Dive into Computational Storage at Storage Developer Conference 2018 – A Chat with SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair Mark Carlson

khauser Leave a comment

An update from SNIA on Storage:  Computational Storage was definitely the “buzz” at SDC! Session slides can now be downloaded.  The BoF attracted over 50 attendees, and a F2F meeting (and WebEx) is set for October 11 at the SNIA Technology Center in Colorado Springs.  Go to snia.org/computational to sign up for the meeting to plan the mission and charter for the SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work Group.  All SNIA and non-SNIA members are welcome to participate in this phase of the TWG.

The SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is running September 24-27, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara CA.   Registration is open, and the agenda is live!

SNIA On Storage is teaming up with the SNIA Technical Council to dive into major themes of the 2018 conference.  The SNIA Technical Council takes a leadership role to develop the content for each SDC, so SNIA on Storage spoke with Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba Memory America, to understand why SDC is bringing Computational Storage to conference attendees.

SNIA On Storage (SOS): Just in the last few weeks, there’s been a tremendous buzz about “computational storage”. Is this a new kid on the block? Read More

RoCE vs. iWARP Q&A

John Kim
In our RoCE vs. iWARP webcast, experts from the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) had a friendly debate on two commonly known remote direct memory access (RDMA) protocols that run over Ethernet: RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and the IETF-standard iWARP. It turned out to be another very popular addition to our “Great Storage Debate” webcast series. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s now available on-demand along with a PDF of the presentation slides. We received A LOT of questions related to Performance, Scalability and Distance, Multipathing, Error Correction, Windows and SMB Direct, DCB (Data Center Bridging), PFC (Priority Flow Control), lossless networks, and Congestion Management, and more. Here are answers to them all.  Read More

Dive into NVMe at Storage Developer Conference – a Chat with SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair Bill Martin

khauser Leave a comment

The SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is coming up September 24-27, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara CA.  The agenda is now live!

SNIA on Storage is teaming up with the SNIA Technical Council to dive into major themes of the 2018 conference.  The SNIA Technical Council takes a leadership role to develop the content for each SDC, so SNIA on Storage spoke with Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and SSD I/O Standards at Samsung Electronics, to understand why SDC is bringing NVMe and NVMe-oF to conference attendees.

SNIA On Storage (SOS): What is NVMe and why is SNIA emphasizing it as one of their key areas of focus for SDC?

Bill Martin (BM):  NVMeTM, also known as NVM ExpressR, is an open collection of standards and information to fully expose the benefits of non-volatile memory (NVM) in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center.

SNIA is very supportive of NVMe.  In fact, earlier this year, SNIA, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and the NVM Express organizations formed a new alliance to coordinate standards for managing solid state drive (SSD) storage devices. This alliance brings together multiple standards for managing the issue of scale-out management of SSDs.  It’s designed to enable an all-inclusive management experience by improving the interoperable management of information technologies.

With interest both from within and outside of SNIA from architects, developers, and implementers on how these standards work, the SNIA Technical Council decided to bring even more sessions on this important area to the SDC audience this year. We are proud to include 16 sessions on NVMe topics over the four days of the conference.

SOS:  What will I learn about NVMe at SDC? Read More

We’re Debating Again: Centralized vs. Distributed Storage

J Metz
We hope you’ve been following the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) “Great Storage Debates” webcast series. We’ve done four so far and they have been incredibly popular with 4,000 live and on-demand views to date and counting. Check out the links to all of them at the end of this blog. Although we have “versus” in the title of these presentations, the goal of this series is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide a “compare and contrast” that educates attendees on how the technologies work, the advantages of each, and to explore common use cases. That’s exactly what we plan to do on September 11, 2018 when we host “Centralized vs. Distributed Storage.” Read More

SNIA Volunteer Work Wins Recognition at Flash Memory Summit

kristin.hauser
SNIA thanks and celebrates the many hardworking SNIA member volunteers whose technical work was awarded Best of Show at the recent Flash Memory Summit.

Jennifer Dietz and Eden Kim accept FMS award from Jay Kramer

SNIA won the FMS Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology Award, recognizing innovations that will change the way flash memory works and is used in products, for the SNIA Technical Position Real World Storage Workloads Performance Test Specification (RWSW PTS), developed by the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group (SSS TWG). “Real World Workloads are important for Data Center, IT, and Storage professionals,” said Eden Kim, Chair of the SSS TWG, and CEO of SNIA member company Calypso Systems “because real world workloads are very different from synthetic lab workloads and are key determinants in datacenter server and storage performance, optimization and qualification.”   Eden and Jennifer Dietz of SNIA member company Intel and Co-Chair of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Marketing Committee accepted the award from Jay Kramer of Flash Memory Summit.

