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: Developer
Storage Training Your Way – Education for 21st Century Professional Development
By Paul Talbut, SNIA Global Education and Regional Affiliate Program Director
It is widely accepted that those who are considered knowledge workers (those who use a screen or the internet as a part of their daily work routine) face constant disruption and distractions. The constant flow of emails, online news feeds, social media, and personal interests tend to draw people away from the need to concentrate on the job at hand.
Recent studies suggest that workers are interrupted on average every five minutes, ironically often by work applications or collaboration tools. If this is happening to the work function, then it is not surprising that the opportunity to undergo training or personal development, where focus and concentration without distraction is key to learning, is severely restricted. The same studies suggest that around 1% of the working week is all that workers have to devote to focus on training and development.
This has led to a dramatic shift in the way people consume their training content. It is no longer practical or cost effective to lock people away in a training room for five days. Any such educational value is now much more likely to be absorbed on the train or the bus on the way to work, and so the nature of the content delivery has to change.
Educational content needs to be delivered in modules and in a variety of formats to match the plethora of personal devices and platforms available today. Even without the formality of instructional design and a comprehensive curriculum, content such as podcasts, webcasts, and training materials need to be accessible on the move and in such bite-size chunks that we can give people the information they need and make it available at the times that suit them best.
SNIA is changing the way study guides and materials are made available to our constituents by collaborating with our members and training partners to focus on a wide variety of educational channels. Materials and study guides are now available via e-book, PDF, YouTube, BrightTALK webcasts, podcasts, and online instructor led courses.
The challenge now is to make the content compelling and attractive enough to compete with all the other digital content available for consumption, and provide the opportunity to learn something new about storage rather than watching ice-buckets, mannequins or the latest cute cat.
To date, SNIA has certified over 12,000 storage professionals worldwide, and our vendor-neutral certification program continues to be the industry leader in the independent assessment of storage technology skills.
Recognize Volunteer Contributions – Nominations Open for the SNIA Individual and Group Recognition Program
Each year, at the Annual Members Symposium, SNIA members recognize their own – volunteers and organizations who have dedicated expertise and time to contribute to the important work done by SNIA technical work groups, committees, and initiatives. SNIA recognizes with a “Volunteer of the Year” award an individual contributor who has stepped up to help SNIA achieve new and groundbreaking work or significantly advanced an existing program. Past winners have included Mark Carlson of Toshiba, Jim Ryan of Intel, and Alex McDonald of NetApp. 
With the Exceptional Leadership award, SNIA recognizes an individual who has advanced a cause for SNIA leading to an impact on the industry or the Association. Past winners have included Wayne Adams of EMC, Eric Hibbard of Hitachi, and Paul von Behren of Intel. SNIA also recognizes unsung heroes who work tirelessly under the radar expecting no attention but who in fact probably deserve more than the rest, and new contributors of the year who begin work in new areas.
SNIA also recognizes groups with several awards, including outstanding achievement of a SNIA Technology Community, significant contribution by a SNIA Committee or Regional Affiliate, significant impact by a previously existing SNIA Technical Work Group or Task Force, and contributions by new SNIA groups. 
Previous recipients have been acknowledged for their work in Persistent Memory, Solid State Storage, Storage Management, and Object Drives, and with SNIA India and the SNIA Global Steering Committee. A list of all individuals and groups recognized since 2008 can be found at http://www.snia.org/about/awards.
Also at the Annual Members Symposium, SNIA honors Deborah Kay Johnson, a SNIA member whose volunteer dedication to educating the industry on technology left a lasting impact, with the Deborah Kay Johnson Memorial Award. Past winners of this award for their outstanding contributions to education include Charles Tasse, Dell; Nancy Clay, SNIA; and David Deming, Solution Technology; all recipients are listed at http://www.snia.org/about/awards/dkj.
It’s time for the 2016 awards, and SNIA encourages all members to enter their nominations for both individual and group categories. The window to submit is open until December 9 and your selections can be made at this link. Awards will be announced during the SNIA Annual Members Symposium, January 17-20, 2017, at the Westin San Jose. Register here to attend the Symposium and view the agenda.
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.
Podcasts Bring the Sounds of SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference to Your Car, Boat, Train, or Plane!
SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference (SDC) offers exactly what a developer of cloud, solid state, security, analytics, or big data applications is looking for – rich technical content delivered in a no-vendor bias manner by today’s leading technologists. The 2016 SDC agenda is being compiled, but now you
can get a “sound bite” of what to expect by downloading SDC podcasts via iTunes, or visiting the SDC Podcast site at http://www.snia.org/podcasts to download the accompanying slides and/or listen to the MP3 version.
Each podcast has been selected by the SNIA Technical Council from the 2015 SDC event, and include topics like:
- Preparing Applications for Persistent Memory from Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Managing the Next Generation Memory Subsystem from Intel Corporation
- NVDIMM Cookbook – a Soup to Nuts Primer on Using NVDIMMs to Improve Your Storage Performance from AgigA Tech and Smart Modular Systems
- Standardizing Storage Intelligence and the Performance and Endurance Enhancements It Provides from Samsung Corporation
- Object Drives, a New Architectural Partitioning from Toshiba Corporation
- Shingled Magnetic Recording- the Next Generation of Storage Technology from HGST, a Western Digital Company
- SMB 3.1.1 Update from Microsoft
Eight podcasts are now available, with new ones added each week all the way up to SDC 2016 which begins September 19 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. Keep checking the SDC Podcast website, and remember that registration is now open for the 2016 event at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer/registration. The SDC conference agenda will be up soon at the home page of http://www.storagedeveloper.org.
Enjoy these great technical sessions, no matter where you may be!
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.
Security is Strategic to Storage Developers – and a Prime Focus at SDC and SNIA Data Storage Security Summit
Posted by Marty Foltyn
Security is critical in the storage development process – and a prime focus of sessions at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference AND the co-located SNIA Data Storage Security Summit on Thursday September 24. Admission to the Summit is complimentary – register here at http://www.snia.org/dss-summit.![DataStorageSecuritySummitlogo200x199[1]](https://sniablog.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/DataStorageSecuritySummitlogo200x1991.png)
The Summit agenda is packed with luminaries in the field of storage security, including keynotes from Eric Hibbard (SNIA Security Technical Work Group and Hitachi), Robert Thibadeau (Bright Plaza), Tony Cox (SNIA Storage Security Industry Forum and OASIS KMIP Technical Committee), Suzanne Widup (Verizon), Justin Corlett (Cryptsoft), and Steven Teppler (TimeCertain); and afternoon breakouts from Radia Perlman (EMC); Liz Townsend (Townsend Security); Bob Guimarin (Fornetix); and David Siles (Data Gravity). Roundtables will discuss current issues and future trends in storage security. Don’t miss this exciting event!
SDC’s “Security” sessions highlight security issues and strategies for mobile, cloud, user identity, attack prevention, key management, and encryption. Preview sessions here, and click on the title to find more details.
Geoff Gentry, Regional Director, Independent Security Evaluators Hackers, will present Attack Anatomy and Security Trends, offering practical experience from implementing the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) and from deploying and interoperability testing multiple vendor implementations of KMIP .
David Slik, Technical Director, Object Storage, NetApp will discuss Mobile and Secure: Cloud Encrypted Objects Using CDMI, introducing the Cloud Encrypted Object Extension to the CDMI standard, which permits encrypted objects to be stored, retrieved, and transferred between clouds.
Dean Hildebrand, IBM Master Inventor and Manager | Cloud Storage Software and Sasikanth Eda, Software Engineer, IBM will present OpenStack Swift On File: User Identity For Cross Protocol Access Demystified. This session will detail the various issues and nuances associated with having common ID management across Swift object access and file access ,and present an approach to solve them without changes in core Swift code by leveraging powerful SWIFT middleware framework.
Tim Hudson, CTO and Technical Director, Cryptsoft will discuss Multi-Vendor Key Management with KMIP, offering practical experience from implementing the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) and from deploying and interoperability testing multiple vendor implementations of KMIP .
Nathaniel McCallum, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat will present Network Bound Encryption for Data-at-Rest Protection, describing Petera, an open source project which implements a new technique for binding encryption keys to a network.
Finally, check out SNIA on Storage previous blog entries on File Systems, Cloud, Management, New Thinking, and Disruptive Technologies. See the agenda and register now for SDC at http://www.storagedeveloper.org.
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.