Membership in SNIA – An Investment Delivering Results

Membership interest in the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is greater than ever. New programs and initiatives launched by the SNIA in 2010 contributed to a rise in member companies in 2010, and SNIA continues its strong appeal in 2011.

What kinds of companies are joining, and renewing, their membership in the SNIA? Many are those we think of as “traditional” storage and networking companies, including industry leaders and those who hold the keys to becoming future stars. Hot technology areas like cloud, virtualization, data protection, and key industries like healthcare, energy, and education are represented by both vendor and customer companies. And increasingly, complementary industries like telecommunications, managed service providers, and channel providers are joining SNIA member ranks.

Why does a company belong to SNIA? There are as many reasons as members. Often, a company is interested in helping set the direction for the storage networking industry as a whole or for their individual discipline. Working closely with SNIA technical working groups made up of a cross-section of companies, member company representatives can collaborate together in the development of a wide variety of standards to enhance the interoperability of storage systems. Standards activities in areas like cloud data management, common RAID disk data format, iSCSI management API, multipath management API, storage management, and extensible access method are underway. Along with technical knowledge, a SNIA member participating in a technical working group can gain exposure to other standards bodies to better align standards for the entire industry. And member-to-member collaborative activities enhance business-to-business relationships, help better the initial design of a product, and increase its production quality.

Companies with new products in emerging market spaces can establish relationships with industry leaders, and leverage worldwide educational and outreach activities offered by SNIA Forums and Initiatives in the areas of cloud, Ethernet storage, green storage, solid state, and storage management. SNIA membership offers opportunities for members to represent SNIA and their company in technology webcasts, tutorial development and delivery, technology articles and white papers, and blogs, Google groups, Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter postings. Company individuals can join and contribute to committees and special interest groups in data protection and capacity optimization; cloud backup, restore and recovery; cloud archive and preservation; and iSCSI and NFS technologies. And they can reach out to IT technology communities with SNIA events like the Storage Developer Conference, Cloud Burst, SNW, and plugfests, and industry events highlighting cloud, virtualization, and storage technologies.

If your company is not a SNIA member, or if you have basic membership but have not explored the rich variety of Forum and Initiative activities, now is the time to find out how your investment can deliver results. Business development representative Marty Foltyn is waiting to speak with you on how you can leverage your investment in SNIA membership. Contact her at marty.foltyn@snia.org.