Ever make a mistake configuring a storage array or wonder if you're maximizing the value of your virtualized environment? With all the different storage arrays and connectivity protocols available today, knowing best practices can help improve operational efficiency and ensure resilient operations. That's why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum is kicking off 2019 with a live webcast "Virtualization and Storage Networking Best Practices." In this webcast, Jason Massae from VMware and Cody Hosterman from Pure Storage will share insights and lessons learned as reported by VMware's storage global services by discussing:

• Common mistakes when setting up storage arrays
• Why iSCSI is the number one storage configuration problem
• Configuring adapters for iSCSI or iSER
• How to verify your PSP matches your array requirements
• NFS best practices
• How to maximize the value of your array and virtualization
• Troubleshooting recommendations

Register today to join us on January 17^th. Whether you've been configuring storage for VMs for years or just getting started, we think you will pick up some useful tips to optimize your storage networking infrastructure.

Ever make a mistake configuring a storage array or wonder if you’re maximizing the value of your virtualized environment? With all the different storage arrays and connectivity protocols available today, knowing best practices can help improve operational efficiency and ensure resilient operations. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum is kicking off 2019 with a live webcast “Virtualization and Storage Networking Best Practices.” In this webcast, Jason Massae from VMware and Cody Hosterman from Pure Storage will share insights and lessons learned as reported by VMware’s storage global services by discussing:

• Common mistakes when setting up storage arrays
• Why iSCSI is the number one storage configuration problem
• Configuring adapters for iSCSI or iSER
• How to verify your PSP matches your array requirements
• NFS best practices
• How to maximize the value of your array and virtualization
• Troubleshooting recommendations

Register today to join us on January 17^th. Whether you’ve been configuring storage for VMs for years or just getting started, we think you will pick up some useful tips to optimize your storage networking infrastructure.

Scale-out storage is increasingly popular for Cloud, High-Performance Computing, Machine Learning, and certain Enterprise applications. It offers the ability to grow both capacity and performance at the same time and to distribute I/O workloads across multiple machines. But unlike traditional local or scale-up storage, scale-out storage imposes different and more intense workloads on the network. Clients often access multiple storage servers simultaneously; data typically replicates or migrates from one storage node to another; and metadata or management servers must stay in sync with each other as well as communicating with clients. Due to these demands, traditional network architectures and speeds may not work well for scale-out storage, especially when it's based on flash. That's why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a live webcast "Networking Requirements for Scale-Out Storage" on November 14^th. I hope you will join my NSF colleagues and me to learn about:

• Scale-out storage solutions and what workloads they can address
• How your network may need to evolve to support scale-out storage
• Network considerations to ensure performance for demanding workloads
• Key considerations for all flash scale-out storage solutions

Register today. Our NSF experts will be on hand to answer your questions.

Scale-out storage is increasingly popular for Cloud, High-Performance Computing, Machine Learning, and certain Enterprise applications. It offers the ability to grow both capacity and performance at the same time and to distribute I/O workloads across multiple machines. But unlike traditional local or scale-up storage, scale-out storage imposes different and more intense workloads on the network. Clients often access multiple storage servers simultaneously; data typically replicates or migrates from one storage node to another; and metadata or management servers must stay in sync with each other as well as communicating with clients. Due to these demands, traditional network architectures and speeds may not work well for scale-out storage, especially when it’s based on flash. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a live webcast “Networking Requirements for Scale-Out Storage” on November 14^th. I hope you will join my NSF colleagues and me to learn about:

• Scale-out storage solutions and what workloads they can address
• How your network may need to evolve to support scale-out storage
• Network considerations to ensure performance for demanding workloads
• Key considerations for all flash scale-out storage solutions

Register today. Our NSF experts will be on hand to answer your questions.

At SNIA, we are dedicated to staying on top of storage trends and technologies to fulfill our mission as a globally recognized and trusted authority for storage leadership, standards, and technology expertise. For the last several years, the Ethernet Storage Forum has been working hard to provide high quality educational and informational material related to all kinds of storage.

