We hope you’ve been following the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) “Great Storage Debates” webcast series. We’ve done four so far and they have been incredibly popular with 4,000 live and on-demand views to date and counting. Check out the links to all of them at the end of this blog. Although we have “versus” in the title of these presentations, the goal of this series is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide a “compare and contrast” that educates attendees on how the technologies work, the advantages of each, and to explore common use cases. That’s exactly what we plan to do on September 11, 2018 when we host “Centralized vs. Distributed Storage.” In the history of enterprise storage there has been a trend to move from local storage to centralized, networked storage. Customers found that networked storage provided higher utilization, centralized and hence cheaper management, easier failover, and simplified data protection amongst many advantages, which drove the move to FC-SAN, iSCSI, NAS and object storage. Recently, however, distributed storage has become more popular where storage lives in multiple locations, but can still be shared over a LAN (Local Area Network) and/or WAN (Wide Area Network). The advantages of distributed storage include the ability to scale out capacity. Conversely, in the hyperconverged use case, enterprises can use each node for both compute and storage, and scale-up as more resources are needed. What does this all mean? Register for this live webcast to find out, where my ESF colleagues and I will discuss:
  • Pros and cons of centralized vs. distributed storage
  • Typical use cases for centralized and distributed storage
  • How SAN, NAS, parallel file systems, and object storage fit in these different environments
  • How hyperconverged has introduced a new way of consuming storage
It’s sure to be another un-biased, vendor-neutral look at a storage topic many are debating within their own organizations. I hope you’ll join us on September 11th. In the meantime, I encourage you to watch our on-demand debates: Learn about the work SNIA is doing to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards, and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement, and security of information by visiting snia.org.