1. The SNIA's New Strategic Vision
2. Get On Board the Multi-City Storage Networking 2007 Tour, Featuring the SNIA Academy
3. Major Milestone: SMI-S Receives ISO Designation
4. Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: The SNIA's Storage Management Forum and the Storage Management Initiative Merge
5. SNIA Interviews Jacob Farmer, Tutorial "Top Speaker" at the Storage Networking World Conferences
6. 2006 SMI Distinguished Leader and Distinguished Engineer Awards
7. Best Practices in Storage Awards Program: Call for Nominations

The SNIA's New Strategic Vision
by Vincent Franceschini, SNIA Chair

Since its formation nearly a decade ago, the SNIA has seen significant shifts in the role of storage. No longer just a device at the end of the IT chain, today storage management plays a critical role in meeting service level demands and supporting business needs. We all know that nothing stands still in IT, and storage is one of the most dynamic areas of the industry. As customer needs evolve, so must the SNIA - there is a larger ecosystem that storage is a part of, and as storage moves up the stack, we need to address this integrated approach, delivering the right tools to simplify the life of end users and deliver business value.

Through our vast educational programs, the SNIA speaks with thousands of end users per year, hearing directly from storage management consumers. End users are telling us that they continue to have higher level challenges, and we’re being asked to help further integrate systems management beyond the traditional storage boundaries. The SNIA’s end user contact, coupled with its international reach (and an understanding of the local markets in geographies worldwide), makes us uniquely positioned to address the new requirements for the management of information infrastructure.

To heed the call, the SNIA is evolving to deliver the technologies that enable effective information management and deliver targeted reductions in cost and complexity to users. Building on its prior work in areas such as Security, Management Framework and Data Management, the SNIA will be addressing multi-layered management issues and offer a global approach to distributed management.

This is not a change in direction for the SNIA – the emphasis on our existing standards and projects is critical work that will continue – but we are looking to build on this foundation, leveraging our progress to date to help accelerate the delivery of the comprehensive management solution for end users.

Get On Board the Multi-City Storage Networking 2007 Tour, Featuring the SNIA Academy

Now entering its 7th year in Canada and expanding into 8 cities in the United States, the SNIA Academy/ SANNAS Summits have announced the dates for their co-located Storage Networking 2007 Tour (http://www.mysannas.com/). Modeled after the highly successful SNIA Europe Academies (http://www.snia-europe.org/news_events/academy.htm), these one-day seminars will deliver unbiased, knowledge-based education on networked storage and associated technologies.

The multi-city Storage Networking 2007 tour will offer a unique educational opportunity for both end users and channel professionals, such as system integrators and value-added re-sellers. The events will include a variety of vendor-neutral tutorials from the SNIA on topics such as automating information lifecycle management, information classification, disk and tape backup, storage security, virtualization, and consolidation via IP storage.

The events will also have a series of vendor breakout sessions delivered by storage networking leaders highlighting the latest in storage networking technologies and solutions. The dates and locations for the Summits include:

Chicago, IL - June 5, 2007
Minneapolis, MN - June 7, 2007
Washington, DC - June 12, 2007
Philadelphia, PA - June 14, 2007
Los Angeles, CA - Sept 25, 2007
San Jose, CA - Sept 27, 2007
Dallas, TX - Oct 2, 2007
Atlanta, GA - Oct 4, 2007

Major Milestone: SMI-S Receives ISO Designation

In January, the SNIA announced that its Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) has been designated an International Standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). SMI-S was ratified last year by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and the latest designations are expected to further accelerate the already widespread adoption of the standard by storage vendors and IT users in all markets worldwide.

"The recognition of SMI-S by ISO and IEC is an important step in driving additional international implementations of the specification, providing many end users with the confidence to embrace the latest storage technologies, safe in the knowledge that their investments will ultimately support their organizations now and in the future," says Vincent Franceschini, chair of the SNIA. "This achievement is the latest validation that SMI-S is a robust standard which helps increase storage interoperability and decrease management complexity. SMI-S was created to develop interoperable storage management technologies, and its ratification as an international standard signifies the impact it can have on a global level to achieve these goals."

The SNIA has worked to drive the global adoption of SMI-S through a wide array of activities hosted by SNIA Regional Affiliates in Australia-New Zealand, North America Canada, China, Europe (EMEA), India, Japan and South-Asia. The SNIA is also a co-owner of Storage Networking World conferences that take place in China, Germany, Australia and the U.S. where educational activities such as tutorials, Hands-on-Labs, Solution Center demonstrations and plugfests have built an international coalition of vendors and users that are implementing SMI-S.

For more information on SMI-S, see http://www.snia.org/forums/smi.

Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: The SNIA's Storage Management Forum and the Storage Management Initiative Merge

The SNIA recently announced that the Storage Management Forum has been re-formed as the Marketing Subcommittee of the Storage Management Initiative (SMI). Streamlining the operational deployment of the specification by targeting the available resources toward common goals, objectives and structure, the integrated SMI now combines all of the core SMI activities under one roof - from spec design and authoring, through development, testing and worldwide educational and promotional activities - providing a single collaborative structure for increased efficiency and speed.

Delivering a more inclusive, unified approach to this critical work within the SNIA, the united SMI will accelerate the value of SMI-S and drive it more effectively into the marketplace. The new structure allows organizations that have not participated previously in the marketing and planning process to contribute and shape SMI. With all SMI-S participating companies becoming part of the entire process, the combined SMI entity will deliver enhanced value to the industry.

This updated approach to SMI is the latest step in ensuring the ongoing focus and success of SMI-S. The SMI is actively seeking volunteer leadership and will soon be holding balloted elections; interested parties should contact tom.mancuso@snia.org or visit http://www.snia.org/forums/smi/about/member.