From our "Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask" series, to the absolutely phenomenal (and required viewing) "Storage Performance Benchmarking" series to the "Great Storage Debates" series, we've produced dozens of hours of material.

Technologies have evolved and we've come to a point where there's a need to understand how these systems and architectures work – beyond just the type of wire that is used. Today, there are new systems that are bringing storage to completely new audiences. From scale-up to scale-out, from disaggregated to hyperconverged, RDMA, and NVMe-oF - there is more to storage networking than just your favorite transport. For example, when we talk about NVMe™ over Fabrics, the protocol is broader than just one way of accomplishing what you need. When we talk about virtualized environments, we need to examine the nature of the relationship between hypervisors and all kinds of networks. When we look at "Storage as a Service," we need to understand how we can create workable systems from all the tools at our disposal. Bigger Than Our Britches As I said, SNIA's Ethernet Storage Forum has been working to bring these new technologies to the forefront, so that you can see (and understand) the bigger picture. To that end, we realized that we needed to rethink the way that our charter worked, to be even more inclusive of technologies that were relevant to storage and networking. So... Introducing the Networking Storage Forum. In this group we're going to continue producing top-quality, vendor-neutral material related to storage networking solutions. We'll be talking about:

• Storage Protocols (iSCSI, FC, FCoE, NFS, SMB, NVMe-oF, etc.)
• Architectures (Hyperconvergence, Virtualization, Storage as a Service, etc.)
• Storage Best Practices
• New and developing technologies

... and more! Generally speaking, we'll continue to do the same great work that we've been doing, but now our name more accurately reflects the breadth of work that we do. We're excited to launch this new chapter of the Forum. If you work for a vendor, are a systems integrator, university or someone who manages storage, we welcome you to join the NSF. We are an active group that honestly has a lot of fun. If you're one of our loyal followers, we hope you will continue to keep track of what we're doing. And if you're new to this Forum, we encourage you to take advantage of the library of webcasts, white papers, and published articles that we have produced here. There's a wealth of un-biased, educational information there, we don't think you'll find anywhere else! If there's something that you'd like to hear about – let us know! We are always looking to hear about headaches, concerns, and areas of confusion within the industry where we can shed some light. Stay current with all things NSF:

• Visit: snia.org/nsf
• Follow: @SNIANSF
• Subscribe: sniansfblog_org_org.org
• Watch: SNIAVideo Network Storage Playlist

   

At SNIA, we are dedicated to staying on top of storage trends and technologies to fulfill our mission as a globally recognized and trusted authority for storage leadership, standards, and technology expertise. For the last several years, the Ethernet Storage Forum has been working hard to provide high quality educational and informational material related to all kinds of storage.

From our “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” series, to the absolutely phenomenal (and required viewing) “Storage Performance Benchmarking” series to the “Great Storage Debates” series, we’ve produced dozens of hours of material.

Technologies have evolved and we’ve come to a point where there’s a need to understand how these systems and architectures work – beyond just the type of wire that is used. Today, there are new systems that are bringing storage to completely new audiences. From scale-up to scale-out, from disaggregated to hyperconverged, RDMA, and NVMe-oF – there is more to storage networking than just your favorite transport. For example, when we talk about NVMe over Fabrics, the protocol is broader than just one way of accomplishing what you need. When we talk about virtualized environments, we need to examine the nature of the relationship between hypervisors and all kinds of networks. When we look at “Storage as a Service,” we need to understand how we can create workable systems from all the tools at our disposal. Bigger Than Our Britches As I said, SNIA’s Ethernet Storage Forum has been working to bring these new technologies to the forefront, so that you can see (and understand) the bigger picture. To that end, we realized that we needed to rethink the way that our charter worked, to be even more inclusive of technologies that were relevant to storage and networking. So… Introducing the Networking Storage Forum. In this group we’re going to continue producing top-quality, vendor-neutral material related to storage networking solutions. We’ll be talking about:

• Storage Protocols (iSCSI, FC, FCoE, NFS, SMB, NVMe-oF, etc.)
• Architectures (Hyperconvergence, Virtualization, Storage as a Service, etc.)
• Storage Best Practices
• New and developing technologies

