Live Panel: Sustainability in the Data Center

Wayne Adams
As our data-driven global economy continues to expand with new workloads such as proven digital assets and currency, artificial intelligence and advanced healthcare, our data centers continue to evolve with denser computational systems and increased data stores. This creates challenges for sustainable growth and managing costs. On April 25, 2023, The SNIA Networking Storage Forum will explore this topic with a live webinar “Sustainability in the Data Center Ecosystem.” We’ve convened a panel of experts, who will cover a wide range of topics, including delivering more power efficiency per capacity, revolutionizing cooling to reduce heat, increasing system processing to enhance performance, infrastructure consolidation to reduce the physical and carbon footprint, and applying current and new metrics for carbon footprint and resource efficiency. Read More

“Year of the Summit” Kicks Off with Live and Virtual Events

SNIA CMSI
For 11 years, SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Initiative (CMSI) has presented a Summit featuring industry leaders speaking on the key topics of the day.  In the early years, it was persistent memory-focused, educating audiences on the benefits and uses of persistent memory.  In 2020 it expanded to a Persistent Memory+Computational Storage Summit, examining that new technology, its architecture, and use cases. Now in 2023, the Summit is expanding again to focus on compute, memory, and storage. Read More

Digital Twins Q&A

Michael Hoard
A digital twin (DT) is a virtual representation of an object, system or process that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning and reasoning to help decision-making. Digital twins can be used to help answer what-if AI-analytics questions, yield insights on business objectives and make recommendations on how to control or improve outcomes. It’s a fascinating technology that the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) discussed at our live webcast “Journey to the Center of Massive Data: Digital Twins.” If you missed the presentation, you can watch it on-demand and access a PDF of the slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our audience asked several interesting questions which are answered here in this blog. Q. Will a digital twin make the physical twin more or less secure? Read More

A Q&A on the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Project

Joseph White
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum hosted several experts leading the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project with a live webcast, “An Introduction to the OPI (Open Programmable Infrastructure) Project.” The project has been created to address a new class of cloud and datacenter infrastructure component. This new infrastructure element, often referred to as Data Processing Unit (DPU), Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) or xPU as a general term, takes the form of a server hosted PCIe add-in card or on-board chip(s), containing one or more ASIC’s or FPGA’s, usually anchored around a single powerful SoC device. Our OPI experts provided an introduction to the OPI Project and then explained lifecycle provisioning, API, use cases, proof of concept and developer platform. If you missed the live presentation, you can watch it on demand and download a PDF of the slides at the SNIA Educational Library. The attendees at the live session asked several interesting questions. Here are answers to them from our presenters. Q. Are there any plans for OPI to use GraphQL for API definitions since GraphQL has a good development environment, better security, and a well-defined, typed, schema approach? Read More

FAQ on CXL and SDXI

David McIntyre
How are Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) and the SNIA Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) related? It’s a topic we covered in detail at our recent SNIA Networking Storage Forum webcast, “What’s in a Name? Memory Semantics and Data Movement with CXL and SDXI” where our experts, Rita Gupta and Shyam Iyer, introduced both SDXI and CXL, highlighted the benefits of each, discussed data movement needs in a CXL ecosystem and covered SDXI advantages in a CXL interconnect. If you missed the live session, it is available in the SNIA Educational Library along with the presentation slides. The session was highly rated by the live audience who asked several interesting questions. Here are answers to them from our presenters Rita and Shyam. Q. Now that SDXI v1.0 is out, can application implementations use SDXI today? Read More

An Overview of the Linux Foundation OPI (Open Programmable Infrastructure)

Joseph White
A new class of cloud and datacenter infrastructure component is emerging into the marketplace. This new infrastructure element, often referred to as Data Processing Unit (DPU), Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) or xPU as a general term, takes the form of a server hosted PCIe add-in card or on-board chip(s), containing one or more ASIC’s or FPGA’s, usually anchored around a single powerful SoC device. The Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project has been created to address the configuration, operation, and lifecycle for these devices. It also has the goal of fostering an open software ecosystem for DPUs/IPUs covering edge, datacenter, and cloud use cases. The project intends to delineate what a DPU/IPU is, to define frameworks and architecture for DPU/IPU-based software stacks applicable to any vendors’ hardware solution, to  create a rich open-source application ecosystem, to integrate with existing open-source projects aligned to the same vision such as the Linux kernel, IPDK.io, DPDK, DASH, and SPDK to create new APIs for interaction with and between the elements of the DPU/IPU ecosystem: Read More

Is EDSFF Taking Center Stage? We Answer Your Questions!

SNIA CMSI
Enterprise and Data Center Form Factor (EDSFF) technologies have come a long way since our 2020 SNIA CMSI webinar on the topic. While that webinar still provides an outstanding framework for understanding – and SNIA’s popular SSD Form Factors page gives the latest on the E1 and E3 specifications – SNIA Solid State Drive Special Interest Group co-chairs Cameron Brett and Jonmichael Hands joined to provide the latest updates at our live webcast: EDSFF Taking Center Stage in the Data Center.  We had some great questions from our live audience, so our experts have taken the time to answer them in this this blog. Q: What does the EDSFF roadmap look like? When will we see PCIe® Gen5 NVMe™, 1.2, 2.0 CXL ™ cx devices? Read More

Kubernetes Trials & Tribulations Q&A: Cloud, Data Center, Edge

Michael Hoard
Kubernetes cloud orchestration platforms offer all the flexibility, elasticity, and ease of use — on premises, in a private or public cloud, even at the edge. The flexibility of turning on services when you want them, turning them off when you don’t, is an enticing prospect for developers as well as application deployment teams, but it has not been without its challenges. At our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webcast “Kubernetes Trials & Tribulations: Cloud, Data Center, Edge” our experts, Michael St-Jean and Pete Brey, debated both the challenges and advantages of Kubernetes. If you missed the session, it is available on-demand along with the presentation slides. The live audience raised several interesting questions. Here are answers to them from our presenters. Q: Are all these trends coming together? Where will Kubernetes be in the next 1-3 years? Read More

Programming Frameworks Q&A

Alex McDonald
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum made sense of the “wild west” of programming frameworks, covering xPUs, GPUs and computational storage devices at our live webcast, “You’ve Been Framed! An Overview of xPU, GPU & Computational Storage Programming Frameworks.” It was an excellent overview of what’s happening in this space. There was a lot to digest, so our stellar panel of experts has taken the time to answer the questions from our live audience in this blog. Q. Why is it important to have open-source programming frameworks? A. Open-source frameworks enable community support and partnerships beyond what proprietary frameworks support. In many cases they allow ISVs and end users to write one integration that works with multiple vendors. Q. Will different accelerators require different frameworks or can one framework eventually cover them all? Read More

Memory Semantics and Data Movement with CXL and SDXI

David McIntyre
Using software to perform memory copies has been the gold standard for applications performing memory-to-memory data movement or system memory operations. With new accelerators and memory types enriching the system architecture, accelerator-assisted memory data movement and transformation need standardization. At the forefront of this standardization movement is the SNIA Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) which is designed as an industry-open standard that is Extensible, Forward-compatible, and Independent of I/O interconnect technology. Adjacently, Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) is an industry-supported Cache-Coherent Interconnect for Processors, Memory Expansion, and Accelerators. CXL is designed to be an industry-open standard interface for high-speed communications, as accelerators are increasingly used to complement CPUs in support of emerging applications such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. How are these two standards related? Read More