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.

What’s the story with NFSv4? Four things you need to know.

Jason Blosil

Experts from SNIA’s Ethernet Storage Forum are going to discuss the key drivers to consider working with NFSv4. For years, NFSv3 has been the practical standard of choice. But, times have changed and significant advances in the NFS standards are ready to address today’s challenges around massive scale, cloud deployments, performance and management.

Join our host Steve Abbott from Emulex and our content expert, Alex McDonald from NetApp, as these SNIA representatives discuss the reasons to start planning for deployment with NFSv4.

Date: November 8, 2011
Time: 11am ET

Register for a live webinar. http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/35415

Now Available – The SSSI Blogroll

Team_SSSI

For those who don’t already know, a blogroll is a list of recommended blogs.  The SSSI website now has a page dedicated to two such lists – SSD-specific blogs and general storage blogs that mention SSDs from time to time.

If you have a favorite storage blog that’s not listed, please send a link to the email address at the bottom of the blogroll page.  Or add a comment to this post.

Just one more way that SSSI is working to be the source for all things SSD.

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Validating CDMI features – Server Side Encryption

mac

One of the features of many storage systems and even disk drives is the ability to encrypt the data at rest. This protects against a specific threat – the disk drive going out the back door for replacement or repair. So it was only a matter of time before we would see this important feature start to be offered for Cloud Storage as well. Well, today Amazon announced their Server Side Encryption capability for their S3 cloud offering. This feature was anticipated by the CDMI standard interface when it was finalized as a standard back in April 2010.

Standard Server Side Encryption

So, how does CDMI standardize this feature? Well, as usual, it starts with finding out if the cloud actually supports the feature and what choices are available. In CDMI, this is done through the capabilities resource – a kind of catalog or discovery mechanism. By fetching the capabilities resource for objects, containers, domain or queues, you can tell whether server side encryption of data at rest if available from the cloud offering (yes this is granular for a reason). The actual capability name is: cdmi_encryption (see section 12.1.3). This indicates that the cloud can do encryption for the data at rest, but also indicates what algorithms are available to do this encryption. The algorithms are expressed in the form of: ALGORITHM_MODE_KEYLENGTH, where:

• “ALGORITHM” is the encryption algorithm (e.g., “AES” or “3DES”).

• “MODE” is the mode of operation (e.g.,”XTS”, “CBC”, or “CTR”).

• “KEYLENGTH” is the key size (e.g.,”128″,”192″, “256″).

So the cloud can offer the user several different algorithms of different strengths and types, or if it only offers a single algorithm (such as the Amazon offering), the cloud storage client can at least understand what that algorithm is.

So how does the user tell the cloud that she wants her data encrypted? Amazon does this with a proprietary header of course, but CDMI does it with standard Data System Metadata that can be placed on any object, container of objects, queue or domain. This metadata is called cdmi_encryption (see section 16.4), and contains merely a string with a value chosen from the list of available algorithms in the corresponding capability. There is also a cdmi_encryption_provided metadata value to tell the client whether their data is being encrypted or not by the cloud.

Lastly, there is a system-wide capability called cdmi_security_encryption (section 12.1.1) that tells the user whether the cloud does server side encryption at all.

Server side encryption is an important capability for cloud storage offerings to provide, which is why CDMI standardized this in advance of having cloud offerings available. We expect more clouds to offer this in the future, and customers to soon realize that – without CDMI implementations, these offerings are locking them in and causing a high cost of exiting that vendor.

New Webpage about SSD Form-Factors

Team_SSSI

There’s a new page on the SSSI website which describes the wide range of SSD form-factors (physical formats) on the market today.   SSSI defines three major categories – Solid State Drive, Solid State Card, and Solid State Module – and the new page provides descriptions and examples of each.

Take a look.

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