… and more! Generally speaking, we’ll continue to do the same great work that we’ve been doing, but now our name more accurately reflects the breadth of work that we do. We’re excited to launch this new chapter of the Forum. If you work for a vendor, are a systems integrator, university or someone who manages storage, we welcome you to join the NSF. We are an active group that honestly has a lot of fun. If you’re one of our loyal followers, we hope you will continue to keep track of what we’re doing. And if you’re new to this Forum, we encourage you to take advantage of the library of webcasts, white papers, and published articles that we have produced here. There’s a wealth of un-biased, educational information there, we don’t think you’ll find anywhere else! If there’s something that you’d like to hear about – let us know! We are always looking to hear about headaches, concerns, and areas of confusion within the industry where we can shed some light. Stay current with all things NSF:

• Visit: snia.org/nsf
• Follow: @SNIANSF
• Subscribe: sniansfblog_org_org.org
• Watch: SNIAVideo Network Storage Playlist

   

Last month, we were fortunate enough to have Greg Schulz, analyst and founder of Server Storage IO, as a guest speaker at our SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum webcast, “What Does Hyperconverged Mean to Storage.” If you missed it, it’s now available on-demand. Greg fielded many great questions during the live event, but we didn’t have time to get to them all. So here they are: Q. What is the difference between Converged Infrastructure (CI) and Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)? A. HCI is aggregated. You scale compute and storage in lock step. Converged is disaggregated. You can scale the compute independently of the storage. There are some software solutions that can support both hyper-converged (aggregated) and converged (disaggregated) deployments.  Q. What is your definition of “Little Data”? A. Little Data is anything that’s not Big Data. It encompasses traditional databases, traditional structured, semi-structured and even some unstructured data. Q. With convergence, what is the impact on the IT organization? A. There is an opportunity for organizations to converge how they manage data infrastructure resources and services delivery. In other words, the technology can be leveraged to help an organization itself converge. Another impact is how converged solutions are protected, backed up, BC/BR/DR and related management done. Traditionally there are separate IT teams for compute, storage, and networking, especially in a large organization. New technology solutions may allow an organization to converge those teams. Q. Is there a hybrid strategy? Where a complete information system is composed of HCI/CI building blocks? If yes, what management tools would span these components? A. Sure, why not? Certainly you can converge your environment into a particular CI/HCI solution or approach, likewise, different CI/HCI solutions can co-exist along with other solutions in a given environment in hybrid ways. Have a hybrid strategy that looks at how technologies and solutions adapt to your needs and environment. Focus on how it’s going to work for you, vs. you having to work for them. Q. What does FUZE stand for? A. FUZE is not an acronym. It is the actual fuzing as in melding and bringing together things – literally fuzing thing together. Q. Do HCI vendors re-balance (compute, I/O, storage) automatically as more nodes are added? A. Solutions vary in how they rebalance the workloads. Some are dynamic while others rebalance on intervals; it varies how, when and what they rebalance. So, as you add capacity as you make changes, you need to make sure resources are properly allocated to address performance. Q. Can’t you offload those CPU cycles caused by I/O to another CPU? A. That’s an interesting question. Yes, move the application to another CPU. There is software that will leverage the resources on another CPU. Most HCI and CI solutions are running on a stack that requires hardware somewhere. Q. This discussion has touched on compute and storage scaling. What about network between compute in the CI/HCI infrastructure and external to other compute, databases, or end-users? A. Both CI and HCI need to connect to other resources, but in most cases the highest levels of network traffic are inside the CI or HCI stack because the compute and storage resources are contained within. Their connections to outside clients or servers data exchange, application integration, or client access is important but usually not very demanding on network bandwidth. (External connections for storage remote replication or backup could be bandwidth-intensive.) Q. How can the current Enterprise Storage Products blend with either CI or HCI? Enterprise Storage is basically centralized storage architecture however the HCI is built mostly on ‘distributed storage architecture’. So how can current Enterprise Storage show use cases to the customer to sell their Enterprise Storage either as part of the HCI solution or exist along with HCI? A. Generally enterprise storage products can be included in CI but are not blended with HCI. For example Dell EMC, Cisco (with NetApp and other storage vendors), IBM and Oracle offer CI solutions that include enterprise storage arrays in the rack. Most HCI platforms do not interoperate with enterprise storage arrays because the HCI platforms include their own storage. They can co-exist with enterprise storage arrays and that’s how most customers deploy them—some workloads run on the HCI infrastructure while others continue to use enterprise storage arrays. Q. One of the HCI selling points is simplicity and cost reductions from a la carte. It seems that from what is being presented, that may not be the case. Can you elaborate on where HCI may become more complex, costly? A. It comes down to value. You can buy all the components yourself and glue them all together and may come up with a lower total cost, but what is the value of your time? What is the cost of staff time to evaluate, test, deploy and maintain. The total value must be considered. It’s possible that HCI will be more costly than a disaggregated deployment that separates compute and storage, but this depends heavily on the workload and specific vendor product solution implementation. Q. Current HCI “full stack” solutions claim compute and storage convergence, but what about the network? Given the east/west traffic introduced by HCI solutions, what networking solutions should customers be looking at? A. Most of the common HCI solutions are packaged with server, storage, compute and most have networking included as well—typically the network adapters and sometimes also the switches. Some even have a backend software defined networking (SDN) capability as part of their stack. Q. Related to HCI answer, what about vendors who allow for storage growth and/or server (compute) and storage additions. This allows for aggregated and dis-aggregated…yes? A. Most HCI vendors require compute and storage to be added simultaneously, though many support different nodes with different ratios of compute and storage. This allow customers to change the ratio of compute and storage by adding different node types. And yes, some HCI vendors also support both a hyper-converged and disaggregated model, with the disaggregated model allowing compute and storage to be added separately. Q. What are the tools available to make HCI work in a hybrid load environment, with different workload requirements, e.g.: VDI and Databases? A. There are tools for moving and migrating applications, workloads, systems and VMs into CI/HCI environments, likewise for tuning, optimizing, gaining insight, analytics and reporting. Most of the CI/HCI solutions have tools built into them for optimizing PACE (Performance, Availability, Capacity, Economics) attributes along with server compute, memory, storage, and I/O resources. Some CI/HCI solutions are optimized for VDI/workspaces, while others are able to support general workloads including databases, and some even support HPC/SC or other specialized workloads. Q. Does network performance affect HCI or CI performance? A. Sometimes. Most hybrid HCI nodes are happy with the bandwidth of 10GbE, but if the nodes are all-flash or have many disks, then a faster speed may be required to avoid a network bottleneck. Network latency could affect HCI or CI performance in some cases, especially with all-flash storage. Of course a reliable network helps ensure reliable CI/HCI operations.  

