UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) are inviting submissions of proposals for presentation at the first annual Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) conference.  PIRL brings together software development leaders interested in learning about programming methodologies for persistent memories and sharing their experiences with others. This is a meeting for developer project leads on the front lines of persistent programming; not sales, marketing, or non-technical management. PIRL is small, with attendance limited to under 100 people, including speakers.  It will discuss what real developers have done, and want to do, with persistent memory.  It will involve what worked, what didn’t, what was easy and hard, what was surprising, and what others can learn from the experience.  Presenters are encouraged, and even expected, to show and write code live in the presentation in a comfortable and dynamic peer environment. Possibilities for presentations include, but are not limited to: •  Experiences on a particular project •  Live code development showing new concepts •  Code challenges •  New tools for programming All attendees will be provided access to a development environment to respond to code challenges, or to show their own work in small forums.  This is intended to be a competition-free atmosphere for peers to network with each other to advance the use of persistent memory in the industry and academia.  By combining many of the industry leaders with the academic lights driving practical applications of new technology, peers at PIRL will encourage forward progress for adoption of persistent memory in the marketplace. Keynote speakers include key personnel from Dreamworks, VMWare, Oracle, Eideticom, and Intel. PIRL will be hosted by the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.  It will be held at Scripps Forum on July 22nd to 23rd, 2019, with optional events starting July 21st. Pre-registration will be $400. We’re excited to present this new conference, and we’re excited for you to participate.  Submit your presentation or code challenge idea today. Submissions are due by Monday, June 10th.  

In the last few years, Ethernet equipment vendors have announced big increases in line speeds, shipping 25, 50, and 100 Gigabits-per -second (Gb/s) speeds and announcing 200/400 Gb/s. At the same time Fibre Channel vendors have launched 32GFC, 64GFC and 128GFC technology while InfiniBand has reached 200Gb/s (called HDR) speed. But who exactly is asking for these faster new networking speeds, and how will they use them? Are there servers, storage, and applications that can make good use of them? How are these new speeds achieved? Are new types of signaling, cables and transceivers required? How will changes in PCIe standards and bandwidth keep up? And do the faster speeds come with different distance limitations? These are among the questions our panel of experts will answer at the next live SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast on May 21, 2019, "New Landscape of Network Speeds." Join us to learn:

• How these new speeds are achieved
• Where they are likely to be deployed for storage
• What infrastructure changes are needed to support them

Register today to save your spot. And don't forget to bring your questions. Our experts will be available to answer them on the spot.

In the last few years, Ethernet equipment vendors have announced big increases in line speeds, shipping 25, 50, and 100 Gigabits-per -second (Gb/s) speeds and announcing 200/400 Gb/s. At the same time Fibre Channel vendors have launched 32GFC, 64GFC and 128GFC technology while InfiniBand has reached 200Gb/s (called HDR) speed. But who exactly is asking for these faster new networking speeds, and how will they use them? Are there servers, storage, and applications that can make good use of them? How are these new speeds achieved? Are new types of signaling, cables and transceivers required? How will changes in PCIe standards and bandwidth keep up? And do the faster speeds come with different distance limitations? These are among the questions our panel of experts will answer at the next live SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast on May 21, 2019, “New Landscape of Network Speeds.” Join us to learn:

• How these new speeds are achieved
• Where they are likely to be deployed for storage
• What infrastructure changes are needed to support them

Register today to save your spot. And don’t forget to bring your questions. Our experts will be available to answer them on the spot.

Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems.

On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish™, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.”

To kick things off, Richelle Ahlvers, SNIA board member, chair of the Scalable Storage Management TWG, and storage management architect, Broadcom, will provide a brief overview of the SNIA Swordfish storage management specification. Swordfish is an extension to the DMTF Redfish^® specification that provides a unified approach for the management of storage equipment and services in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments. Swordfish is built using a RESTful interface over HTTPS in JSON format, and also provides support for OpenAPI.

Richelle will also discuss the lifecycle of creating consistent open standard interfaces, from definition to implementations, and how the open source ecosystem plays a role in open infrastructure management.

Xing Yang, principal architect at Huawei Technologies, and project and architecture lead in OpenSDS, will explain how the open source community addresses storage integration challenges in scale-out cloud native environments and connects siloed data solutions.

The session will be interactive and attendees will be encouraged to join in the conversation, get their questions answered and share their knowledge while making valuable new connections. Add the BoF to your conference schedule here.

While visiting the summit, stop by to see SNIA in booth #B13 in the Open Infrastructure Marketplace and pick up the latest Swordfish swag!

Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems.

On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.”

To kick things off, Richelle Ahlvers, SNIA board member, chair of the Scalable Storage Management TWG, and storage management architect, Broadcom, will provide a brief overview of the SNIA Swordfish storage management specification. Swordfish is an extension to the DMTF Redfish^® specification that provides a unified approach for the management of storage equipment and services in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.  Swordfish is built using a RESTful interface over HTTPS in JSON format, and also provides support for OpenAPI.

Richelle will also discuss the lifecycle of creating consistent open standard interfaces, from definition to implementations, and how the open source ecosystem plays a role in open infrastructure management.

