New SNIA Data Center Storage Taskforce Forming

The SNIA Data Center Storage Taskforce has been chartered to explore the opportunity to satisfy Data Center customer requirements for storage drives through a combination of open source software and changes to existing standard interfaces.

For more information, please visit: http://www.snia.org/datacenter

To get involved, please subscribe to the open mailing list (SNIA membership not required) by sending a blank email (no subject or body) to datacenter-subscribe@snia.org.

SNIA and Evaluator Group Joint Study Reveals Insights into Enterprise Hyperconverged Adoption

Evaluator Group and SNIA announced the availability of their joint research study “Hyperconverged Use in the Enterprise.” The study ranks common hyperconverged use cases such as infrastructure consolidation, VDI, and data protection and lists the hyperconverged products that enterprises have chosen or were evaluating for these use cases. The objective of this study was to find out how enterprises are using, or plan to use, hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. The study also reveals what IT professionals in large companies think about this new technology and how well they think hyperconverged technologies fit running “tier-one” production workloads. The study was released at this year’s Data Storage Innovation Conference. Watch the interview highlighting the findings and read the press release for more information.

SFF Technology Affiliate Technical Work Group is Launched

SNIA recently announced the SFF Committee has transitioned under SNIA as the new SFF Technology Affiliate (TA) Technical Work Group (TWG). This group has operated for over 25 years and consists of more than 40 industry leading member companies and is growing. 
 
The SFF Technology Affiliate TWG will continue to focus and develop technical specifications as SNIA Architecture to enable technology vendors an easy way to procure compatible, multi-sourced products and solutions for storage media, storage networks, and solutions that cover a range of technologies from cables to connectors and interfaces and much more. Read the press release.

• ScienceLogic

• Tintri

• Lenovo

• ClearSky Data

• DriveScale

• Crossbar

• Xilinx
 

• Huawei joined the Green Storage Initiative

Storage Security: Fibre Channel Security

Got DR Issues? Check out the new Disaster Recovery Special Interest Group

The SNIA Data Protection and Capacity Optimization Committee (DPCO) would like to announce the creation of a new Special Interest Group (SIG) focusing on data replication for disaster recovery (DR) standards. The mission of this SIG is focused on investigating existing ISO standards, carrying out surveys, and studying current guidance in order to identify if there is a need to improve the interoperability and resiliency, and/or education and best practices in the area of data replication for disaster recovery. Learn more.

Cloud Object Storage 101
July 14, 2016
Nancy Bennis, Program Manager, Cloud Object Storage, IBM
Alex McDonald, Chair, SNIA Cloud Storage
 
Object storage is a secure, simple, scalable, and cost-effective means of embracing the explosive growth of unstructured data enterprises generate every day. Many organizations have already begun to leverage software-defined object storage to support new application development and DevOps projects. Meanwhile, legacy enterprise companies are in the early stages of exploring the benefits of object storage for their particular business and are searching for how they can use cloud object storage to modernize their IT strategies, store and protect data while dramatically reducing the costs associated with legacy storage sprawl.

• Market trends towards the adoption of object storage
• Definition and benefits of object storage
• Use cases best suited to leverage an underlying object storage infrastructure

Cloud Storage: Solving Interoperability Challenges
July 19, 2016
Udayan Singh, Head of Software Product Engineering, Tata Consultancy
Mark Carlson, Cloud Storage Co-Chair, Cloud Storage TWG Co-Chair
 
Cloud storage has transformed the storage industry, however interoperability challenges that were overlooked during the initial stages of growth are now emerging as front and center issues. Learn about the major challenges that businesses leveraging services from multiple cloud providers, or moving from one cloud provider to another face, and how the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard addresses these challenges by offering data interoperability between clouds. You’ll hear:

• Critical challenges that the cloud storage industry is facing
• Issues in a multi-cloud provider environment
• Addressing cloud storage interoperability challenges
• How the CDMI standard works
• Benefits of CDMI conformance testing
• Benefits for end user companies

Re-Introducing Ethernet Networked Storage
August 4, 2016
Rob Davis, Mellanox
Fred Zhang, Intel
 
Ethernet technology had been a proven standard for over 30 years and there are many networked storage solutions based on Ethernet. While storage devices are evolving rapidly with new standards and specifications, Ethernet is moving towards higher speeds as well: 10Gbps, 25Gbps, 50Gbps and 100Gbps….making it time to re-introduce Ethernet Networked Storage.
 
This live Webcast will provide a solid foundation on Ethernet networked storage and move to the latest advancements, challenges, use cases and benefits. You’ll hear:

• The evolution of storage devices - spinning media to NVM
• New standards: NVMe and NVMe over Fabric
• A retrospect of traditional networked storage including SAN and NAS
• How new storage devices and new standards would impact Ethernet networked storage
• Ethernet based software-defined storage and the hyper-converged model
• A look ahead at new Ethernet technologies optimized for networked storage in the future

Portland Training for the SNIA Storage Foundations Exam (S10-110)

SNIA is taking training classes “on the road” to make storage certification training even easier for you to attain. The upcoming training session is July 25-29 in Portland, OR (4 ½ day class)

For more information about this instructor-led training, please visit here.

Practice Exam Now Available for SNIA Storage Foundations Certification

For storage professionals interested in obtaining the new SNIA Certified Storage Professional Certification, SNIA has developed a practice exam that will help determine if you have the skill set to pass the Certification exam. The practice exam is free of charge, and is available here. 
 
Other training options for SNIA’s Foundations Certification are available here.

• Principles of Networked Solid State Storage – Q&A
• Storage Security: Fibre Channel Security
• How Ethernet RDMA Protocols iWARP and RoCE Support NVMe over Fabrics
• Q&A on Exactly How iSCSI has Evolved
• Open Source Software-Only Storage – Really.
• Your Questions Answered on NVDIMM

Join the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative at Flash Memory Summit 2016 

• Aug. 8^th, (Room 209-210) - SNIA will feature an Education Afternoon with five SNIA Tutorials on flash storage, combined service infrastructures, VDBench, stored-data encryption, and NVDIMM, followed by a SNIA Solid State Storage Reception at 5:30 pm.
• Aug. 9^th, 8:30 am (Session 102-A) – SNIA SSSI Data Recovery/Erase Special Interest Group members will be featured in a Data Recovery of SSDs panel
• Aug. 10^th, 8:30 am (Forum R-21) - SNIA SSSI hosts a Persistent Memory Forum
• August 11^th at 8:30 am (Session 301-A) - SNIA SSSI NVDIMM SIG hosts a NVDIMM Panel

View DSI 2016 General Session Presentations