The SNIA Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP) provides a strong foundation of vendor-neutral, systems-level credentials that integrate with and complement individual vendor certifications. Its four credentials – SNIA Certified Storage Professional; SNIA Certified Storage Engineer; SNIA Certified Storage Architect; and SNIA Certified Storage Networking Expert  - reflect the advancement and growth of storage networking technologies, and establish a uniform standard by which individual knowledge and skill sets can be evaluated, thereby providing employers in the storage industry with an independent assessment of the individual. Should you become certified? With heterogeneous data centers as the de facto environment today, IT certification can be of great value especially if it’s in a career area where you are trying to advance, and even more importantly if it is a vendor-neutral certification which complements specific product skills. And with surveys saying IT storage professionals may anticipate six-figure salaries, going for certification seems like a good idea.  Don't just take our word for it -  CIO Magazine has cited SNIA Certified Storage Networking Expert (SCSN-E) as #2 of their top seven storage certifications - and the way to join an elite group of storage professionals at the top of their games. SNIA now makes it even easier to take its three exams – Foundations; Management/Administration; and Assessment, Planning, and Design.  Exams are now available for on-site test takers globally via a new relationship with Kryterion Testing Network.  The Kryterion Testing Network utilizes over 900 Testing Centers in 120 countries to securely proctor exams worldwide for SNIA Certification Exam candidates. If you would like to know more about Kryterion or locate your nearest testing center please go to: www.kryteriononline.com/Locate-Test-Center . For more information about SNIA’s SNCP, visit https://www.snia.org/education/certification.