SNIA Interviews Jacob Farmer, Tutorial "Top Speaker" at the Storage Networking World Conferences

SNIA Tutorials are among the premier educational materials available to the industry, presenting the latest technical and business information - free of charge - in a fair and unbiased manner. Jacob Farmer, Chief Technology Officer for Cambridge Computer, was recently named "Top Speaker" for his SNIA Tutorial "Identifying and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks: Taking Your Existing Backup System to the Next Level," presented in October at the Storage Networking World Conference (SNW) ( http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/2006/fall/data-management
/Identifying_and_Eliminating_Backup_System_Bottlenecks.pdf).

Nancy Clay, SNIA Tutorial Program Manager, recently interviewed Jacob about the keys to effective backups.

Question: In your tutorial, you talk about the pain points of backup systems. What are they, and how do they affect the user?

Answer: There are three common pain points. The first is that of making the backup window. If backup jobs do not complete on time, they compete with applications for processing and I/O resources. The second point of pain is that of backup jobs inexplicably failing, and then trying to figure out why during production hours. Lastly, there is the pain of a restore job simply failing, in which case, it was all for naught.

Question: What are the not so obvious bottlenecks of backup?

Answer: Most traditional backup systems are constrained in the center of the backup system - within the backup servers themselves. You cannot simply add RAID boxes and tape drives and hope for performance improvements. We also tend to find bottlenecks in file systems, particularly those with millions of small files.

Question: Where are backup system bottlenecks, and what tools are used to pinpoint them?

Answer: There are a few software tools on the market that are specifically designed to analyze backup system performance. The challenge is that the results are sometimes hard to interpret. In short, there is no real alternative to a trained eye.

Question: You talk about eliminating central bottlenecks and back end bottlenecks. What is the methodology for this?

Answer: Once you know where your throughput is constrained, there are usually only a few choices, depending on the backup software you are using. Some backup products offer ways to reduce redundancy in the backup traffic - these are usually configuration settings or add-on products. Others allow you to parallelize backup traffic by having multiple servers that work together. In other words, the tools at your disposal vary from vendor to vendor. Now, once you have opened up the flood gates in the center of the backup system, you grow the back end by adding disk and tape.

Question: How do you design your way out of the "pain points?"

Answer: The first step in solving a problem is identifying that you have a problem! Every backup system is different, so we have to start with a top down analysis. Often, we find that a given backup application lacks the means to address one pain or another. For instance, very few of the mainstream backup systems are good at dealing with high volumes of small files. In these cases, we would bring in a third party tool with that strength, and integrate it into the main backup system.

You can download Jacob's full tutorial online (http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/2006/fall/data-management/
Identifying_and_Eliminating_Backup_System_Bottlenecks.pdf), and view all of the SNIA's recent tutorials (http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/) in the Education section of the SNIA Web site (http://www.snia.org/education/).

About the Interviewee
Jacob Farmer is Chief Technology Officer for Cambridge Computer, an integrator and reseller specializing in data protection and storage management. Founded in 1991, Cambridge is best known in the industry for its award-winning training center, which teaches classes on storage networking and data protection. Jacob is a regular speaker at industry events and travels the country consulting and teaching classes for both end users and storage manufacturers. Jacob is the senior technical advisor and a regular columnist for InfoStor Magazine, a trade magazine dedicated to the storage sector. Jacob is a graduate of Yale University.

2006 SMI Distinguished Leader and Distinguished Engineer Awards

The SNIA is happy to recognize the recipients of the 2006 SMI Distinguished Leader and Distinguished Engineer Awards, recognized by their peers for their significant contributions to the success of SMI.

The SMI Distinguished Leader award is a rare designation, and in 2006 it was bestowed upon Mike Walker. Mike has made many contributions to SMI, including:
• Chairmanship of the Filesystem Management Technical Workgroups
• Chairmanship of the SMI Technical Steering Group
• Strong contributions to the formation of the new Storage Management Initiative

The 2006 SMI Distinguished Engineer award was given to Rich Roscoe, whose numerous contributions to SMI include:
• Very strong involvement in the SMI-Lab plugfests
• Helping to lead the SMI-Lab program by participating on the SMI-Lab governing board
• Contributing for many years to the SMI demos at SNW

The SMI Program is an exceptional place for volunteers from various organizations to come and work together to solve the real world problems facing storage management users. The SNIA would like to thank these dedicated volunteers, and all of our members for their support over the past year!

Best Practices in Storage Awards Program: Call for Nominations

Storage Networking World (SNW), in conjunction with Computerworld and the SNIA, is seeking IT user-organization case study submissions for its "Best Practices in Storage" Awards Program.

Nominations are welcome from IT Users/Implementers; Systems Integrators/Consultants; IT Vendors on behalf of Customers, or, their own In-House Deployment; and PR Firms of behalf of Clients. Multiple submissions of case-studies describing different deployments per company/organization will be considered.

The deadline for submissions is Friday, March 9th, 2007 (5:00 PM EST). Five finalists in each category will be recognized at Storage Networking World, April 16-19, 2007, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, California. The top two honorees in each category will be recognized on the main stage during the SNW Gala Dinner and Awards Ceremony. All finalists will be recognized on the event website, in an event press release, and may be featured in a special supplement of Computerworld magazine.

Honorees and finalists will be recognized in each of the following five categories: Innovation and Promise; Maximizing ROI; Planning, Designing and Building a Strategic Storage Infrastructure; Storage Reliability and Data Recovery; and Systems Implementation.

For more information, visit http://bestpractices.computerworld.com/2007/SNW/.