In April, the SNIA announced the appointment of its new executive director, Leo Leger, who took the reigns just prior to Storage Networking World (SNW), San Diego. Most recently an executive with IDG's Computerworld - Strategic Programs and Events group, Leo is a technology industry veteran with extensive experience in business development, organizational leadership, creative marketing, sales, and strategic alliance development.

"As the storage industry moves to further align with demands from businesses and applications, Leo is joining us at a key time to support the SNIA in addressing these evolving priorities," says Vincent Franceschini, chairman of the board, SNIA. "Leo is an excellent fit for this position, and we're confident he will help us continue to increase the value we bring to our members and the entire industry at-large."

"Having worked in partnership with the SNIA for many years, I've seen the association emerge as a leading voice for storage-related solution seekers, and I'm proud to join such an accomplished organization with its dedicated members, volunteers and staff," says Leo. "I believe one of the great strengths of the SNIA is that we can match storage and information management technology providers with educated buyers, allowing the entire industry to improve effectiveness and productivity. Tapping into my personal background and network of contacts, I'm dedicated to working with both vendors and end users to achieve this objective."

As a non-voting member of both the SNIA Board and SNIA Executive Committee, the Executive Director is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the Association while providing input into organizational strategy, business development, budgeting, staffing, and operational management of the Association. This executive also serves as an impartial, customer-focused members' liaison, relaying any concerns, issues and requests directly to the SNIA Board.

"The SNIA's list of accomplishments speaks for itself - from the ISO accreditation track for its standards, to a continued focus on international expansion, to its successful co-ownership (with Computerworld) of the industry-leading SNW conference series. We will maintain an ongoing commitment to promote certified storage professionals and standards-conformant, interoperable products," says Leo. "Moving forward, I see a great opportunity for the SNIA to enhance its role as a globally recognized, trusted advisor in leading the industry by supporting and promoting technologies to empower organizations to best manage, share and secure its information.

"As the SNIA approaches its 10^th anniversary, I am committed to listening, learning and energetically steering the organization along the course that its dedicated Board of Directors, staff and volunteers have chartered. Through this, I ask that you share your ideas and your constructive critiques - along with your convictions and passion for our industry - with me and our Association. My 'door' is open, and I welcome input from our members and the industry."

To share your feedback and suggestions with Leo, contact him by e-mail at executivedirector@snia.org.

The SNIA is inviting the industry to participate in the recently announced XAM Initiative, which will drive adoption of the forthcoming eXtensible Application Method (XAM) specification. Storage vendors, independent software vendors, and end users are encouraged to join today, to ensure that the XAM specification fulfills the market needs for a fixed content data management interface standard. These needs include interoperability, information assurance (security), storage transparency, and long-term records retention and automation for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)-based practices.

The ever-growing complexity of owning and managing data objects has become insurmountable, with conventional approaches based on discrete, and often competing, management processes. XAM addresses this complexity in an interface specification that defines a standard access method between "consumers" (applications and management software) and "providers" (storage systems) to manage fixed content. XAM abstracts the access method from the storage, annotating objects with metadata that allows the management of information at a semantic level. This connection allows policies to make intelligent decisions about the management of objects without referring back to the application.

The XAM Initiative will:

• Ensure the adoption, implementation, and deployment of the XAM programming interface(s) by applications concerned with fixed content data management and storage systems including SAN, NAS, and CAS;
• Cultivate both a SNIA community and an industry-at-large ecosystem for vendor product XAM standard implementations, driven by end-user demand;
• Develop and implement XAM product interoperability programs, XAM developer programs, XAM standard product conformance programs, and industry education materials.

Figure 1

XAM Initiative Membership Benefits

XAM Initiative members will play a key role in coordinating activities across the XAM Software Development Kit (SDK) Technical Working Group (TWG) and the existing Fixed Content Aware Storage (FCAS) TWG, which is developing the XAM specification. The XAM SDK TWG will develop a XAM software reference implementation and related software tools, which will help accelerate adoption of XAM and improve interoperability of the specification's implementations.

