For the third consecutive year, SNIA will present their highly successful Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in Bangalore, India, on May 25-26, 2017 at the My Fortune Hotel. The 2017 agenda, developed under the supervision of the SNIA India agenda committee, leads off with a keynote by Indian Institute of Science Professor P. Vijay Kumar on Codes for Big Data: Error-Correction for Distributed Storage, followed by Amar Tunballi, Engineering Manager at Red Hat, speaking on Software Defined Storage and Why It Will Continue To Be Relevant. Thursday keynotes will feature Anand Ghatnekar, Country Read More
Tag: Conference
SNIA Activities in Security, Containers, and File Storage on Tap at Three Bay Area Events
SNIA will be out and about in February in San Francisco and Santa Clara, CA, focused on their security, container, and file storage activities.
February 14-17 2017, join SNIA in San Francisco at the RSA Conference in the OASIS Interop: KMIP & PKCS11 booth S2115. OASIS and SNIA member companies will be demonstrating OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) through live interoperability across all participants. SNIA representatives will be on hand in the booth to answer questions about the Storage Security Industry Forum KMIP Conformance Test Program, which enables organizations with KMIP implementations to validate the protocol conformance of those products and meet market requirements for secure, plug-and-play storage solutions. And Eric Hibbard, Chair of the SNIA Security Technical Work Group and CTO Security and Privacy, HDS Corporation, will participate in the “Can I Get a Witness? Technical Witness Bootcamp” session on February 17.
The following week, February 21-23, join SNIA at Container World in Santa Clara CA. Enabling access to memory is an important concern to container designers, and Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group Co-Chair from SMART Modular, will speak on Boosting Performance of Data Intensive Applications via Persistent Memory. Integrating containers into legacy solutions will be a focus of a panel where Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair from Toshiba, will speak on Container Adoption Paths into Legacy Infrastructure. SNIA experts will be joined by other leaders in the container ecosystem like Docker, Twitter, ADP, Google, and Expedia . The SNIA booth will feature cloud infrastructure and storage discussions and a demonstration of a multi-vendor persistent memory solution featuring NVDIMM! (P.S. – Are you new to containers? Get a head start on conference discussions by checking out a December 2016 SNIA blog on Containers, Docker, and Storage.)
Closing out February, find SNIA at their booth at USENIX FAST from February 27-March 2 in Santa Clara, CA, where you can engage with SNIA Technical Council leaders on the latest activities in file and storage technologies.
We look forward to seeing you at one (or more) of these events!
SNIA Puts the You in YouTube
Did you know that SNIA has a YouTube Channel? SNIAVideo is the place designed for You to visit for the latest technical and educational content – all free to download – from SNIA thought leaders and events. 
Our latest videos cover a wide range of topics discussed at last month’s SNIA Storage Developer Conference. Enjoy The Ride Cast video playlist where industry expert Marc Farley (@GoFarley) motors around Silicon Valley with SNIA member volunteers Richelle Ahlvers(@rahlvers), Stephen Bates (@stepbates), Mark Carlson(@macsun), and storage and solid state technology analysts Tom Coughlin (@ThomasaCoughlin), and Jim Handy chatting about persistent memory, SNIA Swordfish, NVMe, storage end users, and more. You’ll also want to check out onsite interviews from Kinetic open storage project participants Seagate, Scality, and Open vStorage on their experiences at an SDC solutions plugfest.
Featured on the SNIAVideo YouTube Channel are SNIA thought leaders weighing in on the trends and activities that will revolutionize enterprise data centers and consumer applications over the next decade. New ways to unify the management of storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud environments; an ecosystem driving system memory and storage into a single, unified “persistent memory” entity; and how security is being managed at enterprises today are just a few of the topics covered by speakers from Microsoft, Intel, Toshiba, Cryptsoft, and more.
Bookmark our site and return often for fresh, new content on how SNIA helps You understand and solve the thorny storage issues facing your career and your organization.
