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: Events
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.
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.
Securing Fibre Channel Storage
by Eric Hibbard, SNIA Storage Security TWG Chair, and SNIA Storage Security TWG team members
Fibre Channel is often viewed as a specialized form of networking that lives within data centers and which neither has, or requires, special security protections. Neither of these assumptions is true, but finding the appropriate details to secure Fibre Channel infrastructure can be challenging.
The ISO/IEC 27040:2015 Information technology – Security techniques – Storage Security standard provides detailed technical guidance in securing storage systems and ecosystems. However, while the coverage of this standard is quite broad, it lacks details for certain important topics.
ISO/IEC 27040:2015 addresses storage security risks and threats at a high level. This blog is written in the context of Fibre Channel. The following list is a summary of the major threats that may confront Fibre Channel implementations and deployments.
- Storage Theft: Theft of storage media or storage devices can be used to access data as well as to deny legitimate use of the data.
- Sniffing Storage Traffic: Storage traffic on dedicated storage networks or shared networks can be sniffed via passive network taps or traffic monitoring revealing data, metadata, and storage protocol signaling. If the sniffed traffic includes authentication details, it may be possible for the attacker to replay9 (retransmit) this information in an attempt to escalate the attack.
- Network Disruption: Regardless of the underlying network technology, any software or congestion disruption to the network between the user and the storage system can degrade or disable storage.
- WWN Spoofing: An attacker gains access to a storage system in order to access/modify/deny data or metadata.
- Storage Masquerading: An attacker inserts a rogue storage device in order to access/modify/deny data or metadata supplied by a host.
- Corruption of Data: Accidental or intentional corruption of data can occur when the wrong hosts gain access to storage.
- Rogue Switch: An attacker inserts a rogue switch in order to perform reconnaissance on the fabric (e.g., configurations, policies, security parameters, etc.) or facilitate other attacks.
- Denial of Service (DoS): An attacker can disrupt, block or slow down access to data in a variety of ways by flooding storage networks with error messages or other approaches in an attempt to overload specific systems within the network.
A core element of Fibre Channel security is the ANSI INCITS 496-2012, Information Technology – Fibre Channel – Security Protocols – 2 (FC-SP-2) standard, which defines protocols to authenticate Fibre Channel entities, set up session encryption keys, negotiate parameters to ensure frame-by-frame integrity and confidentiality, and define and distribute policies across a Fibre Channel fabric. It is also worth noting that FC-SP-2 includes compliance elements, which is somewhat unique for FC standards.
Fibre Channel fabrics may be deployed across multiple, distantly separated sites, which make it critical that security services be available to assure consistent configurations and proper access controls.
A new whitepaper, one in a series from SNIA that addresses various elements of storage security, is intended to leverage the guidance in the ISO/IEC 27040 standard and enhance it with a specific focus on Fibre Channel (FC) security. To learn more about security and Fibre Channel, please visit www.snia.org/security and download the Storage Security: Fibre Channel Security whitepaper.
And mark your calendar for presentations and discussions on this important topic at the upcoming SNIA Data Storage Security Summit, September 22, 2016, at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara CA. Registration is complimentary – go to www. http://www.snia.org/dss-summit for details on how you can attend and get involved in the conversation.
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!
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.