Storage for Transactional Systems: From Banking to Facebook

We’re all accustomed to transferring money from one bank account to another; a credit to the payer becomes a debit to the payee. But that model uses a specific set of sophisticated techniques to accomplish what appears to be a simple transaction. Today, we’re also well acquainted with ordering goods online, reserving an airline seat over the Internet, or simply updating a photograph on Facebook. Can these applications use the same banking models, or are new techniques required? It’s a question we’ll tackle at our next Ethernet Storage Forum webcast on October 31st “Transactional Models & Their Storage Requirements.” Read More

Take the 2017 Archive Requirements Survey!

 

by Samuel A. Fineberg, Co-chair, SNIA LTR TWG

Ten years ago, a SNIA Task Force undertook a 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey with a goal to determine requirements for long-term digital retention in the data center.  The Task Force hypothesized that the practitioner survey respondents would have experiences with terabyte archive systems that would be adequate to define business and operating system requirements for petabyte-sized information repositories in the data center. Read More

How Gateways Benefit Cloud Object Storage

The use of cloud object storage is ramping up sharply especially in the public cloud, where its simplicity can significantly reduce capital budgets and operating expenses. And while it makes good economic sense, enterprises are challenged with legacy applications that do not support standard protocols to move data to and from the cloud. That’s why the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative is hosting a live webcast on September 26th, “Cloud Object Storage and the Use of Gateways.” Read More

A Q&A on Containers and Persistent Memory

The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative recently hosted a live webcast “Containers and Persistent Memory.” Where my colleagues and I discussed persistent storage for containers, persistent memory for containers, infrastructure software changes for persistent memory-based containers, and what SNIA is doing to advance persistent memory. If you missed the live event, it’s now available on-demand. You can also download a PDF of the webcast slides. Read More

Comparing iSCSI, iSER, and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF): Ecosystem, Interoperability, Performance, and Use Cases

iSCSI is one of the most broadly supported storage protocols, but traditionally has not been associated with the highest performance. Newer protocols like iSER and NVMe over Fabrics promise extreme performance but are still maturing and lack the broad feature and platform support of iSCSI. Storage vendors and customers face interesting tradeoffs and options when evaluating how to achieve the highest block storage performance on Ethernet networks, while preserving the major software and hardware investment in iSCSI. Read More

Too Proud to Ask Webcast Series Opens Pandora’s Box – Storage Management

Storage can be something of a “black box,” a monolithic entity that is at once mysterious and scary. That’s why we created “The Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask” webcast series. So far, we’ve explored various and sundry aspects of storage, focusing on “the naming of the parts.” Our goal has been to break down some of the components of storage and explain how they fit into the greater whole. On September 28th, we’ll be hosting “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Cyan – Storage Management.” This time, we’re going to open up Pandora’s Box and peer inside the world of storage management, uncovering some of the key technologies that are used to manage devices, storage traffic, and storage architectures. In particular, we’ll be discussing: Read More

The Alphabet Soup of Storage Networking Acronyms Explained

At our most recent webcast, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Part Turquoise – Where Does My Data Go?, our panel of experts dove into what really happens when you hit “save” and send your data off. It was an alphabet soup of acronyms as they explained the nuances of and the differences between:
  • Volatile v Non-Volatile v Persistent Memory
  • NVDIMM v RAM v DRAM v SLC v MLC v TLC v NAND v 3D NAND v Flash v SSDs v NVMe
  • NVMe (the protocol)
As promised during the live event, here are answers to all the questions we received. Q. Is SRAM still used today? A. SRAM is still in use today as embedded CACHE (Level 1/2/3) within a CPU and very limited in external standalone packaging… This is due to cost and size/capacity. Read More

Q&A – When Compute, Networking and Storage Intersect

In Part Vermillion of our SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcast series – we examined the terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. That’s why we called it “What if Programming and Networking Had a Storage Baby” If you missed the live webcast, you can watch it on-demand. The discussion from our panel of experts generated a lot of good questions. As promised, here are answers to them all.  Read More

Unlock the Power of Persistent Memory in Containers

Containers and persistent memory are both very hot topics these days. Containers are making it easier for developers to know that their software will run, no matter where it is deployed and no matter what the underlying OS is as both Linux and Windows are now fully supported. Persistent memory, a revolutionary data storage technology, will boost the performance of next-generation packaging of applications and libraries into containers. On July 27th, SNIA is hosting a live webcast “Containers and Persistent Memory.” Read More