Additionally, participants in the XAM Initiative will coordinate activities with the SNIA Data Management Forum (DMF), where the Long Term Archive and Compliance Storage Initiative (LTACSI) is working on best practices and market requirements for archives, migration methods, and compliance.

With plans to demonstrate a multi-vendor fixed content solution based on the prototype XAM Applications Programming Interface (API) at the 2007 Fall Storage Networking World (SNW), there is an immediate opportunity to have a direct impact on the future of storage management by joining the Initiative.

Membership in the XAM Initiative offers a number of important benefits, including:

• Collaborating with leaders from across the industry to define the direction of data management standards
• Leadership positions available in XAM Initiative Governing Board and its Committees
• Developing relationships with key industry media and analysts and other industry associations
• Working with IT professionals and gain first hand understanding of their data management requirements
• Participating in the planning of significant SNIA industry conferences such as SNW, EIW, SDC
• Participating in public technology launches and demonstrations

To learn more about XAM and the XAM Initiative, visit the XAM Web page. To join the Initiative today, visit http://www.snia.org/forums/xam/about/join/.

As vendors work to provide products and services that simplify the operation and management of IT storage infrastructures, File Area Networks (FANs) continue this trend by applying business-level controls and intelligence to file management. A FAN can provide a number of benefits, including:

• True file-level virtualization across the infrastructure
• Enterprise-wide pervasive controls of all file information
• Ability to establish file visibility and access rights based on business values regardless of physical location
• Non-disruptive, transparent movement of file information without regard to geographic location
• Infrastructure-wide services
• Consolidation of redundant file resources

To address FAN, the SNIA has formed the File Area Network Task Force, which is conducting important initial work to unite the industry efforts around FAN. Both technical and product marketing representatives are invited to participate in the FAN Task Force, and provide input into this effort.

"With File Area Networks gaining so much interest in the industry, it became clear to SNIA members that formal industry activities around FAN would be beneficial to both end users as well as to vendors providing FAN-based solutions. SNIA provides the perfect venue for this work," says Steve Wilson, chair of the FAN Task Force. "Having reference models and interoperability helps everyone, and FAN has reached the stage where it's time for SNIA members to participate in delivering these benefits to the industry."

The FAN Task Force is charged with identifying the major technical and marketing work items, and recommending the next steps to SNIA. The FAN Task Force will also determine interoperability priorities and help educate the industry about FAN.

To join, SNIA members can visit the Task Force Web page and click "join group." For non-members interested in joining the SNIA to participate in the FAN Task Force, please see the "Join SNIA" section of the SNIA Web site.

Being held August 7-9, 2007, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, EIW 2007 is the SNIA's second annual event focused exclusively on "Information Convergence" and the transformation of the "Information-centric Enterprise." Next generation data centers will be built around next generation information management practices. EIW is the only event in the IT marketplace providing a forum where leading technology experts and important IT communities will collaborate on all aspects related to information management and the evolving data center.

EIW will feature recently-announced keynotes from Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO, Amazon.com; Ann Livermore, executive vice president, Technology Solutions Group, HP; Ron Hevsepian, president and CEO, Novell, Inc.; and Diana Greene, president and co-founder, VMWare. Offering presentations in three full conference tracks that will include more than 25 informative sessions and workshops, EIW will provide unparalleled insights into solving the costly and complex challenges of compliance, legal discovery, digital rights management and security and business risk through a new approach - collaboratively centering infrastructure management and operations around the value and requirements for information.

"We've designed this conference to deliver the specific information attendees need to be able to plan for the future - 18 to 24 months out," says Michael Peterson, director of content development, EIW. "There will be a strong focus on applications - what is required, what is available today, and where are things going. We're excited about the agenda, as we look forward to giving participants real insight into the new requirements and how to address them."

