At our most recent webcast, "Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Part Turquoise - Where Does My Data Go?, our panel of experts dove into what really happens when you hit "save" and send your data off. It was an alphabet soup of acronyms as they explained the nuances of and the differences between:

• Volatile v Non-Volatile v Persistent Memory
• NVDIMM v RAM v DRAM v SLC v MLC v TLC v NAND v 3D NAND v Flash v SSDs v NVMe
• NVMe (the protocol)

As promised during the live event, here are answers to all the questions we received. Q. Is SRAM still used today? A. SRAM is still in use today as embedded CACHE (Level 1/2/3) within a CPU and very limited in external standalone packaging... This is due to cost and size/capacity. Q. Does 3D NAND use multiple voltage levels? Or does each layer use just two voltages? A. 3D NAND is much like Planar NAND in operation. Supporting all the versions (SLC, MLC, TLC, and future even QLC). Other challenges exist going vertical, but are unrelated to voltage levels being supported Q. How does Symbolic IO work with the NVDIMM-P? A. SNIA does not comment on individual companies. Please contact Symbolic IO directly. Q. When do you see NVMe over Fibre Channel becoming mainstream? Just a "guesstimate" A. At the time of this writing, FC-NVMe (the standardized form of NVMe over Fabrics using Fibre Channel) is in the final ratification phase and is technically stable. By the time you read this it will likely already be completed. The standard itself is already a mainstream form of NVMe-oF, and has been a part of the NVMe-oF standard since the beginning. Market usage for NVMe-oF will ramp up as vendors, products, and ecosystem developments continue to announce innovations. Different transport mechanisms solve different problems, and the uses for Fibre Channel are not 100% overlapped with Ethernet or Fibre Channel. Having said that, it would not be surprising that both FC and Ethernet-based NVMe-oF grew at a somewhat similar pace for the next couple of years. Q. How are networked NVMe SSDs addressed? A. Each NVMe-oF transport layer has an addressing scheme that is used for discovery. NVMe SSDs actually connect to the Fabric transport through a port connected with the NVMe controller. A thorough description of how this works can be found at the SNIA ESF webcast: "Under the Hood with NVMe over Fabrics." You can also check out the Q&A blog from that webcast. Q. NVMe has any specific connectors like SATA or SAS would do? A. When looking at the physical drive connector, the industry came up with an edge connector called "U.2" that supports NVMe, SAS and SATA drives. However, the backplane in the host system must be connected correctly Q. Other than a real-estate savings, what advantage does the 3D NAND offer?     Speed? A. 3D NAND brings to us the added space used for the floating gate. When we get down to 20nm and 16nm (the measured width of the that floating gate) it only allows a few electrons, yes actual electrons, to separate the states. With 3D NAND we have room grow the gate, allowing more electrons per level and gaining us the ability to have things like TLC and beyond a reality. Don't forget, you can check out the  recorded version  of the webcast at your convenience and you can  download the webcasts slides  as well if you'd like to follow along. Remember, this webcast was part of series. I encourage you to  register today  for our next one, which will be on September 28^, 2017 at 10:00 am PT – Part Cyan – Storage Management. And please visit the  SNIA ESF website  for our full library of ESF webcasts.      

At our most recent webcast, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Part Turquoise – Where Does My Data Go?, our panel of experts dove into what really happens when you hit “save” and send your data off. It was an alphabet soup of acronyms as they explained the nuances of and the differences between:

• Volatile v Non-Volatile v Persistent Memory
• NVDIMM v RAM v DRAM v SLC v MLC v TLC v NAND v 3D NAND v Flash v SSDs v NVMe
• NVMe (the protocol)