Xing Yang, principal architect at Huawei Technologies, and project and architecture lead in OpenSDS, will explain how the open source community addresses storage integration challenges in scale-out cloud native environments and connects siloed data solutions.

The session will be interactive and attendees will be encouraged to join in the conversation, get their questions answered and share their knowledge while making valuable new connections. Add the BoF to your conference schedule here.

While visiting the summit, stop by to see SNIA in booth #B13 in the Open Infrastructure Marketplace and pick up the latest Swordfish swag!

Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems.

On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.”

To kick things off, Richelle Ahlvers, SNIA board member, chair of the Scalable Storage Management TWG, and storage management architect, Broadcom, will provide a brief overview of the SNIA Swordfish storage management specification. Swordfish is an extension to the DMTF Redfish^® specification that provides a unified approach for the management of storage equipment and services in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.  Swordfish is built using a RESTful interface over HTTPS in JSON format, and also provides support for OpenAPI.

Richelle will also discuss the lifecycle of creating consistent open standard interfaces, from definition to implementations, and how the open source ecosystem plays a role in open infrastructure management.

Xing Yang, principal architect at Huawei Technologies, and project and architecture lead in OpenSDS, will explain how the open source community addresses storage integration challenges in scale-out cloud native environments and connects siloed data solutions.

The session will be interactive and attendees will be encouraged to join in the conversation, get their questions answered and share their knowledge while making valuable new connections. Add the BoF to your conference schedule here.

While visiting the summit, stop by to see SNIA in booth #B13 in the Open Infrastructure Marketplace and pick up the latest Swordfish swag!

Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems. On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish™, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.” To kick things off, Richelle Ahlvers, SNIA board member, chair of the Scalable Storage Management TWG, and storage management architect, Broadcom, will provide a brief overview of the SNIA Swordfish storage management specification. Swordfish is an extension to the DMTF Redfish^® specification that provides a unified approach for the management of storage equipment and services in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.  Swordfish is built using a RESTful interface over HTTPS in JSON format, and also provides support for OpenAPI. Richelle will also discuss the lifecycle of creating consistent open standard interfaces, from definition to implementations, and how the open source ecosystem plays a role in open infrastructure management. Xing Yang, principal architect at Huawei Technologies, and project and architecture lead in OpenSDS, will explain how the open source community addresses storage integration challenges in scale-out cloud native environments and connects siloed data solutions. The session will be interactive and attendees will be encouraged to join in the conversation, get their questions answered and share their knowledge while making valuable new connections. Add the BoF to your conference schedule here. While visiting the summit, stop by to see SNIA in booth #B13 in the Open Infrastructure Marketplace and pick up the latest Swordfish swag!

Many followers (dare we say fans?) of the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) are familiar with our popular webcast series "Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask." If you've missed any of the nine episodes we've done to date, they are all available on-demand and provide a 101 lesson on a range of storage related topics like buffers, storage controllers, iSCSI and more. Our next "Too Proud to Ask" webcast on May 16, 2019 will be "Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Taupe – The Memory Pod." Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we've built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components. The only purpose of storage is to persist the data between periods of processing it on a CPU. And the only purpose of memory is to provide a cache of fast accessible data to feed the huge appetite of compute. Currently, we build effective systems in a cost-optimal way by using appropriate quantities of expensive and fast memory (DRAM for instance) to cache our cheaper and slower storage. But fast memory has no persistence at all; it's only storage that provides the application the guarantee that storing, modifying or deleting data does exactly that. Memory and storage differ in other ways. For example, we load from memory to registers on the CPU, perform operations there, and then store the results back to memory by loading from and storing to byte addresses. This load/store technology is different from storage, where we tend to move data back and fore between memory and storage in large blocks, by using an API (application programming interface). It's clear the lines between memory and storage are blurring as new memory technologies are challenging the way we build and use storage to meet application demands. New memory technologies look like storage in that they're persistent, if a lot faster than traditional disks or even Flash based SSDs, but we address them in bytes, as we do memory like DRAM, if more slowly. Persistent memory (PM) lies between storage and memory in latency, bandwidth and cost, while providing memory semantics and storage persistence. In this webcast, our SNIA experts will discuss:

• Fundamental terminology relating to memory
• Traditional uses of storage and memory as a cache
• How can we build and use systems based on PM?
• Persistent memory over a network
• Do we need a new programming model to take advantage of PM?
• Interesting use cases for systems equipped with PM
• How we might take better advantage of this new technology

Register today for this live webcast on May 16^th. Our experts will be available to answer the questions that you should not be too proud to ask! And if you're curious to know why each of the webcasts in this series is associated with a different color (rather than a number), check out this SNIA NSF blog that explains it all.