Mark Carlson and Bill Martin accept award on behalf of SNIA from Jay Kramer

SNIA also won the FMS Best of show Technology Innovation Award, recognizing that cloud and other large data centers typically prioritize their selection criteria for storage solutions as those that can achieve the highest possible performance while avoiding proprietary vendor lock-in.  SNIA and EXTEN HyperDynamic™ NVMe over Fabrics high-performance storage software were recognized for creating an open storage management specification that works with EXTEN storage software for being the first in the industry to provide a solution based on SNIA Swordfish™ and DMTF Redfish® specifications. “We congratulate EXTEN Technologies for its innovation and well-deserved accolade,” said Don Deel, SNIA Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Chair. “By integrating SNIA Swordfish into its solution, EXTEN Technologies’ customers will benefit from a standards-based API that does not require learning the intricacies of storage infrastructure to handle day-to-day storage needs.” Accepting the award for SNIA at FMS were Mark Carlson of SNIA member company Toshiba Memory Systems and Bill Miller of SNIA member company Samsung Electronics, Co-Chairs of the SNIA Technical Council. Congratulations to all the SNIA volunteers who participated in the development of these award-winning specifications. SNIA Sessions at FMS Now Available for Viewing and Download Read More

Dive into Orchestration at SDC – a Chat with Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair

khauser Leave a comment

The SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is coming up September 24-27, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara CA.  The agenda is now live!

SNIA on Storage is teaming up with the SNIA Technical Council to dive into major themes of the 2018 conference.  The SNIA Technical Council takes a leadership role to develop the content for each SDC, so SNIA on Storage spoke with Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba Memory America, to understand why SDC is bringing Orchestration to conference attendees.

SNIA On Storage (SOS):  When I think of “orchestration”, my first vision is of a conductor with a magnificent symphony.  Am I on the right track in thinking this way?

Mark Carlson (MC):  If you think of the conductor as the “automator” of the symphony, you’re right on!  Orchestration for computing is the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of computer systems, middleware, and services.  For example, cloud orchestration technology helps to manage the interconnections and interactions among public and private cloud infrastructure workloads.

SOS:  What are some examples of orchestration? Read More

What the “T” Means in SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies

Alex McDonald
The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) has had a rebrand; we’ve added a T for Technologies into our name, and we’re now officially the Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI). That doesn’t seem like a significant change, but there’s a good reason. Our old name reflected the push to getting acceptance of cloud storage, and that specific cloud storage debate has been won, and big time. One relatively small cloud service provider is currently storing 400PB of clients’ data. Twitter alone consumes 300PB of data on Google’s cloud offering. Facebook, Amazon, AliBaba, Tencent – all have huge data storage numbers. Enterprises of every size are storing data in the cloud. That’s why we added the word “technologies.” The expanded charter and new name reflect the need to support the evolving cloud business models and architectures such as OpenStack, software defined storage, Kubernetes and object storage. Read More

SNIA Swordfish™ – Your Questions Answered

Diane Marsili

The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA’s) Storage Management Initiative (SMI) took on the topic of SNIA Swordfish™ in a live webcast titled “Introduction to SNIA Swordfish™ – Scalable Storage Management.” The replay is available here. SNIA experts Richelle Ahlvers and Don Deel, responded to questions during the webcast. Here are those questions and responses:

Q. You talked about two different ways to add storage to Redfish – hosted service configuration and integrated service configuration. When would you use one configuration instead of the other?

A. The integrated services configuration was added to clarify support with direct attach configurations using Swordfish constructs. If you have a server that has a RAID card in it, and you want to have it use a more complex storage configuration – storage pools and some notion of class of service, you would use the integrated service configuration. The hosted service configuration is used to model non-direct attach configurations, such as external storage arrays, or file services.

Q. Another service configuration question. For a pure JBOD, which would be the preferred approach?

A. A JBOD configuration configuration could start with either configuration depending on whether it is a standalone system (HSC) or server-attached. If the JBOD has an embedded controller in an enclosure, it could be modeled using the HSC configuration.

Q. Are there provisions for adding custom data in the payloads that Swordfish support. Is there a method to add vendor specific parameters in the payload?