As promised during the live event, here are answers to all the questions we received. Q. Is SRAM still used today? A. SRAM is still in use today as embedded CACHE (Level 1/2/3) within a CPU and very limited in external standalone packaging… This is due to cost and size/capacity. Q. Does 3D NAND use multiple voltage levels? Or does each layer use just two voltages? A. 3D NAND is much like Planar NAND in operation. Supporting all the versions (SLC, MLC, TLC, and future even QLC). Other challenges exist going vertical, but are unrelated to voltage levels being supported Q. How does Symbolic IO work with the NVDIMM-P? A. SNIA does not comment on individual companies. Please contact Symbolic IO directly. Q. When do you see NVMe over Fibre Channel becoming mainstream? Just a “guesstimate” A. At the time of this writing, FC-NVMe (the standardized form of NVMe over Fabrics using Fibre Channel) is in the final ratification phase and is technically stable. By the time you read this it will likely already be completed. The standard itself is already a mainstream form of NVMe-oF, and has been a part of the NVMe-oF standard since the beginning. Market usage for NVMe-oF will ramp up as vendors, products, and ecosystem developments continue to announce innovations. Different transport mechanisms solve different problems, and the uses for Fibre Channel are not 100% overlapped with Ethernet or Fibre Channel. Having said that, it would not be surprising that both FC and Ethernet-based NVMe-oF grew at a somewhat similar pace for the next couple of years. Q. How are networked NVMe SSDs addressed? A. Each NVMe-oF transport layer has an addressing scheme that is used for discovery. NVMe SSDs actually connect to the Fabric transport through a port connected with the NVMe controller. A thorough description of how this works can be found at the SNIA ESF webcast: “Under the Hood with NVMe over Fabrics.” You can also check out the Q&A blog from that webcast. Q. NVMe has any specific connectors like SATA or SAS would do? A. When looking at the physical drive connector, the industry came up with an edge connector called “U.2” that supports NVMe, SAS and SATA drives. However, the backplane in the host system must be connected correctly Q. Other than a real-estate savings, what advantage does the 3D NAND offer?   Speed? A. 3D NAND brings to us the added space used for the floating gate. When we get down to 20nm and 16nm (the measured width of the that floating gate) it only allows a few electrons, yes actual electrons, to separate the states. With 3D NAND we have room grow the gate, allowing more electrons per level and gaining us the ability to have things like TLC and beyond a reality. Don’t forget, you can check out the recorded version of the webcast at your convenience and you can download the webcasts slides as well if you’d like to follow along. Remember, this webcast was part of series. I encourage you to register today for our next one, which will be on September 28^, 2017 at 10:00 am PT – Part Cyan – Storage Management. And please visit the SNIA ESF website for our full library of ESF webcasts.      

In Part Vermillion of our SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcast series – we examined the terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. That’s why we called it “What if Programming and Networking Had a Storage Baby” If you missed the live webcast, you can watch it on-demand. The discussion from our panel of experts generated a lot of good questions. As promised, here are answers to them all.  Q. With regard to persistent memory, how does one decide if it’s better to use load/store or access via I/O? A. Legacy applications will not change and hence will access the persistent memory the way they were written. If your legacy application needs a lot of memory and you want to use the new persistent memory as just a big and cheap (volatile) memory, then the access will be byte addressable (load/store). If your legacy application uses block storage then it will use the persistent memory using block addressing. New applications can take advantage of using byte addressing and persistency. They can keep all their data structures in memory, and these data structures will also be persistent! This saves applications the need to serialize before storing and to de-serialize when retrieving from storage and enables many other ways to optimize the software. Q. Can you go over again a bit more slowly how byte accessible and LBA change with persistent memory? A. Persistent memory can be accessed in three different ways.

1. Using byte addressing, in which case it behaves like a big (volatile) memory
2. Using logical block addressing, in which case it behaves like a block storage device
3. Using SNIA NVM Programming Model that enable byte addressing along with persistency. In this case byte being written into the device can be made persistent with special APIs

