Each SAN transport has its own way to initialize and transfer data. So how do initiators (hosts) and targets (storage arrays) communicate in Fibre Channel (FC) Storage Area Networks (SANs)?

Find out in this live webcast where Fibre Channel experts will answer:

SNIA is pleased to be a sponsor of the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, November 9-10, 2021 in San Jose, CA and also as a virtual event. SNIA SFF standards will be featured in two sessions on Wednesday, November 10: SFF Driving Future Server Needs by Anthony Constantine, and Native NVMe-of Drives: Optimizing Networked Storage Capacity by Mark Carlson.

Everyone enjoys having storage that is fast, reliable, scalable, and affordable. But it turns out different applications have different storage needs in terms of I/O requirements, capacity, data sharing, and security. Some need local storage, some need a centralized storage array, and others need distributed storage—which itself could be local or networked. One application might excel with block storage while another with file or object storage.

Modern data centers systems consist of hundreds of sub-systems that are all connected with optical transceivers, copper cables, and industry standards-based connectors and cages. For interconnecting storage subsystems, two things are happening: Speeds are radically increasing making the maximum reach of copper wire interconnects very short and, at the same time, increasingly larger storage systems are expanding in size and much further apart. This is making longer reach optical technologies much more popular.

NVMe® IP-based SANs (including TCP, RoCE, iWARP) have the potential to provide significant benefits in application environments ranging from the Edge to the Data Center. However, before we can fully unlock NVMe IP-based SAN’s potential, we first need to overcome the NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) discovery problem. This discovery problem, specific to IP based fabrics, can result in the need for Host administrators to explicitly configure each Host to access each of the NVM subsystems in their environment.

SNIA develops a wide range of standards to enhance the interoperability of various storage systems.  With new technologies like computational storage, standards do not exist. As companies develop solutions, questions arise.  Should computational storage have standards for recommended behavior for hardware and software?  Should an application programming interface be defined?

Seamless standards-based open source management will be demonstrated at the first event in the new Intel ON series: Intel InnovatiON. Stop by the SNIA virtual booth and learn how SNIA and DMTF^® are working with the OpenFabrics Alliance to provide IT administrators the ability to add seamless standards-based management of their fabrics and networks to the same SNIA Swordfish^™ and DMTF Redfish ecosystem they are using for their storage and server management.

Storing objects has become commonplace. Object storage provides bulk and undifferentiated storage for unstructured data like photos, video & audio, DNA sequences, files, backups, and it can even protect against ransomware. Object access is also simplified because there are no built-in hierarchies or filesystems of objects, and no devices to manage that look like disks.

The automotive industry is effectively transforming the vehicle into a data center on wheels. Connectedness, autonomous driving, and media & entertainment bring in more and more storage onboard and into the networked data centers. But all the storage in (and for) a car is not created equal. There are 10s if not 100s of different processors on the car. Some are attached to storage and some are not. Each application demands different characteristics from the storage device.

We invite you to attend our 2022 Annual Members Symposium virtually this coming year. Since this event is virtual, we have organized updates to members from all the current Technical Working Groups (TWG), the Forums and Initiatives (F&I) and Committees. We would also like to share a virtual lunch session from the leadership about the 2022 vision and plans for SNIA as a whole. Please join us to see who our Membership Award Recipients are for 2021. As always, we are excited to share and support our membership and working groups and highlight some of the great successes of 2021!