EIW was developed by the SNIA Data Management Forum to provide cross training and a common vocabulary for professionals from the critical practice areas of Records and Information Management, Information Technology and Information Security. By participating in this event, attendees will achieve an increased level of understanding, bringing back tools and methods to help guide their companies in this critical direction.

"The storage industry has only recently begun to truly address the requirements of records managers," says Jeff Porter, chair, SNIA's Data Management Forum. "The latest improvements in the technologies available are exciting breakthroughs, and EIW is the central event to learn more about them, and how to implement the advancements."

As announced previously, this year EIW has joined forces with IDG's new Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) conference and expo - resulting in a single, co-located event that addresses all of the key issues facing information and data center managers today.

To register for the conference, visit http://www.enterpriseinformationworld.com/Registration_Form.htm.

A limited number of sponsorship and exhibit opportunities are also available. Please contact Derek Jenkins at 781-812-2886 or Derek.Jenkins@snia.org for more information.

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. Over the last four years, Stephen Barr has presented the SNIA Tutorial for Metropolitan and Wide Area Storage Networking at Storage Networking World and at Interop. Stephen was recently recognized as "Top Speaker - SNIA Tutorials" at SNW Fall '06.

Nancy Clay, SNIA Tutorial Program Manager, recently interviewed Stephen about Metropolitan and Wide Area Storage Networking.

Question: Why is "Metropolitan and Wide Area Storage Networking" such a hot topic these days?

Answer: To butcher a quote from the poet, John Donne: "No SAN is an island." Storage Area Networks and Data Centers must be connected over distance for the following reasons:

1. Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) plans require distance to overcome geographical outages. By far, the most common cause for Data Center downtime is loss of power followed by human error. Planning for geographical diversity across major power grids is just as important as separating data centers across regions with natural disaster threats such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornados and even volcanoes.
2. Business leaders have realized that access to key applications and current data at all times is a firm business requirement. It's no longer a matter of just backing up data periodically and reducing downtime. Data must be continuously backed up and immediately restorable for most any enterprise, not just the top financial, medical, airlines and government verticals. We've implemented solutions for legal firms as well as grocery store chains.
3. Industry consolidation is occurring at a rapid pace as we move through our current business cycle. IT professionals are faced not only with moving data centers, but also adding users, combining applications and optimizing storage resources. These activities require connectivity over distance.
4. Regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and the public relations impacts of lost data have caused enterprises to look beyond static tape backups to secure network based data protection.

Question: What do storage professionals really need to know about MAN & WAN transport technologies?

Answer: The good news is that storage professionals do not need a strong background in networking technology. The most important skill is being able to communicate application bandwidth and performance requirements in a form that your network IT group or service provider can understand. This is my focus for my "MAN/WAN Storage Networking" SNIA tutorial. Many storage professionals believe they can't afford data center to data center networking because they over-estimate the amount of bandwidth they really need.

Fibre Channel, FICON and Ethernet ports now run well over 1Gbps, however the disk mirroring applications driving data across the MAN & WAN only require a small fraction of the bandwidth provided by the port. Any storage professional can estimate their required bandwidth just by dividing a day's worth of incremental data by the time the data's changing. For example, a 10 Terabyte disk that is mirrored over a 10 hour period with a 5% daily change rate only requires 112Mbps of bandwidth, well below the 1 or 2 Gbps they may have thought.

Besides understanding their bandwidth requirements, they need to understand and communicate their application's performance requirements. SANs are not like LANs. Fibre Channel & FICON protocols make certain assumptions around the quality of the link both in terms of not losing data as well as timely data delivery. Disk mirroring applications do not easily tolerate networks designed for user to server access that utilize lost data retransmit technologies or inconsistent delivery rates such as TCP/IP. Storage professionals must work with their service provider and disk mirroring application vendor to ensure the performance of their network service aligns to the requirements of the application.

