.  Send them to askcmsi@snia.org. The post So just what is an SSD? first appeared on SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Blog.

Your Questions Answered on Persistent Memory, CXL, and Memory Tiering

SNIA CMSI
With the persistent memory ecosystem continuing to evolve with new interconnects like CXL™ and applications like memory tiering, our recent Persistent Memory, CXL, and Memory Tiering-Past, Present, and Future webinar was a big success.  If you missed it, watch it on demand HERE! Many questions were answered live during the webinar, but we did not get to all of them.  Our moderator Jim Handy from Objective Analysis, and experts Andy Rudoff and Bhushan Chithur from Intel, David McIntyre from Samsung, and Sudhir Balasubramanian and Arvind Jagannath from VMware have taken the time to answer them in this blog. Happy reading! Q: What features or support is required from a CXL capable endpoint to e.g. an accelerator to support the memory pooling? Any references? Read More

Considerations and Options for NVMe/TCP Deployment

David McIntyre
NVMe®/TCP has gained a lot of attention over the last several years due to its great performance characteristics and relatively low cost. Since its ratification in 2018, the NVMe/TCP protocol has been enhanced to add features such as Discovery Automation, Authentication and Secure Channels that make it more suitable for use in enterprise environments. Now as organizations evaluate their options and consider adopting NVMe/TCP for use in their environment, many find they need a bit more information before deciding how to move forward. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a live webinar on July 19, 2023 “NVMe/TCP: Performance, Deployment and Automation” where we will provide an overview of deployment considerations and options, and answer questions such as: Read More