You can configure and decide what model is better use for your application. Q. Is that like flash? A. Persistent memory is a technology that is persistent like flash, but has byte addressing. It can be implemented using underlying flash, battery backed DRAM, Phase Change Memory and more. Q. You were going to parse out flash vs. NVMe, I think. Also, how will the elements discussed during the session impact these evolving technologies? A. Flash is a non-volatile memory technology that supports block addressing. PCM is another non-volatile technology which is newer that supports byte addressing (which implies that it can also do block addressing by emulation). NVMe describes an interface to access non-volatile memory technology, by placing the non-volatile memory over the PCI bus. Storage Class Memory is yet another interface to access non-volatile memory, by placing the non-volatile memory over the memory bus. With this in mind: 1) It is common to see NVMe devices with backing flash devices. They will support block addressable. They have the option to expose a small byte addressable memory buffer as well on the PCI (typically a DRAM), which may or may not be volatile. 2) It is common to see Storage Class Memory with backing PCM device, or with DRAM (that can backup itself to flash on power failure). They will support byte addressable. Q. Regarding SMB & CIFS protocols, is SMB or CIFS the deprecated one? A. The name CIFS hasn’t been used in a while; it’s now all SMB. SMB version1 is deprecated; see this Microsoft article. Don’t use CIFS! Q. Are there any rules of thumb in regards to the efficiency of block vs. file vs. object stores from the storage capacity overhead and network “busyness”? A. Effectively, as you get closer to the lower-level block storage devices, your storage networking architecture needs to become more deterministic. That is, you begin to start caring more about the number of hosts connecting to a particular storage target (fan-in ratio) and the ratio of bandwidth the target has compared to the bandwidth that the hosts connecting to it have (oversubscription). Highly-transactional block storage protocols, such as Fibre Channel, FCoE and lossless iSCSI, for example, will need to have very low oversubscription ratios (sometimes as low as 4:1, depending on the type of application/workload). Most are somewhat more forgiving, and 16:1 and 20:1 are not uncommon. When you move into file-based systems, that oversubscription can be a lot higher (there is no general rule of thumb here, but the oversubscription can be in the low hundreds:1). Object-based systems are so scaled and distributed, that there really are no oversubscription limits at all, because those systems are not highly transactional. Q. Does an object always have to be replaced in entirety? How do systems handle updates to large objects? A. The rule is that you shouldn’t take a lock on an object. Classically, the whole object should be replaced. Updating is not straightforward. Traditional “get/release” locking is too expensive in terms of latency over geographic distances, too hard to manage in a distributed environment, is hard to scale, needs recovery in the case of failure, and introduces state to what is basically storage built for stateless operations. Plus, the object may be sharded across multiple physical systems. Some object systems do allow what they call “pessimistic locking” (take a lock for a fixed period of time, say 10 seconds) but it’s not a true lock that you obtain then release. It’s more like a window of opportunity and is often called, and acts like, a lease. There are also other techniques, like “optimistic concurrency” (using a unique identifier, try and then check if your identifier was successful) and “last writer wins” (as it says, the last write is the one that the storage system remembers). Many systems do this by snapshotting the object, allowing updates on the copy, and then atomically swapping them. Object systems differ in what they permit. In general, applications need to be aware that they may, very occasionally, not be successful when modifying objects, and to have strategies to deal with it, like retrying or even simply giving up. Again, you can check out the recorded version of the webcast at your convenience and you can download the webcasts slides as well if you’d like to follow along. Remember, this webcast was part of series. I encourage you to register today for our next one, which will be on August 1^st at 10:00 am PT – Part Turquoise “Where Does My Data Go?” And please visit the SNIA ESF website for our full library of ESF webcasts.  

Containers and persistent memory are both very hot topics these days. Containers are making it easier for developers to know that their software will run, no matter where it is deployed and no matter what the underlying OS is as both Linux and Windows are now fully supported. Persistent memory, a revolutionary data storage technology used in 3d printing london, will boost the performance of next-generation packaging of applications and libraries into containers. On July 27^th, SNIA is hosting a live webcast “Containers and Persistent Memory.” In this webcast you’ll learn:

• What SNIA is doing to advance persistent memory technologies
• What the ecosystem enablement efforts are around persistent memory solutions and their relationship to containerized applications
• How NVDIMMs are paving the way for plug-n-play adoption into containers environments for applications demanding extreme performance
• How next-generation applications (often referred to as cloud-native or web-scale) can take advantage of both NVDIMMs and Containers to achieve both high performance and hyperscale

I hope you will join me, together with my colleagues Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-chair, and Alex McDonald, Co-chair of SNIA Solid State Storage and SNIA Cloud Storage Initiatives, to find out what application developers, storage administrators and the industry want to see to fully unlock the potential of persistent memory in a containerized environment. I encourage you to register today. And please bring your questions. We’ll be on-hand to answer them on the spot. I hope to see you there.

Containers and persistent memory are both very hot topics these days. Containers are making it easier for developers to know that their software will run, no matter where it is deployed and no matter what the underlying OS is as both Linux and Windows are now fully supported. Persistent memory, a revolutionary data storage technology, will boost the performance of next-generation packaging of applications and libraries into containers. On July 27^th, SNIA is hosting a live webcast “Containers and Persistent Memory.” In this webcast you’ll learn:

• What SNIA is doing to advance persistent memory technologies
• What the ecosystem enablement efforts are around persistent memory solutions and their relationship to containerized applications
• How NVDIMMs are paving the way for plug-n-play adoption into containers environments for applications demanding extreme performance
• How next-generation applications (often referred to as cloud-native or web-scale) can take advantage of both NVDIMMs and Containers to achieve both high performance and hyperscale

I hope you will join me, together with my colleagues Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-chair, and Alex McDonald, Co-chair of SNIA Solid State Storage and SNIA Cloud Storage Initiatives, to find out what application developers, storage administrators and the industry want to see to fully unlock the potential of persistent memory in a containerized environment. I encourage you to register today. And please bring your questions. We’ll be on-hand to answer them on the spot. I hope to see you there.

