Solid State Storage Contributors Honored at SNIA Symposium

Marty Foltyn

Passionate and dedicated volunteers are vital to the success of SNIA and its programs.  Congratulations to the following SNIA Solid State Storage honorees, selected by the entire SNIA member community, who were recognized for their 2011 contributions!

Volunteer of the Year recognizes an individual who, above all others in 2011, consistently stepped up and helped SNIA achieve something new and groundbreaking or who significantly advanced an existing program. Congratulations to Paul Wassenberg of Marvell, SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Chair, winner of the 2011 SNIA Volunteer of the Year for his leadership in Solid State Storage education and outreach of SSSI activities including the Enterprise and Client Performance Test Specifications and Understanding SSD Performance Project .

The Industry Impact Honoree recognizes an individual who has significantly advanced a cause for SNIA leading to an impact on the industry or the Association. Congratulations to Eden Kim of Calypso Systems, SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group, winner of the 2011 Industry Impact Award for his leadership on development of the Solid State Storage Enterprise and Client Performance Test Specifications.

The Most Significant Impact by a Technical Work Group recognizes the SNIA TWG, which above all others in 2011, had members and efforts which consistently stepped up and helped SNIA achieve something new and groundbreaking or which significantly advanced an existing program. Congratulations to the Solid State Storage Technical Work Group, honored in 2011 for their development of the Solid State Storage Enterprise and Client Performance Test Specifications.

Eden Kim, SNIA SSS TWG Chair, receiving "SNIA Industry Impact Award" from Wayne Adams, SNIA Chairman of the Board, and Leo Leger, SNIA Executive Director

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Understand SSD Performance Project

Team_SSSI

At last week’s Storage Vision conference, SSSI announced the Understanding SSD Performance project, which is intended to educate users about how to use the SSS PTS (Performance Test Specification) to make intelligent decisions about SSD performance.  You can find the press release here.

The project outcomes so far include a new webpage at www.snia.org/forums/sssi/pts, a white paper (www.snia.org/forums/sssi/knowledge/education), and a webcast.

Join us for the webcast on January 19 at 11AM Pacific Time by going to www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/40549.

 

Validating CDMI features – Object Expiration

mac

Validating yet another feature of the CDMI standard (see previous post for an earlier one), Amazon announced their Object Expiration feature for S3. While not a new concept for storage interfaces, it is the first cloud implementation of this capability that I know of. The idea is simply to have the server side of the cloud do object deletion on your behalf automatically, once the lifecycle of that data has completed.

As part of overall Data Lifecycle Management, object deletion is the most common terminal state for data. CDMI has standardized the interface for this capability in cloud storage with a comprehensive Retention and Hold Management feature (Chapter 17). The granularity of the standard CDMI feature is finer than that of the S3 feature in that it allows for retention and deletion on individual objects (although you could accomplish this in S3 with prefix = object name, it doesn’t scale using the header fields that Amazon uses). The S3 prefix mechanism can be used to scope the expiration policy down to individual “directories” (forward slash terminated parts of object names), and CDMI allows this also for the semantically equivalent CDMI sub-containers.

Complying with Regulations

Although the ability to delete objects when their lifecycle completes is useful, it is insufficient for complying with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, or for eDiscovery needs during litigation. For most enterprises, they need to show that the data has not been modified during its lifecycle. In addition, if a subpoena is issued for the data – you DO NOT want the object deleted, even if it’s retention period has expired – this can cost you millions of dollars in a pending court case…

The CDMI standard anticipates that storage clouds will want to offer a more robust, full featured retention and hold management for corporate data, and that a standard means of achieving it will be needed. Take a quick look at Chapter 17 (it’s quite compact while being comprehensive) and investigate using the standard way to achieve this function. If you are a cloud vendor trying to emulate the S3 interface, good luck to you – Amazon will continue to expand the definition of what “S3″ means (like adding this feature), forcing you to constantly modify your cloud’s storage interface to keep up (as well as requiring you to reverse engineer any bugs that exist).

Holiday Education Before Our New Year Event!

