by George Ericson, Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC; Member,
SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group,
@GEricson
Introduction
This blog is part two of a three-part series by George Ericson, a distinguished engineer at Dell EMC. If you missed part one, you can read it here. George is an active participant on the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group which has been developing the SNIA Swordfish™ storage management specification.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
Whether you’ve recently mastered the basics, or are a storage technology expert, letting the industry know you are credentialed can (and probably should) be part of your career development process. SNIA’s Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP) provides a strong foundation of vendor-neutral, systems-level credentials that integrate with and complement individual vendor certifications. SNCP’s three knowledge “domains” – Concepts – Standards, and Solutions – each provide a standard by which your knowledge and skill set can be assessed on a consistent, industry-wide basis without any vendor specializations.
Many storage professionals choose to begin with the SNIA Storage Foundations Certification, according to Michael Meleedy, SNIA’s Director of Education. “The SNIA Foundations Exam (S10-110), newly revised to integrate new technologies and industry practices, is the entry-level exam within the SNIA Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP),” Meleedy explained. “It has been widely accepted by the storage industry as the benchmark for basic vendor-neutral storage credentials. In fact, vendors like Dell require this certification.”
Try the Practice Exam!
We recommend considering Spring as the best time to test your skills – and a NEW SNIA Storage Foundations Certification Practice exam makes it very easy. This practice exam is short (easy to squeeze into your busy day) and the sample of questions from the real exam will help you quickly determine if you have the skills required to pass the industry’s only vendor-neutral certification exam. It’s open to everyone free of charge with the results available immediately. Take the practice exam.
Why Should I Explore the SNCP?
Professionals often wonder about the real value of IT related certifications. Is it worth your time and money to become certified? “Yes, especially in today’s global marketplace,” said Paul Talbut, SNIA Global Education and Regional Affiliate Program Director. “SNIA certifications provide storage and data management practitioners worldwide with an industry recognised uniform standard by which individual knowledge and skill-sets can be judged. We’re reaching a variety of professional audiences; for example, SNIA’s Foundations Exam is available both in English and Japanese, and is offered at all Prometric testing centers worldwide.”
Learn more about the new SNIA Foundations exam (S10–110) and study materials, the entire range of SNIA Certification Testing, and the six good reasons why you should be SNIA certified! Visit http://www.snia.org/education/certification.
by Marty Foltyn
SNIA is pleased to present seven of their series of SNIA Tutorials at the 14th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies (USENIX FAST) on February 24, 2016 in Santa Clara, CA. 
SNIA Tutorials are educational materials developed by vendors, training companies, analysts, consultants, and end-users in the storage and information technology industry. SNIA tutorials are presented and used throughout the world at SNIA events and international conferences.
Utilizing VDBench to Perform IDC AFA Testing will be presented by Michael Ault, Oracle Guru, IBM, Inc. This SNIA Tutorial provides procedures, scripts, and examples to perform the IDC test framework utilizing the free tool VDBench on AFAs to provide a common set of results for comparison of multiple AFAs suitability for cloud or other network based storage.
Practical Online Cache Analysis and Optimization will be presented by Carl Waldspurger, Research and Development, CloudPhysics, Inc., and Irfan Ahmad, CTO, CloudPhysics, Inc. After reviewing the history and evolution of MRC algorithms, this SNIA Tutorial examines new opportunities afforded by MRCs to capture valuable information about locality that can be leveraged to guide efficient cache sizing, allocation, and partitioning in order to support diverse goals such as improving performance, isolation, and quality of service.
SMB Remote File Protocol (Including SMB 3.x) will be presented by Tom Talpey, Architect, Microsoft. This SNIA Tutorial begins by describing the history and basic architecture of the SMB protocol and its operations. The second part of the tutorial covers the various versions of the SMB protocol, with details of improvements over time. The final part covers the latest changes in SMB3, and the resources available in support of its development by industry.
Object Drives: A New Architectural Partitioning will be presented by Mark Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards, Toshiba. This SNIA Tutorial discusses the current state and future prospects for object drives. Use cases and requirements will be examined and best practices will be described.
Fog Computing and Its Ecosystem will be presented by Ramin Elahi, Adjunct Faculty, UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley. This SNIA Tutorial introduces and describes Fog Computing and discusses how it supports emerging Internet of Everything (IoE) applications that demand real-time/predictable latency (industrial automation, transportation, networks of sensors and actuators).
Privacy vs. Data Protection: The Impact of EU Data Protection Legislation will be presented by Thomas Rivera, Senior Technical Associate, HDS. This SNIA Tutorial explores the new EU data protection legislation and highlights the elements that could have significant impacts on data handling practices.
Converged Storage Technology will be presented by Liang Ming, Research Engineer, Development and Research, Distributed Storage Field, Huawei. This SNIA Tutorial discusses the concept of key-value storage, next generation key-value converged storage solutions, and what has been done to promote the key-value standard.
Get Your Registration Discount
As a friend of SNIA, we are able to offer you a $75 discount on registration for the technical sessions. Use code75FAST15SNIA during registration to receive your discount.
FAST ’16 Program
FAST ’16 will kick off with their Keynote Address given by Eric Brewer, VP Infrastructure at Google, on “Spinning Disks and Their Cloudy Future”. In addition to the SNIA Industry Track, the 3-day technical sessions program also includes 27 refereed paper presentations.
The full program is available here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast16/glance