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?

It’s not quite as simple as a “yes/no” answer. The answer to this question involves application, interconnect, memory technology and scalability factors that can be analyzed in the context of a latency budget.

On April 19^th, Doug Voigt, Chair SNIA NVM Programming Model Technical Work Group, returns for a live SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum webcast, “Architectural Principles for Networked Solid State Storage Access – Part 2” where we 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.

In this webcast you’ll learn:

• Why latency is important in accessing solid state storage
• How to determine the appropriate use of networking in the context of a latency budget
• Do’s and don’ts for Load/Store access

This is a technical seminar built upon part 1 of this series. If you missed it, you can view it on demand at your convenience. It will give you a solid foundation on this topic, outlining key architectural principles that allow us to think about the application of networked solid state technologies more systematically.

I hope you will register today for the April 19^th event. Doug and I will be on hand to answer questions on the spot.

Do you ever feel a bit confused about common storage networking terms? You’re not alone. At our recent SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum webcast “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Mauve,” we had experts from Cisco, Mellanox and NetApp explain the differences between:

• Channel vs. Busses
• Control Plane vs. Data Plane
• Fabric vs. Network

If you missed the live webcast, you can watch it on-demand. As promised, we’re also providing answers to the questions we got during the webcast. Between these questions and the presentation itself, we hope it will help you decode these common, but sometimes confusing terms.

And remember, the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” is a webcast series with a “colorfully-named pod” for each topic we tackle. You can register now for our next webcast: Part Teal, The Buffering Pod, on Feb. 14^th.

Q. Why do we have Fibre and Fiber

A. Fiber Optics is the term used for the optical technology used by Fibre Channel Fabrics.  While a common story is that the “Fibre” spelling came about to accommodate the French (FC is after all, an international standard), in actuality, it was a marketing idea to create a more unique name, and in fact, it was decided to use the British spelling – “Fibre”.

Q. Will OpenStack change all the rules of the game?

A. Yes. OpenStack is all about centralizing the control plane of many different aspects of infrastructure.

Q. The difference between control and data plane matters only when we discuss software defined storage and software defined networking, not in traditional switching and storage.

A. It matters regardless. You need to understand how much each individual control plane can handle and how many control planes you have from a overall management perspective. In the case were you have too many control planes SDN and SDS can be a benefit to you.

Q. As I’ve heard that networks use stateless protocols, would FC do the same?

A. Fibre Channel has several different Classes, which can be either stateful or stateless. Most applications of Fibre Channel are Class 3, as it is the preferred class for SCSI traffic, A connection between Fibre Channel endpoints is always stateful (as it involves a login process to the Fibre Channel fabric). The transport protocol is augmented by Fibre Channel exchanges, which are managed on a per-hop basis. Retransmissions are handled by devices when exchanges are incomplete or lost, meaning that each exchange is a stateful transmission, but the protocol itself is considered stateless in modern SCSI-transport Fibre Channel.

iSCSI, as a connection-oriented protocol, creates a nexus between an initiator and a target, and is considered stateful. In addition, SMB, NFSv4, ftp, and TCP are stateful protocols, while NFSv2, NFSv3, http, and IP are stateless protocols.

Q. Where do CIFS/SMB come into the picture?

A. CIFFS/SMB is part of a network stack.  We need to have a separate talk about network stacks and their layers.  In this presentation, we were talking primarily about the physical layer of the networks and fabrics.  To overly simplify network stacks, there are multiple layers of protocols that run on top of the physical layer.  In the case of FC, those protocols include the control plane protocols (such as FC-SW), and the data plane protocols.  In FC, the most common data plane protocol is FCP (used by SCSI, FICON, and FC-NVMe).  In the case of Ethernet, those protocols also include the control plan (such as TCP/IP), and data plane protocols.  In Ethernet, there are many commonly used data plane protocols for storage (such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIFFS/SMB)