Marty Foltyn

These first weeks of December always fly by with the myriad of tasks and assignments we need to get done before everyone disappears for the
holidays. I won’t add to your load, but I will ask you to put two items on your future to-do list.

SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative just completed two excellent webcasts on Solid State Storage – a topic that is getting the 2012 buzz.    In my involvement with the SNIA SSSI, I was lucky enough to introduce both webcasts, and they really brought some new perspectives to light.

Put them on your holiday viewing list, and you’ll jumpstart your 2012 education just in time to see the SSSI at Storage Visions, January 8-9, 2012 in Las Vegas.

I would suggest beginning with a session that gives a glimpse into how IT professionals look at solid state drives and high speed memory technologies.  Jim Bagley of Storage Strategies NOW gives a quick background of the solid state drive and high-speed memory market and then dives into solid state storage growth and how businesses are adopting and deploying solid state storage for rapid access to transactional data, the cloud and virtual desktop infrastructures.

This session includes the results of an IT Professionals Adoption Survey, co-sponsored by the SNIA and the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI), which presents information on the status of solid state drives (SSDs) and high-speed memory, and that’s where it gets interesting.  You’ll want to compare your organization to these answers from 300+ professionals, and see where you stand with SSD adoption, how SSDs have affected the perception of the value of IT as a business enabler, and which storage applications are deploying SSDs.

The webcast is entitled “Solid State Adoption and Use – a Glimpse into the IT Professional Mind” and you can access it here.

Stay tuned for my next blog entry, I’ll give your present #2, and maybe even a bonus gift.

Join Our Webcast on SSS Adoption and Use – A Glimpse into the IT Professional Mind

Marty Foltyn

Our next SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative webcast will be Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 2:00 pm ET/11:00 am PT.

Preview and register here:

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/39135

Join the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative and Jim Bagley of Storage Strategies NOW for a topical and informative look into solid state storage growth and how businesses are adopting and deploying solid state storage for rapid access to transactional data, the cloud and virtual desktop infrastructures. This session will include the results of an IT Professionals Adoption Survey, co-sponsored by the SNIA and the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI), which presents information on the status of solid state drives and high-speed memory.

Webcast on SSD Encryption

Team_SSSI

Join Tom Coughlin, Marketing Chair, SNIA SSSI and President, Coughlin Associates,  for an informative SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative webcast on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET.

Solid Security:  The Rise of Self-Encrypted Solid State Drives

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/37987  

Protecting user data is important in storage devices.  If valuable information is on a storage device, it makes sense to make sure that that data isn’t accessible by unauthorized individuals or organizations.  Protecting user data from being stolen or accessed leads to the use of encryption in storage devices. 

With one of the hottest drive categories – solid state drives (SSDs) – rapidly penetrating data centers,  this hour-long webcast provides a valuable introduction to  self-encrypting drives (SEDs) and explains why organizations need SEDs Solid State Drives in their environment.  Listen, ask questions, and find out from your peers where they are in incorporating SEDs and SSDs in their environment.

Quick PTS Implementation

Jim Handy

PTS ProcedureNeed an abbreviated version of the SNIA SSD Performance Test Specification (PTS) in a hurry?  Jamon Bowen of Texas Memory Systems (TMS) whipped up a simple implementation of certain key parts of the PTS that can be run on a Linux system and interpreted in Excel.

It’s a free download on his Storage Tuning blog.

This is a boon for anyone that might want to run a internal preliminary test before pursuing a more formal route.

The bash script uses the Flexible I/O utility (FIO) to run through part of the SSSI PTS.  FIO does the heavy lifting, and the script manages it.  The script outputs comma separated (CSV) data and the download includes an Excel pivot table that helps format the results and select the measurement window.

Since this is a bare-bones implementation the SSD must be initialized manually before the test script is run.

The test runs the IOPS Test from the PTS.  This test covers a range of block sizes, read/write ratios and iterates until the steady state for the device is reached (with a maximum of 25 iterations).  Altogether the test takes over a day to run.

Once the test is complete, the downloadable pivot tables allow users to select the steady-state measurement window and report the data in a recommended format.

See Mr. Bowen’s blog at http://storagetuning.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/sssi-performance-test-specification/ for details on this valuable download.