By now, we at the SNIA Storage Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) hope you are familiar with (perhaps even a loyal fan of) the "Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask," popular webcast series. On August 1^st, the "Too Proud to Ask" train will make another stop. In this seventh session, "Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Turquoise - Where Does My Data Go?, we will take a look into the mysticism and magic of what happens when you send your data off into the wilderness. Once you click "save," for example, where does it actually go? When we start to dig deeper beyond the application layer, we often don't understand what happens behind the scenes. It's important to understand multiple aspects of the type of storage our data goes to along with their associated benefits and drawbacks as well as some of the protocols used to transport it. In this webcast we will explain:

• Volatile v Non-Volatile v Persistent Memory
• NVDIMM v RAM v DRAM v SLC v MLC v TLC v NAND v 3D NAND v Flash v SSDs v NVMe
• NVMe (the protocol)

Many people get nervous when they see that many acronyms, but all too often they come up in conversation, and you're expected to know all of them? Worse, you're expected to know the differences between them, and the consequences of using them? Even worse, you're expected to know what happens when you use the wrong one? We're here to help. It's an ambitious project, but these terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. Having a good grasp of these concepts ties in with which type of storage networking to use, and how data is actually stored behind the scenes. Register today to join us for this edition of the "Too Proud To Ask" series, as we work towards making you feel more comfortable in the strange, mystical world of storage. And don't let pride get in the way of asking any and all questions on this great topic. We will be there on August 1^st to answer them! Update: If you missed the live event, it's now available  on-demand. You can also  download the webcast slides.      

By now, we at the SNIA Storage Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) hope you are familiar with (perhaps even a loyal fan of) the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series. On August 1^st, the “Too Proud to Ask” train will make another stop. In this seventh session, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Turquoise – Where Does My Data Go?, we will take a look into the mysticism and magic of what happens when you send your data off into the wilderness. Once you click “save,” for example, where does it actually go? When we start to dig deeper beyond the application layer, we often don’t understand what happens behind the scenes. It’s important to understand multiple aspects of the type of storage our data goes to along with their associated benefits and drawbacks as well as some of the protocols used to transport it. In this webcast we will explain:

• Volatile v Non-Volatile v Persistent Memory
• NVDIMM v RAM v DRAM v SLC v MLC v TLC v NAND v 3D NAND v Flash v SSDs v NVMe
• NVMe (the protocol)

Many people get nervous when they see that many acronyms, but all too often they come up in conversation, and you’re expected to know all of them? Worse, you’re expected to know the differences between them, and the consequences of using them? Even worse, you’re expected to know what happens when you use the wrong one? We’re here to help. It’s an ambitious project, but these terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. Having a good grasp of these concepts ties in with which type of storage networking to use, and how data is actually stored behind the scenes. Register today to join us for this edition of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, as we work towards making you feel more comfortable in the strange, mystical world of storage. And don’t let pride get in the way of asking any and all questions on this great topic. We will be there on August 1^st to answer them!      

This summer, join SNIA as they evangelize members’ industry activity to advance the convergence of storage and memory. SNIA is participating in the first annual European In-Memory Computing Summit, June 20-21, 2017 at the Movenpick Hotel in Amsterdam.  SNIA Europe Vice-Chair and SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) Co-Chair Alex McDonald of NetApp keynotes a session on SNIA and Persistent Memory, highlighting SNIA work on an NVM programming model and persistent memory solutions available today and SNIA is a sponsor in the exhibit hall. Alex’s presentation and SNIA’s booth presence is just one of SNIAs many outreach and education activities on persistent memory taking place this summer. Rob Peglar, SNIA Board of Directors member, was a highlight of Storage Field Day earlier this month, engaging with tech’s leading bloggers on persistent memory advances.  Watch the day’s video on-demand. SNIA’s NVDIMM Special Interest Group exhibited at the JEDEC Server Forum, presenting an application demonstration using multiple member companies’ JEDEC-compliant NVDIMM-Ns.   Eden Kim, chair of SNIA’s Solid State Storage Technical Work Group, speaks later this week at the China Flash Summit on SNIA’s work in persistent memory and solid state storage performance. In August, SNIA will have a major presence at Flash Memory Summit, with a dedicated persistent memory conference track, an NVDIMM Forum, and a persistent memory demonstration area.  Stay tuned for all the details coming in July. Finally, SNIA will continue an interest in containers and persistent memory with a SNIA BrightTalk webcast July 27 at 10:00 am PT/1:00 pm ET. Registration is now open to join SNIA experts Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-Chair, Chad Thibodeau, SNIA Cloud Storage member, and Alex McDonald, Co-Chair of SNIA Solid State Storage and SNIA Cloud Storage Initiatives to find out what customers, storage developers, and the industry want to see to fully unlock the potential of persistent memory in a container environment.