Through my tutorial, participants are introduced to common service provider technologies that offer many levels of bandwidth, availability and performance. These include wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), time division multiplexing (T3/SONET) and Ethernet (private & IP-based).

A firm understanding of the SAN application requirements is much more important that knowing the gory details of MAN & WAN networking.

Question: What are services and equipment vendors doing to meet this demand?

Answer: Successful service providers and communication equipment vendors understand the specific needs of Storage Networking over distance. They are offering solutions that interface natively into SAN equipment with performance enhancing features such as data compression, flow control and write acceleration. Previously, storage professionals were forced to use channel extenders that forced Fibre Channel over ATM over SONET or Fibre Channel over IP over a common router infrastructure. Both solutions were costly, complex and offered poor application performance.

A good example of a commercially available service is AT&T's StorageConnect™ managed service. Instead of forcing the customer to buy something that doesn't fit in their SAN, they offer native Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON and/or Gigabit Ethernet ports sized specifically to meet the applications bandwidth with data compression, flow control, security and minimal delivery delay.

Many storage and communication equipment vendors also offer these solutions in the form of Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) that optimizes dark fiber or T3/SONET or Gigabit Ethernet private line services for storage extension applications. In addition to the CPE itself, these vendors also offer professional services so the enterprise can focus on their data and business core competency, not MAN or WAN networking.

Question: What is your view on the tutorials as teaching tools to the industry?

Answer: I am very pleased to participate with SNIA to provide real world storage technology information and training to industry professionals. It's often difficult to learn through all the self-serving corporate marketing collateral and sale pitches flying around. These tutorials are unique in that they are supported and exhaustively reviewed by experts across many institutions and corporations to provide an objectively neutral view on a variety of topics important to storage and networking professionals. I appreciate SNIA's dedication to learning and hope to continue our long relationship.

About the Interviewee
Stephen Barr, Director of Solutions Sales & Systems Engineering, Ciena Communications Inc., is responsible for driving customer value though the positioning, sales, design and delivery of carrier class enterprise solutions through the Ciena Alliance Partner Program.

Stephen's 19 years in the Storage, Data and Telecom industries provide him with a unique blend of experiences relevant to solving today's challenges in transporting large amounts of data over distance while ensuring high security and application performance.

Stephen previously held positions at Ciena as Director of Carrier Partner Business Development, Senior Manager of Storage Extension Applications Marketing and Optical Networks Product Marketing. Prior to joining Ciena, Stephen was responsible for the development and marketing of several Nortel Data and Optical solutions including Optical Ethernet, RPR over SONET, SDSL/ADSL/VDSL, Fiber to the premise and telecom switching.

Mr. Barr holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

SNIA China continues to deliver unique educational materials for its regional storage industry through its professional development program titled "Storage from ABC to Professional Road," which delivers SNIA curriculum-based courses online. Designed to provide all Chinese end users and solutions providers with expanded educational opportunities and additional options for the China IT industry, this vendor-neutral tutorial information has been developed by the SNIA China Education Committee.

The Web-based program offers a series of courses that are 30-45 minutes each on a variety of storage networking topics. Courses include everything from the fundamentals to more advanced offerings.

Since starting the program in October 2006, SNIA China has trained more than 300 technology professionals. Supported by sponsors Cisco, EMC, HDS, HP and Quantum, users are encouraged to participate and can access the program directly at http://webcast.snia.org.cn.

By Michael Peterson, SNIA-DMF Chief Strategy Advocate

Indicators from all over the world are signaling that digital information being retained for long-term is at high risk. A recent article in the entertainment industry publication, "Variety," highlights these risks, including efforts by the Academy's Science and Technology Council to work on the problem. It appears the entertainment industry is deciding to revert to transferring digital masters to film for long term retention until the problem is solved.