A. Previous standards did not have a good model for adding OEM specific data.

As a result, Redfish, and its extensions such as Swordfish, have ensured that there is a very clean place to add OEM data. Every schema supports OEM extensions in two places. There are OEM extensions for properties and also for OEM actions – a way to support functions that don’t map to REST.

Q. Is there any work related to NVMe over Fabric in development?

A. Both SNIA and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF – which developed Redfish) have been working on this. The DMTF’s Redfish Forum developed the base model for SAS/SATA and PCIe fabrics, which is being extended to include NVMe over Fabric. SNIA is also working on adding NVMe over Fabric device connections to their basic models to integrate the storage elements.

Q. I think of Redfish as talking to the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). Where is Swordfish functionality located? Is it on the CPU running the OS or is it also out of band?

A. Where Swordfish is running will be determined by the implementation. An implementation can choose to run either in band or out of band. In most cases this will be consistent with implementations. If a vendor’s existing architecture supports out of band management, then their Swordfish implementation will also likely be out of band. Note that the Swordfish implementation may leverage existing Redfish instrumentation on integrated components in either case, but this is a completely vendor-specific choice.

Q. What is meant by endpoint?

A. Endpoints are an abstraction of a connection. They describe the connections without needing to define everything about the underlying hardware.

Q. Since JBODs fall within the domain of server hardware, can software RAID solutions take full advantage of Swordfish?

A. The software RAID solutions can absolutely take full advantage of Swordfish. Remember that Swordfish is a schema extension to Redfish for storage functionality; therefore, it doesn’t care what underlying hardware it is running on. Note that many different types of storage solutions today run on “server hardware” – SDS solutions, for example, have no custom hardware, and fall exclusively in this domain, yet are clearly storage solutions.

Q. Is Swordfish planning on staying an extension to Redfish? Does it have a goal of being integrated into Redfish specification at some point?

A. Yes, Swordfish plans to remain an extension to Redfish. There isn’t a reason to integrate it into Redfish, as it is already tightly coupled with Redfish; the schema are delivered publicly on the same site. The SNIA will continue to own Swordfish content separately from DMTF in order to take advantage of the focused attention of the large body of storage domain experts in SNIA. In order to allow the Redfish ecosystem to grow to its maximum potential as quickly as possible, DMTF is partnering with other organizations to add features such as storage and networking to the standard.

Q. Do you have to be a SNIA member to contribute to the open source work?

A. No. You do not have to be a SNIA member to contribute to the open source projects. You will, however, need to sign the SNIA Contributor License Agreement, available at snia.org/cla in order to release any contributions you make to the open source projects to SNIA to allow us to incorporate them back into the open source projects.

Q. Going through the specs for Redfish /Swordfish, I can see that only a few parameters of the schema are really mandatory to be supported by the vendor. Does that not break functionality where a client would be expecting data as per the entire schema?

A. The SSM TWG is working on the development of feature profiles, which will help clarify which functionality is required to be implemented for specific clients, applications, and use cases. In addition to the functionality requirements in the Swordfish specification, the profile definitions will help clarify to both clients and service implementations much more clearly what functionality is required to implement for their specific configurations.

Additional information on SNIA Swordfish is available at: www.snia.org/swordfish. This site contains resources including the latest specification, a Swordfish User Guide, a Swordfish Practical Guide, Swordfish mockups and more.

You can also join the Redfish Specification Forum to ask and answer questions about Swordfish!

SNIA Swordfish™ – Your Questions Answered

Diane Marsili

The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA’s) Storage Management Initiative (SMI) took on the topic of SNIA Swordfish™ in a live webcast titled “Introduction to SNIA Swordfish™ – Scalable Storage Management.” The replay is available here. SNIA experts Richelle Ahlvers and Don Deel, responded to questions during the webcast. Here are those questions and responses:

Q. You talked about two different ways to add storage to Redfish – hosted service configuration and integrated service configuration. When would you use one configuration instead of the other?

A. The integrated services configuration was added to clarify support with direct attach configurations using Swordfish constructs. If you have a server that has a RAID card in it, and you want to have it use a more complex storage configuration – storage pools and some notion of class of service, you would use the integrated service configuration. The hosted service configuration is used to model non-direct attach configurations, such as external storage arrays, or file services.

Q. Another service configuration question. For a pure JBOD, which would be the preferred approach?

A. A JBOD configuration configuration could start with either configuration depending on whether it is a standalone system (HSC) or server-attached. If the JBOD has an embedded controller in an enclosure, it could be modeled using the HSC configuration.

