With the emergence of Hyper-converged infrastructure, the storage management has become more integrated with the server management frameworks. The scalability requirement of today’s cloud-scale infrastructure makes it more complex. SNIA Swordfish storage management specification defines a comprehensive, RESTful API for storage management that addresses block, file, object storage, and storage-network infrastructure.

A storage ecosystem is comprised of several servers which could be heterogeneous with components from multiple vendors. The administrator for this ecosystem should be able to obtain information about each intelligent component connected, and also manage them, without worrying about intricacies of communication with that component. Standardization of the way the component and its data are represented, helps achieve interoperability which the administrator needs. Swordfish, Redfish and SMI-S are standard specifications which model hardware components of a storage ecosystem.

To integrate unknown storage systems, Tendrl adopts an approach where it lets the storage system define itself for Tendrl. This helps Tendrl approach the problem like configuration management where Tendrl enforces boundaries and capabilities defined by the storage system while the storage systems actually implement said boundaries/capabilities.

This definition driven integration leads to management layer which abstracts itself out not via code but via definitions.

A few decades ago the storage community had to stick to a few proprietary options. Many contributors started modifying the original protocols and develop code to suit their requirements and then releasing the new tools and solutions that helped the other groups in the community. This open source community brought in a few new innovation ideas from NAS—an inter OS storage—to OpenStack – A scalable public cloud implementation.

OpenStack cinder is a software defined storage project from OpenStack foundation which has broadest support to multiple storage systems developed by OEM's.

NoSQL Databases are gaining traction in various industry verticals, e.g. web applications, analytics, banking etc., replacing relational database deployments for reasons like scalability and flexibility [1]. These databases are typically deployed on commodity, direct-attached storage devices and bundle up value adds like replication, compression, cluster management in their software. While these databases are great at serving queries at scale, they lack some enterprise features such as backup and recovery.

In a special mainstage presentation at Flash Memory Summit 2019, SNIA Executive Director Michael Oros provides an overview of SNIA standards in three key areas: persistent memory, computational storage, and next generation storage management with SNIA SwordfishTM.

Michael Oros, SNIA Executive Director, provides an overview of SNIA standards in persistent memory, computational storage, and storage management in this mainstage presentation delivered at Flash Memory Summit 2019.