The SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) has created and published an open industry standard specification for storage management that defines a customer centric interface for the purpose of managing storage and related data services. This specification builds on the DMTF’s Redfish specification using RESTful methods and JSON formatting. This presentation shows how Swordfish extends Redfish, details Swordfish concepts and talks about CSDL and JSON schema formats and ODATA protocol for modeling resources.

The most difficult to support is the requirement of consistency that often implies not only storage system’s own internal consistency (which is mandatory) but the application level consistency as well. Distributed clocks are never perfectly synchronized: temporal inversions are inevitable. While most I/O sequences are order indifferent, we cannot allow inconsistent snapshots that reference user data contradicting the user’s perception of ordering. Further, photo snapshots do not require the subjects to freeze: distributed snapshot operation must not require cluster-wide freezes.

As all flash arrays mature into full feature platforms, vendors are seeking new ways to differentiate themselves and prepare for the next killer app. This presentation will first talk about industrial internet of things and how to prepare for these workloads. With these new workloads, storage controller overhead can be high for data compression and lead to significant performance impacts. This presentation compares the performance of different data compression algorithms (LZO, LZ4, GZIP, and BZIP2) using a CPU versus acceleration hardware.

The unyielding growth of digital data continues to drive demand for higher capacity, lower-cost storage. With the advent of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), which overlaps HDD tracks to provide a 25 percent capacity increase versus conventional magnetic recording technology, storage vendors are able to offer extraordinary drive capacities within existing physical footprints. That said, IT decision makers and storage system architects need to be cognizant of the different data management techniques that come with SMR technology, namely Drive Managed, Host Managed and Host Aware.

Caches in modern storage systems lack the ability to adapt automatically and optimize for dynamic workload mixes. Despite the potential for huge improvements in cost, performance, and predictability, such adaptability is extremely challenging, due to inherently complex, non-linear, and workload-dependent behavior. Even when manually-tunable controls are provided to support dynamic cache sizing, partitioning, and parameter tuning, administrators simply don’t have the information required to make good decisions.

Debate is rising in the industry over the best method for deploying infrastructure in private and public cloud datacenters. The predictable performance, packaging, and capacity increments of hyperconverged systems have made it the latest model to gain traction. Hyperscale is also gaining momentum as a preferred architecture due to its independent scaling capabilities. Now, businesses are asking, which is the best deployment for software-defined storage? The answer: it depends.

IT in healthcare organizations face many challenges in supporting high-quality medical services. Regulations, the move to electronic records and more sophisticated imaging systems have skyrocketed the amount of data related to patients. In addition, IT has to maintain continuous operations around the clock and deliver the application performance needed by clinicians and staff.

Ceph protects data by making 2-3 copies of the same data but that means 2-3x more storage servers and related costs. It also means higher write latencies as data hops between OSD nodes. Customers are now starting to deploy Ceph using SSDs for high-performance workloads and for data lakes supporting real-time analytics. We describe a novel approach that eliminates the added server cost by creating Containerized, stateless OSDs and leveraging NVMe-over-fabrics to replicate data in server-less storage nodes.

The DMTF’s Redfish is an open industry standard specification and schema that specifies a RESTful interface and utilizes JSON and OData to help customers integrate solutions within their existing tool chains. Designed to meet the expectations of end users for simple, modern and secure management of scalable platform hardware, the Redfish method and approach has seen accelerated adoption across the IT infrastructure management standards community.

The ISO/IEC 27040 (Information technology - Security techniques - Storage security) standard provides detailed technical guidance on controls and methods for securing storage systems and ecosystems. This whitepaper provides an overview of key security concepts as they relate to storage security and summarizes the security guidance in the standard as applied to storage management. It also provides additional SNIA guidance in developing a storage management security program to meet organizations’ particular needs.