Tag: Storage

Wish You Knew More About Storage? Geek Out with SNIA

Diane Marsili Leave a comment

Are you a storage geek at heart? Or perhaps an aspiring one? Here’s your chance to “Geek Out” on all the storage basics. Whether you need a refresh on a foundational storage technology or want a 101 lesson on something new, SNIA has you covered.

Visit our “Geek Out on Storage” page for a unique lesson on storage basics. We call it “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask.” Here you’ll find videos that clearly define and explain storage terminology and technologies.

Read More

Managing Your Computing Ecosystem

khauser Leave a comment

  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

khauser Leave a comment

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!

 

Linear Tape File System Now an International Standard

khauser Leave a comment

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!

khauser Leave a comment

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!

SNIA Tutorials Highlight Industry Track at USENIX FAST ’16

khauser Leave a comment

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.  fast16_button_180_0

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

 

Hitachi Data Systems’ Hu Yoshida Featured in Keynote at SNIA Annual Members Symposium

khauser Leave a comment

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 hubert-yoshidaSNIA 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.

SNIA’s Events Strategy Today and Tomorrow

khauser Leave a comment

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.