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 you 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!

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 SNIA 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.

Posted by Marty Foltyn Tomorrow is the last day to register online for next week's Storage Developer Conference at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. What better incentive to click www.storagedeveloper.org and register than to read about the amazing keynote and featured speakers at this event - I think they're the best since the event began in 1998! Preview sessions here, and click on the title to download the full description. Bev Crair, Vice President and General Manager, Storage Group, Intel will present Innovator, Disruptor or Laggard, Where Will Your Storage Applications Live? Next Generation Storage and discuss the leadership role Intel is playing in driving the open source community for software defined storage, server based storage, and upcoming technologies that will shift how storage is architected. Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis will report on The Long-Term Future of Solid State Storage, examining research of new solid state memory and storage types, and new means of integrating them into highly-optimized computing architectures. This will lead to a discussion of the way that these will impact the market for computing equipment. Jim Pinkerton, Partner Architect Lead, Microsoft will present Concepts on Moving From SAS connected JBOD to an Ethernet Connected JBOD . This talk examines the advantages of moving to an Ethernet connected JBOD, what infrastructure has to be in place, what performance requirements are needed to be competitive, and examines technical issues in deploying and managing such a product. Andy Rudoff, SNIA NVM Programming TWG, Intel will discuss Planning for the Next Decade of NVM Programming describing how emerging NVM technologies and related research are causing a change to the software development ecosystem. Andy will describe use cases for load/store accessible NVM, some transparent to applications, others non-transparent. Richard McDougall, Big Data and Storage Chief Scientist, VMware will present Software Defined Storage - What Does it Look Like in 3 Years? He will survey and contrast the popular software architectural approaches and investigate the changing hardware architectures upon which these systems are built. Laz Vekiarides, CTO and Co-founder, ClearSky Data will discuss Why the Storage You Have is Not the Storage Your Data Needs , sharing some of the questions every storage architect should ask. Donnie Berkholz, Research Director, 451 Research will present Emerging Trends in Software Development drawing on his experience and research to discuss emerging trends in how software across the stack is created and deployed, with a particular focus on relevance to storage development and usage. Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze will discuss Learnings from Nearly a Decade of Building Low-cost Cloud Storage. He will cover the design of the storage hardware, the cloud storage file system software, and the operations processes that currently store over 150 petabytes and 5 petabytes every month. You could wait and register onsite at the Hyatt, but why? If you need more reasons to attend, check out SNIA on Storage previous blog entries on File Systems, Cloud, Management, New Thinking, Disruptive Technologies, and Security sessions at SDC. See the full agenda and register now for SDC at http://www.storagedeveloper.org.

In July 2014, IEEE 802.3 voted to form a Study Group for 25Gb/s Ethernet.  There has been a lot attention in the networking press lately about 25Gb/s Ethernet, but many people are asking what is it and how did we get here.  After all, 802.3 already has completed standards for 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s and is currently working on 400Gb/s, so from a pure speed perspective, starting a 25Gb/s project now does look like a step backwards.

(Warning: the following discussion contains excessive physical layer jargon.)

The Sweet Spot

25GbE as a port speed is attractive because it makes use of 25Gb/s per lane signaling technology that has been in development for years in the industry, culminating in the recent completion of 802.3bj, the standard for 100GbE over backplane or TwinAx copper that utilizes four parallel lanes of 25Gb/s signaling to achieve the 100Gb/s port speed. Products implementing 25Gb/s signaling in CMOS technology are just starting to come to market, and the rate will likely be a sweet spot for many years, as higher rate signaling of 40Gb/s or 50Gb/s is still in early technology development phases. The ability to implement this high speed I/O in CMOS is important because it allows combining high-speed I/O with many millions of logic gates needed to implement Ethernet switches, controllers, FPGAs, and microprocessors. Thus specifying a MAC rate of 25Gb/s to utilize 25Gb/s serdes technology can enable product developers to optimize for both the lowest cost/bit and the highest overall bandwidth utilization of the switching fabric.

4-Lane to 1-Lane Evolution

To see how we got here and why 25Gb/s is interesting, it is useful to back up a couple of generations and look at 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s Ethernet.  Earliest implementations of 10GbE relied on rather wide parallel electrical interfaces: XGMII and the 16-Bit interface.  Very soon after, however, 4-lane serdes-based interfaces became the norm starting with XAUI (for chip-to-chip and chip-to-optical module use) which was then adapted to longer reaches on TwinAx and backplane (10GBASE-CX4 and 10GBASE-KX4).  Preceding 10GbE achieving higher volumes (~2009) was the specification and technical feasibility of 10Gb/s on a single electrical serial lane. XFI was the first followed by 10GBASE-KR (backplane) and SFI (as an optical module interface and for direct attach TwinAx cable using the SFP+ pluggable form factor).  KR and SFI started to ramp around 2009 and are still the highest volume share of 10GbE ports in datacenter applications. The takeaway, in my opinion, is that single-lane interfaces helped the 10GbE volume ramp by reducing interconnect cost. Now look forward to 40GbE and 10GbE. The initial standard, 802.3ba, was completed in 2010.  So during the time that this specification was being developed, 10Gb/s serial interfaces were gaining traction, and consensus formed around the use of multiple 10Gb/s lanes in parallel to make the 40GbE and 100GbE electrical interfaces. For example, there is a great similarity between 10GBASE-KR, and one lane of the 40GBASE-KR4 four-lane interface. In a similar fashion 10Gb/s SFI for TwinAx  & optics in the SFP+ form factor is similar to a lane of the 40GbE equivalent interfaces for TwinAx and optics in the QSFP+ form factor.

But how does this get to 25Gb/s?

Due to the similarity in technology needed to make 10GbE and 40GbE, it has because a common feature in Ethernet switch and NIC chips to implement a four-lane port for 40GbE that can be configured to use each lane separately yielding four 10GbE ports.

From there it is a natural extension that 100GbE ports being implemented using 802.3bj technology (4x25Gb/s) also can be configured to support four independent ports operating at 25Gb/s.  This is such a natural conclusion that multiple companies are implementing 25GbE even though it is not a standard.

In some environments, the existence of a standard is not a priority.  For example, when a large-scale datacenter of compute, storage and networking is architected, owned and operated by one entity, that entity validates the necessary configuration to meet its requirements. For the broader market, however, there is typically a requirement for multi-vendor interoperability across a diverse set of configurations and uses. This is where Ethernet and IEEE 802.3 has provided value to the industry for over 30 years.

Where’s the Application?

Given the nature of their environment, it is the Cloud datacenter operators that are poised to be the early adopters of 25GbE. Will it also find a home in more traditional enterprise and storage markets? Time will tell, but in many environments ease of use, long shelf life, and multi-vendor interoperability are the priorities. For any environment, having the 25GbE specification maintained IEEE 802.3 will facilitate those needs.