The Changing World of SNIA Technical Work – A Conversation with Technical Council Chair Mark Carlson
Mark Carlson is the current Chair of the SNIA Technical Council (TC). Mark has been a SNIA member and volunteer for over 18 years, and also wears many other SNIA hats. Recently, SNIA on Storage sat down with Mark to discuss his first nine months as the TC Chair and his views on the industry.
SNIA on Storage (SoS): Within SNIA, what is the most important activity of the SNIA Technical Council?
Mark Carlson (MC): The SNIA Technical Council works to coordinate and approve the technical work going on within SNIA. This includes both SNIA Architecture (standards) and SNIA Software. The work is conducted within 13 SNIA Technical Work Groups (TWGs). The members of the TC are elected from the voting companies of SNIA, and the Council also includes appointed members and advisors as well as SNIA regional affiliate advisors. 
SoS: What has been your focus this first nine months of 2016?
MC: The SNIA Technical Council has overseen a major effort to integrate a new standard organization into SNIA. The creation of the new SNIA SFF Technology Affiliate (TA) Technical Work Group has brought in a very successful group of folks and standards related to storage connectors and transceivers. This work group, formed in June 2016, carries forth the longstanding SFF Committee work efforts that has operated since 1990 until mid-2016. In 2016, SFF Committee leaders transitioned the organizational stewardship to SNIA, to operate under a special membership class named Technology Affiliate, while retaining the long standing technical focus on specifications in a similar fashion as all SNIA TWGs do.
SoS: What changes did SNIA implement to form the new Technology Affiliate membership class and why?
MC: The SNIA Policy and Procedures were changed to account for this new type of membership. Companies can now join an Affiliate TWG without having to join SNIA as a US member. Current SNIA members who want to participate in a Technology Affiliate like SFF can join a Technology Affiliate and pay the separate dues. The SFF was a catalyst – we saw an organization looking for a new home as its membership evolved and its leadership transitioned. They felt SNIA could be this home but we needed to complete some activities to make it easier for them to seamlessly continue their work. The SFF is now fully active within SNIA and also working closely with T10 and T11, groups that SNIA members have long participated in.
SoS: Is forming this Technology Affiliate a one-time activity?
MC: Definitely not. The SNIA is actively seeking organizations who are looking for a structure that SNIA provides with IP policies, established infrastructure to conduct their work, and 160+ leading companies with volunteers who know storage and networking technology.
SoC: What are some of the customer pain points you see in the industry?
MC: Critical pain points the TC has started to address with new TWGs over the last 24 months include: performance of solid state storage arrays, where the SNIA Solid State Storage Systems (S4) TWG is working to identify, develop, and coordinate system performance standards for solid state storage systems; and object drives, where work is being done by the Object Drive TWG to identify, develop, and coordinate standards for object drives operating as storage nodes in scale out storage solutions. With the number of different future disk drive interfaces emerging that add value from external storage to in-storage compute, we want to make sure they can be managed at scale and are interoperable.
SoS: What’s upcoming for the next six months?
MC: The TC is currently working on a white paper to address data center drive requirements and the features and existing interface standards that satisfy some of those requirements. Of course, not all the solutions to these requirements will come from SNIA, but we think SNIA is in a unique position to bring in the data center customers that need these new features and work with the drive vendors to prototype solutions that then make their way into other standards efforts. Features that are targeted at the NVM Express, T10, and T13 committees would be coordinated with these customers.
SoS: Can non-members get involved with SNIA?
MC: Until very recently, if a company wanted to contribute to a software project within SNIA, they had to become a member. This was limiting to the community, and cut off contributions from those who were using the code, so SNIA has developed a convenient Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for contributions to individual projects. This allows external contributions but does not change the software licensing. The CLA is compatible with the IP protections that the SNIA IP Policy provides to our members. Our hope is that this will create a broader community of contributors to a more open SNIA, and facilitate open source project development even more.
SoS: Will you be onsite for the upcoming SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC)?