Q. Are there provisions for adding custom data in the payloads that Swordfish support. Is there a method to add vendor specific parameters in the payload?

A. Previous standards did not have a good model for adding OEM specific data.

As a result, Redfish, and its extensions such as Swordfish, have ensured that there is a very clean place to add OEM data. Every schema supports OEM extensions in two places. There are OEM extensions for properties and also for OEM actions – a way to support functions that don’t map to REST.

Q. Is there any work related to NVMe over Fabric in development?

A. Both SNIA and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF – which developed Redfish) have been working on this. The DMTF’s Redfish Forum developed the base model for SAS/SATA and PCIe fabrics, which is being extended to include NVMe over Fabric. SNIA is also working on adding NVMe over Fabric device connections to their basic models to integrate the storage elements.

Q. I think of Redfish as talking to the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). Where is Swordfish functionality located? Is it on the CPU running the OS or is it also out of band?

A. Where Swordfish is running will be determined by the implementation. An implementation can choose to run either in band or out of band. In most cases this will be consistent with implementations. If a vendor’s existing architecture supports out of band management, then their Swordfish implementation will also likely be out of band. Note that the Swordfish implementation may leverage existing Redfish instrumentation on integrated components in either case, but this is a completely vendor-specific choice.

Q. What is meant by endpoint?

A. Endpoints are an abstraction of a connection. They describe the connections without needing to define everything about the underlying hardware.

Q. Since JBODs fall within the domain of server hardware, can software RAID solutions take full advantage of Swordfish?

A. The software RAID solutions can absolutely take full advantage of Swordfish. Remember that Swordfish is a schema extension to Redfish for storage functionality; therefore, it doesn’t care what underlying hardware it is running on. Note that many different types of storage solutions today run on “server hardware” – SDS solutions, for example, have no custom hardware, and fall exclusively in this domain, yet are clearly storage solutions.

Q. Is Swordfish planning on staying an extension to Redfish? Does it have a goal of being integrated into Redfish specification at some point?

A. Yes, Swordfish plans to remain an extension to Redfish. There isn’t a reason to integrate it into Redfish, as it is already tightly coupled with Redfish; the schema are delivered publicly on the same site. The SNIA will continue to own Swordfish content separately from DMTF in order to take advantage of the focused attention of the large body of storage domain experts in SNIA. In order to allow the Redfish ecosystem to grow to its maximum potential as quickly as possible, DMTF is partnering with other organizations to add features such as storage and networking to the standard.

Q. Do you have to be a SNIA member to contribute to the open source work?

A. No. You do not have to be a SNIA member to contribute to the open source projects. You will, however, need to sign the SNIA Contributor License Agreement, available at snia.org/cla in order to release any contributions you make to the open source projects to SNIA to allow us to incorporate them back into the open source projects.

Q. Going through the specs for Redfish /Swordfish, I can see that only a few parameters of the schema are really mandatory to be supported by the vendor. Does that not break functionality where a client would be expecting data as per the entire schema?

A. The SSM TWG is working on the development of feature profiles, which will help clarify which functionality is required to be implemented for specific clients, applications, and use cases. In addition to the functionality requirements in the Swordfish specification, the profile definitions will help clarify to both clients and service implementations much more clearly what functionality is required to implement for their specific configurations.

Additional information on SNIA Swordfish is available at: www.snia.org/swordfish. This site contains resources including the latest specification, a Swordfish User Guide, a Swordfish Practical Guide, Swordfish mockups and more.

You can also join the Redfish Specification Forum to ask and answer questions about Swordfish!

SNIA Swordfish™ – Your Questions Answered

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA’s) Storage Management Initiative (SMI) took on the topic of SNIA Swordfish™ in a live webcast titled “Introduction to SNIA Swordfish™ – Scalable Storage Management.” The replay is available here. SNIA experts Richelle Ahlvers and Don Deel, responded to questions during the webcast. Here are those questions and responses:

Q. You talked about two different ways to add storage to Redfish – hosted service configuration and integrated service configuration. When would you use one configuration instead of the other?

A. The integrated services configuration was added to clarify support with direct attach configurations using Swordfish constructs. If you have a server that has a RAID card in it, and you want to have it use a more complex storage configuration – storage pools and some notion of class of service, you would use the integrated service configuration. The hosted service configuration is used to model non-direct attach configurations, such as external storage arrays, or file services. Read More