This summer, join SNIA as they evangelize members’ industry activity to advance the convergence of storage and memory. SNIA is participating in the first annual European In-Memory Computing Summit, June 20-21, 2017 at the Movenpick Hotel in Amsterdam.  SNIA Europe Vice-Chair and SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) Co-Chair Alex McDonald of NetApp keynotes a session on SNIA and Persistent Memory, highlighting SNIA work on an NVM programming model and persistent memory solutions available today and SNIA is a sponsor in the exhibit hall. Alex’s presentation and SNIA’s booth presence is just one of SNIAs many outreach and education activities on persistent memory taking place this summer. Rob Peglar, SNIA Board of Directors member, was a highlight of Storage Field Day earlier this month, engaging with tech’s leading bloggers on persistent memory advances.  Watch the day’s video on-demand. SNIA’s NVDIMM Special Interest Group exhibited at the JEDEC Server Forum, presenting an application demonstration using multiple member companies’ JEDEC-compliant NVDIMM-Ns.   Eden Kim, chair of SNIA’s Solid State Storage Technical Work Group, speaks later this week at the China Flash Summit on SNIA’s work in persistent memory and solid state storage performance. In August, SNIA will have a major presence at Flash Memory Summit, with a dedicated persistent memory conference track, an NVDIMM Forum, and a persistent memory demonstration area.  Stay tuned for all the details coming in July. Finally, SNIA will continue an interest in containers and persistent memory with a SNIA BrightTalk webcast July 27 at 10:00 am PT/1:00 pm ET. Registration is now open to join SNIA experts Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-Chair, Chad Thibodeau, SNIA Cloud Storage member, and Alex McDonald, Co-Chair of SNIA Solid State Storage and SNIA Cloud Storage Initiatives to find out what customers, storage developers, and the industry want to see to fully unlock the potential of persistent memory in a container environment.

Following enthusiastic response to their first Storage Field Day in March, SNIA is returning to the lineup on June 15, 2017. Storage Field Day events bring together innovative IT organizations and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation format that is lively – and live streamed. SNIA will present Storage Field Day #13 at their Technology Center in Colorado Springs, CO where organizer Stephen Foskett and a dozen delegates will tour the facility and interact with SNIA members on persistent memory and scalable storage management - two hot storage topics that consumers and the industry want to learn more about. Specifically, SNIA experts will discuss:

• How the convergence of storage and memory will revolutionize computer architecture
• How SNIA is accelerating a system for unified, scalable server and storage management.

In SNIA’s 90 minute session, beginning at 12 pm Pacific/1:00 pm Mountain/ 3:00 pm Eastern, Rob Peglar, senior vice president and CTO at Symbolic IO and a SNIA Board member, will first discuss how SNIA, its technical work, and its outreach initiatives are key contributors to an ecosystem driving system memory and storage into a single, unified “persistent memory” entity. Rob will describe activities of the SNIA Non Volatile Memory Technical Work Group, which is delivering specifications describing the behavior of a common set of software interfaces that provide access to non volatile memory, and the NVDIMM Special Interest Group, which accelerates awareness and adoption of Non Volatile Dual In-line (NVDIMM) memory modules in the marketplace. Richelle Ahlvers, principal storage management architect at Broadcom Limited and co-chair of the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group, will discuss how the customer-centric SNIA Swordfish^TM interface extends the DMTF’s Redfish specification (API) to handle the management of storage equipment and storage services found in modern data centers. By extending the DMTF Redfish API protocol and schema, SNIA Swordfish helps provide a unified approach for the management of storage equipment, data services, and servers in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments. The same easy-to-use RESTful interface is used, along with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and the Open Data Protocol (OData), making it easier for IT administrators to integrate scalable solutions into their data centers. SNIA invites you and your colleagues to watch the live stream of Storage Field Day 13 on June 15th at 1:00 pm MT.  Click here to access the live viewing portal.  If your plans don’t permit you to watch live, check out the SNIAVideo channel for on-demand viewing of all SNIA’s presentations at Storage Field Day, and other technology discussions or follow the conversation on Twitter using #SFD13.