MC: Absolutely! I look forward to meeting SNIA members and colleagues September 19-22 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. We have a great agenda, now online, that the TC has developed for this, our 18th conference, and registration is now open. SDC brings in more than 400 of the leading storage software and hardware developers, storage product and solution architects, product managers, storage product quality assurance engineers, product line CTOs, storage product customer support engineers, and in–house IT development staff from around the world. If technical professionals are not familiar with the education and knowledge that SDC can provide, a great way to get a taste is to check out the SDC Podcasts now posted, and the new ones that will appear leading up to SDC 2016.
Hitachi Data Systems’ Hu Yoshida Featured in Keynote at SNIA Annual Members Symposium
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Annual Members Symposium is a must attend event for both SNIA members and interested colleagues. Held at the Westin San Jose in San Jose California from January 19-22, 2016, the Symposium offers four full days of collaboration, networking, and knowledge about the latest advances in cloud storage, Ethernet storage, solid state storage, storage management, green computing, and more. Register and learn more at http://www.snia.org/events/symp.
A highlight of every SNIA Symposium are keynotes from leaders in the industry, and 2016 is no exception. Whether you are a SNIA member, or thinking about 
SNIA membership, you are invited to attend a very special keynote presented on January 19 at 8:45 am on IT Trends that Matter in 2016, presented by Mr. Hubert Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems. Mr. Yoshida will comment on how innovative technology companies that quickly capitalize on business opportunities and satisfy the demands of today’s empowered consumer have caused a wave of disruption. In 2016, businesses will turn to IT for solutions that will keep them competitive. Chief Information Officers will invest in faster delivery of applications and analytics, and transform IT by leveraging the third platform, social, mobile, analytics, and cloud. Mr. Yoshida will advise on how to avoid distractions and remain focused on the IT trends that matter in 2016.
Hubert Yoshida is responsible for defining the technical direction of Hitachi Data Systems. Currently, he leads the company’s effort to help customers address data life cycle requirements and resolve compliance, governance and operational risk issues. He was instrumental in evangelizing the unique Hitachi approach to storage virtualization, which leveraged existing storage services within Hitachi Universal Storage Platform® and extended it to externally-attached, heterogeneous storage systems.
Mr. Yoshida is well-known within the storage industry, and his blog has ranked among the “top 10 most influential” within the storage industry as evaluated by Network World. In October of 2006, Byte and Switch named him one of Storage Networking’s Heaviest Hitters and in 2013 he was named one of the “Ten Most Impactful Tech Leaders” by Information Week.
Hitachi Data Systems is a valued member of SNIA. Currently, Thomas Rivera, Technical Associate – File, Content & Cloud Solutions at Hitachi Data Systems, serves as the Secretary of the SNIA Board of Directors.
For the full agenda of activities and events at the SNIA Symposium visit http://www.snia.org/events/symp.
Embrace the Cloud at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference With These Top-Notch Speakers and Sessions!
For the next two weeks, SNIA on Storage will highlight exciting interest areas in the 2015 SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) agenda. If you have not registered, you need to! Visit www.storagedeveloper.org to see the four day overview and sign up.
Cloud storage is hot, and whether you are new to the cloud or an experienced developer, SDC has a great lineup of speakers and sessions. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.
If you are just dipping your toes into cloud technology, you will want to check out the SDC Pre-Conference Primer on Sunday September 20. These sessions are included with full conference registration.
Here, SNIA Cloud Storage TWG Co-Chairs, David Slik and Mark Carlson, will explain all you Need to Know on Cloud Storage. You will come up to speed on the concepts, conventions, and standards in this space, and even see a live demo of an operating storage cloud. And Brian Mason, MTS-SW at NetApp, will review how to use REST API for Management Integration and how developers can use their best in class management tools and have various storage systems integrate into their management tools.
At the SDC Conference, the Cloud track kicks off with David Slik, SNIA Cloud Storage TWG Co-Chair and Technical Director at NetApp, discussing how to Use SNIA’s Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) to Manage Swift, S3, and Ceph Object Repositories, and how the use of CDMI as a management protocol adds value to multi-protocol systems.
