Hyperscaler Storage Takes Front Stage

Last month, Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair, spoke on Hyperscaler storage before a panel of independent bloggers, speakers and other social media tech influencers at Storage Field Day #SFD12.
 
The session generated a lot of interesting discussions among the delegate panel and created a buzz on social media. Check out Mark’s presentation on YouTube to learn more about this disruptive trend and hear how the industry can respond to the technical requirements to promote adoption and standards for Hyperscaler storage.

Congratulations to Inspur for SMI-S Conformance

CIO Gives SNIA Certification A Top Ranking

CIO has ranked SNIA certifications among the “Top 7 Storage Certifications for IT Pros,” stating that those who earn SNIA certifications  “…join an elite group of storage networking professionals at the top of their games.”
 
Exams are now offered at more than 900 Kryterion testing centers. Learn how you can take part in the SNIA Storage Networking Certification Program.  

Rockin’ and Rollin’ with SMB3
April 5, 2017
Ned Pyle, Microsoft
John Kim, Mellanox
 
Server Message Block (SMB) is the core file-transfer protocol of Windows, MacOS and Samba, and has become widely deployed. The latest iteration of SMB3 is almost unrecognizable when compared to versions only a few years old. Extensive reengineering has led to advanced capabilities that include multichannel, transparent failover, scale out, and encryption. SMB Direct makes use of RDMA networking, creates block transport system and provides reliable transport to zetabytes of unstructured data worldwide.  Hear Microsoft’s Ned Pyle, Program Manager of the SMB protocol, discuss the current state of SMB.
 
Architectural Principles for Networked Solid State Storage Access - Part 2
April 19, 2017
Doug Voigt, HPE
J Metz, Cisco
 
New solid state storage technologies are forcing the industry to refine distinctions between networks and other types of system interconnects. The question on everyone’s mind is, when is it beneficial to use networks to access solid state storage, particularly persistent memory? The answer to this question involves application, interconnect, memory technology and scalability factors that can be analyzed in the context of a latency budget. This webcast will explore latency budgets for various types of solid state storage access. These can be used to determine which combinations of interconnects, technologies and scales are compatible with Load/Store instruction access and which are better suited to IO completion techniques such as polling or blocking.
 
Need a foundation on this topic? Check out Part 1 of this webcast series, “Architectural Principles for Networked Solid State Storage Access.”
 
IP-Based Object Drives Now Have a Management Standard
April 20, 2017
Erik Riedel, Dell EMC
Enrico Signoretti, OpenIO
David Slik, NetApp
Alex McDonald, NetApp
 
The growing popularity of object-based storage has resulted in the development of Ethernet-connected storage devices, herein referred to as IP-Based Drives and subsystems supporting object interfaces and in some cases the ability to run localized applications. Typical scale-out storage nodes consist of relatively inexpensive enclosures with IP network connectivity, CPU, Memory and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). While inexpensive to deploy, these solutions become harder to manage over time. To ease management of these drives, SNIA has approved the release of the IP-Based Drive Management Specification. In this webcast, you’ll hear from authors of the specification who’ll discuss how this standard allows drive management to scale to data centers and beyond, enabling automation and software defined data centers.
 
How Many IOPS? Users Share Their 2017 Storage Performance Needs
May 3, 2107
Jim Handy, Objective Analysis
Tom Coughlin, Coughlin Associates
 
Modern storage systems offer a dizzying range of IOPS (from hundreds to millions), as well as different latencies and storage capacities. Many IT managers find it difficult to determine which SSD or flash array to buy for their needs, or even whether they can get the speed they need from standard HDDs. This webcast will present results from a 2012 and follow-up 2016 survey of IT professionals to understand performance, capacity, and cost requirements, including IOPS, storage capacity, and latency, of various applications.
 
Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask: Getting from Here to There - Sepia Pod
May 9, 2017
Chad Hintz, Cisco
Fred Zhang, Intel
John Kim, Mellanox
Alex McDonald, NetApp
 
The Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask series continues! This webcast will take a look at some of the terms and concepts that affect Storage Architectures as a whole. In particular, we’ll be looking at those aspects that can help or hinder storage systems inside the network: Encapsulation vs. Tunneling, IOPS vs. Latency vs. Jitter, and Quality of Service, as each of these topics has a profound impact on storage designs and performance, but they are often misunderstood.

SPDK - Building Blocks for Scalable, High Performance Storage Application 
By Benjamin Walker, Software Engineer, Intel Corporation