Tag: SNIA

Accelerating the Adoption of Next-Generation Storage Technologies

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Introduction to the Storage Networking Industry Association

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is the largest storage industry association in existence, and one of the largest in IT. It is comprised of over 170 leading industry organizations, and 2,500 contributing members that serve more than 50,000 IT and storage professionals worldwide.

During the nineties, the nascent storage networking field needed a strong voice to communicate the value of storage area networks (SANs) and the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. SNIA emerged in 1997 when a handful of storage experts realized that there was a need for a unified voice and vendor-neutral education on these emerging technologies to ensure that storage networks became feature complete, interoperable and trusted solutions across the IT landscape.

Since then, SNIA has earned a reputation for developing technologies that have emerged as industry standards. There standards relate to data, storage and information management, and address such challenges as interoperability, usability, complexity and security. Read More

Registration Now Open for Storage Developer Conference India – May 25-26 in Bangalore

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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

Managing Your Computing Ecosystem

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  By George Ericson, Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC; Member, SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group, @GEricson

Introduction

This blog is part one of a three-part series recently published on “The Data Cortex”, which represents the thoughts and opinions from members of the CTO Team of Dell EMC’s Data Protection Division.  The author, George Ericson, has been actively participating on the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group which has been developing the SNIA Swordfish™ storage management specification. Read More

SNIA Activities in Security, Containers, and File Storage on Tap at Three Bay Area Events

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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!

 

Recognize Volunteer Contributions – Nominations Open for the SNIA Individual and Group Recognition Program

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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.  Wayne Adams accepting award finalWith 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.  winners2Previous 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

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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. youtube channel

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.

you tube channel pictureBookmark 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.

Linear Tape File System Now an International Standard

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By David Pease, Co-Chair SNIA Linear Tape File System Technical Working Group

In 2011 the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) earned IBM an Engineering Emmy Award after being recognized by FOX Networks for “improving the ability of media companies to capture, manage and exploit content in digital form, fundamentally changing the way that audio and video content is managed and stored.”  Now, the International Standardization Organization (ISO) has named LTFS an International Standard (ISO/IEC 20919:2016).

LTFS’s road to standardization was a long one.  It started with IBM and the LTO (Linear Tape Open) Consortium jointly publishing the LTFS Format Specification as an open format in April, 2010, the day that LTFS was announced at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show in Las Vegas.  In 2012, at the invitation of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), we formed the SNIA LTFS Technical Work Group, with a specific goal of moving towards international standardization.  The LTFS TWG and SNIA proceeded to publish several revisions of the LTFS Format Specification, inviting all interested parties to join the work group and contribute, or to comment on the specification before formal publication.  In 2014 SNIA helped the LTFS TWG format the then-current version of the specification (V2.2) to ISO standards and worked with the ISO organization to publish the specification as a draft standard and solicit comments.  After review and comments, the LTFS Format Specification was approved by ISO as an international standard in April of 2016 (just 6 years after it was first announced).

We are thrilled by the recognition of LTFS as an ISO standard; it is one more step towards guaranteeing that the LTFS format is a truly open standard that will continue to be available and usable for the foreseeable future.  In my opinion, two of the major inhibitors to the widespread use of tape technology for data storage have been the lack of a standard format for data storage and interchange on tape, and its perceived difficulty of use. LTFS addresses both of these problems by providing a general-purpose, open format that can easily be used like any other storage medium.

As the world’s data continues to grow at an increasing pace, and the need for affordable, large-scale storage becomes more important, the standardization of LTFS will make the use of tape for long-term, affordable storage easier and more attractive.

Use Case: Making Digital Media Storage Open and Future-Proof

Just as in personal photography, the last couple of decades have seen a major shift from analog and film technologies to digital ones in the Media and Entertainment industry, where modern cameras record directly to digital media. This has led to the need for new technologies to replace traditional film as a long-term storage medium for television and movies.

Film has some specific advantages for the Media & Entertainment industry that a new technology needs to replicate, including long shelf life, inexpensive, and zero-power storage, and a format that is “future-proof.” Tape storage is a perfect match to several of these criteria, including long (30+ years) shelf life, and zero-power, inexpensive storage. However, a stumbling block for the wide-spread acceptance of tape for digital storage in the media and entertainment business had been the lack of an open, easy-to-use, future-proof standard for the format of the data on tape. You can imagine an entertainment company using proprietary storage software, for example, only to run into problems like the provider going out of business or increasing its software costs to an unacceptable level.