Yong Chen, Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University will speak on Unistore: A Unified Storage Architecture for Cloud Computing. He will introduce an ongoing effort from Texas Tech University and Nimboxx Inc. to build an innovative unified storage architecture (Unistore) with the co-existence and efficient integration of heterogeneous HDD and SCM devices for Cloud storage.
Luke Behnke, VP of Products at Bitcasa will present The Developer’s Dilemma: Do-It-Yourself Storage or Surrender Your Data? He’ll discuss the choice between DIY or cloud storage APIs, and how this will impact future functionality and user experience.
Sachin Goswami, Solution Architect and Storage COE Head Hi Tech, Tata Consultancy Services ((TCS), will explain How to Test CDMI Extension Features Like LTFS, Data Deduplication, and OVF, Partial – Value Copy Functionality: Challenges, Solutions and Best Practices, sharing the approach TCS will adopt to overcome the challenges in testing of LTFS integration with CDMI, Data Deduplication, partial upload on Server and Open Vitalization format (OVF) of CDMI and Non-CDMI based scenarios of the cloud.
Speaking of the CDMI standard, join the Cloud Plugfest at SDC starting on September 21st to learn more about the CDMI Conformance Test Program and test your application for CDMI conformance.
And you won’t want to miss the Birds-Of-a-Feather (BOF) Sessions on Cloud! The first is on Tuesday evening, September 22, on Getting Started with the CDMI Conformance Test Program! Come to this OPEN TO ALL Birds of a Feather session to learn what the CTP program entails, details on the testing service that is offered, and how to get the CTP process started.
On Wednesday evening, September 23, the Moving Data Protection to the Cloud: Trends, Challenges and Strategies BOF will discuss critical cloud data protection challenges, how to use the cloud for data protection, pros and cons of various cloud data protection strategies, experiences of others (good and bad) to avoid common pitfalls, and cloud standards in use – and why you need them! This BOF is open to all!
Register now at www.storagedeveloper.org. And stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog on Management topics at SDC!
SNIA’s Events Strategy Today and Tomorrow
David Dale, SNIA Chairman
Last month Computerworld/IDG and the SNIA posted a notice to the SNW website stating that they have decided to conclude the production of SNW. The contract was expiring and both parties declined to renew. The IT industry has changed significantly in the 15 years since SNW was first launched, and both parties felt that their individual interests would be best served by pursuing separate events strategies.
For the SNIA, events are a strategically important vehicle for fulfilling its mission of developing standards, maintaining an active ecosystem of storage industry experts, and providing vendor-neutral educational materials to enable IT professions to deal with and derive value from constant technology change. To address the first two categories, SNIA has a strong track record of producing Technical Symposia throughout the year, and the successful Storage Developer Conference in September.
To address the third category, IT professionals, SNIA has announced a new event, to be held in Santa Clara, CA, from April 22-24 – the Data Storage Innovation Conference. This event is targeted at IT decision-makers, technology implementers, and those expected to influence, implement and support data storage innovation as actual production solutions. See the press release and call for presentations for more information. We are excited to embark on developing this contemporary new event into an industry mainstay in the coming years.
Outside of the USA, events are also critically important vehicles for the autonomous SNIA Regional Affiliates to fulfill their mission. The audience there is typically more biased towards business executives and IT managers, and over the years their events have evolved to incorporate adjacent technology areas, new developments and regional requirements.
As an example of this evolution, SNIA Europe’s events partner, Angel Business Communications, recently announced that its very successful October event, SNW Europe/Datacenter Technologies/Virtualization World, will be simply known as Powering the Cloud starting in 2014, in order to unite the conference program and to be more clearly relevant to today’s IT industry. See the press release for more details.
Other Regional Affiliates have followed a similar path with events such as Implementing Information Infrastructure Summit and Information Infrastructure Conference – both tailored to meet regional needs.
The bottom line on this is that the SNIA is absolutely committed to a global events strategy to enable it to carry out its mission. We are excited about the evolution of our various events to meet the changing needs of the market and continue to deliver unique vendor-neutral content. IT professionals, partners, vendors and their customers around the globe can continue to rely on SNIA events to inform them about new technologies and developments and help them navigate the rapidly changing world of IT.