Many followers (dare we say fans?) of the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) are familiar with our popular webcast series “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask.” If you’ve missed any of the nine episodes we’ve done to date, they are all available on-demand and provide a 101 lesson on a range of storage related topics like buffers, storage controllers, iSCSI and more. Our next “Too Proud to Ask” webcast on May 16, 2019 will be “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Taupe – The Memory Pod.” Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components. The only purpose of storage is to persist the data between periods of processing it on a CPU. And the only purpose of memory is to provide a cache of fast accessible data to feed the huge appetite of compute. Currently, we build effective systems in a cost-optimal way by using appropriate quantities of expensive and fast memory (DRAM for instance) to cache our cheaper and slower storage. But fast memory has no persistence at all; it’s only storage that provides the application the guarantee that storing, modifying or deleting data does exactly that. Memory and storage differ in other ways. For example, we load from memory to registers on the CPU, perform operations there, and then store the results back to memory by loading from and storing to byte addresses. This load/store technology is different from storage, where we tend to move data back and fore between memory and storage in large blocks, by using an API (application programming interface). It’s clear the lines between memory and storage are blurring as new memory technologies are challenging the way we build and use storage to meet application demands. New memory technologies look like storage in that they’re persistent, if a lot faster than traditional disks or even Flash based SSDs, but we address them in bytes, as we do memory like DRAM, if more slowly. Persistent memory (PM) lies between storage and memory in latency, bandwidth and cost, while providing memory semantics and storage persistence. In this webcast, our SNIA experts will discuss:

• Fundamental terminology relating to memory
• Traditional uses of storage and memory as a cache
• How can we build and use systems based on PM?
• Persistent memory over a network
• Do we need a new programming model to take advantage of PM?
• Interesting use cases for systems equipped with PM
• How we might take better advantage of this new technology

Register today for this live webcast on May 16^th. Our experts will be available to answer the questions that you should not be too proud to ask! And if you’re curious to know why each of the webcasts in this series is associated with a different color (rather than a number), check out this SNIA NSF blog that explains it all.

Thanks to all who attended or listened on-demand to our recent SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) webcast on Trends in Worldwide Media and Entertainment Storage. Motti Beck of Mellanox Technologies and Tom Coughlin, SSSI Education Chair and analyst with Coughlin Associates, got rave reviews for their analysis of this important market.  Feedback comments included “Good overview with enough details for me to learn something”; “Really appreciate the insight into the ME businesses”; and “Just in time for the upcoming NAB Show!”.  We appreciate your interest and enthusiasm! Important to every SNIA webcast are the Questions – and we got quite a few on this one.  Thanks in advance to Tom Coughlin, who provided the answers below.  Send any more questions to us at asksssi@snia.org with the subject- M&E Webcast Questions.  Happy reading, and we hope to see you at one of our upcoming webcasts or events. Q.  What is the best form to store(age) the format video, NAS or SAN? A.  Well, it depends.  A SAN can directly access the data blocks that make up the video file, these can be quickly transported to the workstation.  There they are reassembled into the video file.  A properly configured SAN can provide faster access to data, particularly if many users are accessing the same data in the storage system.  SANs can be appropriate for a larger production facility.  A NAS may provide somewhat slower access, but provides individual access to individual files.  NAS storage can be an appropriate shared storage for smaller production facilities where there are fewer users or the users don’t access the same files at the same time.   Q.  Are there an M&E-specific performance benchmarks or other qualification tools recommended for storage subsystem selection? A.  That is an interesting question.  I know about several general storage performance benchmarks, such as SPC (https://spcresults.org/benchmarks).  There are storage performance tests offered by some M&E industry suppliers, such as one from AJA System Test (https://www.aja.com/products/aja-system-test).  This is probably an area that could use some additional development.   Q.  Revenue share by type and use case – is this on the decline or rise?  What are the YoY trends? A.  If I understand this right, you are asking questions about revenue growth for different media and entertainment use cases or different parts of the workflow on an annual basis.  That information is in the 2018 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report (https://tomcoughlin.com/tech-papers/)   Q.  A question for Tom Coughlin.  You  said 66% will use private or public cloud for archiving in 2018.  Do you have the breakdown between the the two? A.  It is a combination but given the concerns of the industry, I suspect this is mostly private cloud in 2018.   Q.  When Tom says “post production” storage, is that primary, secondary/nearline, or both? A.  If I understand the question right, this is all storage used in post-production, which can use a primary and secondary storage tier, particularly in a larger facility which is economizing on its storage costs.   Q.  With regard to HDD storage, does the interface trend continue to be SATA/SAS?  Does the back end workload look to benefit from SMR or dual-actuator technology? A.  For the time being HDDs will be SATA and SAS.  There are now some HDD storage systems with NVMe on the back end and it will be interesting to see how this develops.  I am sure that M&E users will benefit from SMR and dual-actuator HDDs.  SMR will be good for active archiving in particular and dual actuator will allow faster access to HDD data, a benefit for video projects.   Q.  Unless I missed it, you made no mention of software-defined storage as a viable method for storing the growing amount of data in M&E.  Was that taken into consideration when you did your survey? A.  Software defined storage can be an important element in media and entertainment storage and is finding increasing use in this and other applications.   Q.  Is the cloud archive, primary copy or secondary (insurance policy with limited to no access)? A.  It depends upon the organization, although I think for many studios and larger organizations, they may keep content on tape and even off-line tape as well.  Cloud archives do allow access to data, the usual issue is the cost of egressing that content.