We created LTFS to be an open and future-proof format from the beginning: open, because when we published the format, we made it publicly available at no charge, and future-proof because the format is self-documenting and can be easily accessed without the need for proprietary software.

Being an international standard should make anyone who is considering the use of LTFS even more comfortable with the fact that it is an open standard that is not owned or controlled by any single company, and is a format that will continue to be supported in the future.  As such, becoming an international standard has the potential to increase the use, and therefore the value, of LTFS across industries.

For more information about the work of the SNIA LTFS TWG, please visit www.snia.org/ltfs.

Podcasts Bring the Sounds of SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference to Your Car, Boat, Train, or Plane!

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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 yousdc podcast pic 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!

Curious about Your Storage Knowledge? It’s a Quick “Test” with SNIA Storage Foundations Certification Practice Exam

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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.Education_continuum_new_resize

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.

Meet Michael Oros – SNIA’s New Executive Director

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Michael-Oros-resize120x149SNIA is pleased to announce the appointment of its new Executive Director, Michael Oros. A 20-year industry veteran, Michael comes to SNIA from Intel where he was instrumental in overseeing a wide range of strategic industry initiatives, and for the development and deployment of storage, backup, and disaster recovery services. He also led the formation of the Open Data Center Alliance and with the Board of Directors, established the organization’s presence and reach across six continents, with world leading members accelerating cloud adoption and transformation of the IT landscape.

David Dale, SNIA Chairman, recently sat down with Michael to discuss his vision for the future of SNIA.

Dale: Michael, welcome to SNIA. We’re excited to have you on board.

Oros: Thank you David. I am honored and thrilled to be here! These are exciting times for the storage industry, and I strongly believe SNIA and the member companies are poised to be at the center of this transformation.

Dale: How long have you been involved with SNIA?

Oros: I’ve been involved with SNIA indirectly since 2000, when fibre channel interoperability was an industry challenge that I had to address for Intel’s managed storage service offerings. Since 2004, I have participated more directly starting with my first SNW event in Phoenix.

Dale: What attracted you to the Executive Director position and what excites you the most about SNIA? 

Oros: The opportunity to lead, facilitate and be part of the storage industry transformation. The great people that make up the storage industry – an amazing SNIA Board of Directors that’s passionate and cares deeply, great staff and incredible volunteers; these were key attributes that I personally value and sought out.

Dale: What are the major changes forthcoming in the storage industry that SNIA needs to be actively involved with?

Oros: The flurry of M&A activity over the past couple years has already changed the storage industry landscape, and we can expect to see over the next couple years the impact and innovation coming out from these mergers/acquisitions. SNIA needs to be nimble; continue to deliver value through standards and initiatives that are of high importance and relevancy to the storage industry and the implementers/consumers of enterprise storage technologies: enterprise IT, cloud service providers and hyperscalers. 

Dale: What do you think the impact of the 3rd Platform will be to the industry?

Oros: Huge! The analyst terminology referring to the third computing platform that encompasses mobile, social, cloud computing, and Internet of Things, is driving an increase in both storage demand and efficiency. As billions of users/devices and millions of apps interact on this “3rd Platform”, IT organizations have to change how they do business and manage this exponential increase in assets, data they are generating and its security. The storage industry and vendors have to innovate and deliver solutions that are lower touch to deploy and manage, more flexible and adaptable to an array of applications and security requirements.

Dale: What do you see as SNIA’s top goals for 2016? 

Oros: Continue to be relevant in our work to the industry and our member companies, execute on the technology specifications, and grow the organization.

Dale: One week in the role, what are your initial thoughts and plans?

Oros: First, a big thank you to everyone for their help and support as I’ve come on board! I’ve started working with the team to ensure the member companies have the best resources and tools available to collaborate on technology specifications and initiatives – myself and all SNIA staff are here to support our members and delight our wonderful industry volunteers. Business development and outreach will see an increase in activity. And marketing programs are being planned in addition to our events, to promote loudly and with clarity the vital work SNIA and member companies are doing!

To learn more, read the official SNIA press release.