For building and maintaining enterprise storage, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) has long served as the foundation by providing a serviceable slot architecture which contributes to high availability, high reliability and a high degree of serviceability and usability. Due to the forward and backward compatible nature of the technology, SAS preserves the logical SCSI command set which most enterprise middleware is derived from. That’s particularly significant for CIOs and IT managers in terms of investment protection.

The word Archiving often immediately brings to our mind an image of a passive, low-priority process of moving historical information to cold storage media. Traditionally, most organizations have used digital archiving software products mainly to ease the pain of staying compliant by automating the archiving process.

This Session will cover design considerations and traffic flow for the following 4 Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Design Scenarios:
1. Ethernet MLAG technologies with FCOE
2. FIP Snooping Bridges and their traffic flow and troubleshooting with FCOE
3. Multi-Hop FCOE with NPV
4. Multi-Hop FCOE with VE ports

In the face of rapidly increasing requirements for storage, IT initiatives driving virtualization across all aspects of the infrastructure, and cloud-enabling the environment, Data Center Managers face a fundamental task in figuring out how to integrate SAN environments over multi-vender and multi-protocol infrastructures. Learn about solutions that streamline the integration and cost effective expansion of heterogeneous SAN environments by enabling transparent connections to existing core infrastructures.

The SCSI Trade Association (STA) has accepted SCSI Express as a formal project and has taken ownership of refining, defining and marketing this data storage industry standard initiative. SCSI Express combines the rugged storage-centric SCSI interface with the low-latency features of PCIe to create a powerful new interface ideal for the high performance needs of solid state storage. These two technologies enable unprecedented performance gains while maintaining Enterprise attributes such as reliability, availability and serviceability to directly connected storage devices.

The SMB protocol has evolved over time from CIFS to SMB1 to SMB2, with implementations by dozens of vendors including most major Operating Systems and NAS solutions. The SMB 3.0 protocol, announced at the SNIA SDC Conference in September 2011, is expected to have its first commercial implementations by Microsoft, NetApp and EMC by the end of 2012 (and potentially more later). This SNIA Tutorial describes the basic architecture of the SMB protocol and basic operations, including connecting to a share, negotiating a dialect, executing operations and disconnecting from a share.

Solid State Disks (SSD) have become a “must have” storage technology. SSD performance cannot be equaled by spinning disk. However, rapid adoption is hampered by higher costs and longevity concerns. Data deduplication is the “change agent” that closes the gap between SSDs and spinning disks. Data deduplication rates of 5-35x dramatically reduces SSD effective cost making that issue so close that it’s no longer significant.

Computer architects dream of storage devices for their applications/workloads which can provide very high IOPs at minimal cost (IOPS/$/GB) using infinite cheap storage and instant access (low latency) Enterprise-Ready SSDs ©IMEX have started to fulfill that promise, segmented into SATA and PCIe based Hybrid Storage products.

Is Social Media, with all its possibilities – and pitfalls – a good match for your organization? Are you weighing the pros and cons of integrating social media, and how to propose an implementation strategy – if at all? In this lively and interactive SNIA Professional Development tutorial, learn about the strengths and shortcomings of popular social media tools and where they might fit in to your professional development, and that of your organization.

Many organizations face the challenge of implementing protection and data security measures to meet a wide range of requirements, including statutory and regulatory compliance. Too often the security associated with storage systems and infrastructure has been missed because of misconceptions and limited familiarity with the storage technology, or in the case of storage managers and administrators, a limited understanding of the inherent risks or basic security concepts.