The SNIA's 100 Year Archive Task Force (100 YrATF) was formed in 2004 to address the storage domain part of the long-term digital information retention problem. Many standards exist that cover archive practices, but none of them deal with the storage problems beyond framing them in an architecture and saying "use best practices" and "migrate physically and logically". The National Archives standing 'best practice' for migration is "If it is on disk, migrate every 3 years. If it is on tape, migrate every 5." But, migration doesn't scale to cost-effectively support the size of today's exponentially growing digital information repositories. Consequently, we can confidently say that current long-term digital information retention practices are broken and new methods are needed. The 100 YrATF joins the Academy's Science and Technology Council in confirming this point.

Projects currently underway in the 100 YrATF include:

• Completing the 100 YrATF Requirements survey report. 276 survey responses were received and the final report is now in review. Public release by the SNIA Data Management Forum is scheduled within a month.
• Progressing with a proposal for a logical migration format based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) ISO-standard's Archival Information Package (AIP) called 'Self-Contained-Self Describing Data Format (SC-SDCF)." We are investigating the use of the OAIS AIP framework, as a preferred container methodology. Further, the integration with XAM will allow applications and utilities to write in a standard-long-term format with the appropriate controls and metadata, thus eliminating the logical migration problem.
• Establishing a reference model for long term digital information retention best practices in the storage domain. By using the requirements feedback from the recent study, the 100 YrATF has identified a proposed storage architecture that meets these requirements and may eliminate any further need for 'physical migration' as a periodic, manually initiated practice.

We are on a path to solving the two 'holy-grail' storage problems, logical and physical migration. Now is a great time to get involved in these exciting projects. It's easy - all you have to do is register at the following URL: http://www.snia-dmf.org/register/index.shtml.

To find out more about the 100 Year Archive Task force, visit http://www.snia-dmf.org/100year/index.shtml and http://advisorygroups.snia.org/apps/org/workgroup/100yrarchive/index.php.

The 100 YrATF meets every two weeks via teleconference. Come join us!

The SNIA Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP) recently reached a major milestone, having certified more than 2,000 professionals worldwide. The SNCP is firmly established as the key program for vendor-neutral, systems-level credentials that integrate with and complement individual vendor certifications, and the success of this program is an indication of its importance to the industry.

As storage networking continues to become increasingly specialized and complex, storage certification allows IT professionals to prove their value to employers and help build their careers. The SNCP establishes a uniform standard for the storage networking industry by which individual knowledge and skill sets can be verified. Before the establishment of the SNIA SNCP, there was no single standard by which to measure a professional's knowledge of storage networking technologies. Through its certification program, the SNIA is establishing open standards for storage networking certification that IT organizations can trust.

Resellers can now leverage SNIA vendor-neutral credentials to promote storage networking operations or services, which, in turn, gives them more credibility with their customers. Few customer environments-if any-have only one vendor in-house. Individuals will be able to leverage a SNIA exam or credential into multiple vendor programs. In addition, customers, or end-users, can demand vendor-neutral credentials from vendors and resellers alike. Certification is providing professionals working with storage networking in the IT industry with credentials that validate their expertise level, as well as establishing companies as leaders in the industry.

The structure of the SNCP continues to be enhanced to reflect the advancement and growth of storage networking technologies over the past few years, and to provide for expanded offerings for the future. In April 2006, a new worldwide Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP) Curriculum Program was announced to ensure a standardized, SNIA-validated curriculum across a variety of training providers. Six leading training providers have received validation and are delivering courses across North and South America, Europe, India, and Asia-Pacific regions.

Currently, SNIA offers five credentials, including the SNIA Sales Qualified Sales Professional (SQSP), SNIA Certified Professional (SCP), SNIA Certified Systems Engineer (SCSE), SNIA Certified Architect (SCA), and SNIA Certified Storage Networking Expert (SCSN-E).

To learn more about how you can join the ranks of the more than 2,000 SNIA-certified professionals, visit http://www.snia.org/education/certification/.