SNIA will be out and about in February in San Francisco and Santa Clara, CA, focused on their security, container, and file storage activities. February 14-17 2017, join SNIA in San Francisco at the RSA Conference in the OASIS Interop: KMIP & PKCS11 booth S2115. OASIS and SNIA member companies will be demonstrating OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) through live interoperability across all participants. SNIA representatives will be on hand in the booth to answer questions about the Storage Security Industry Forum KMIP Conformance Test Program, which enables organizations with KMIP implementations to validate the protocol conformance of those products and meet market requirements for secure, plug-and-play storage solutions. And Eric Hibbard, Chair of the SNIA Security Technical Work Group and CTO Security and Privacy, HDS Corporation, will participate in the “Can I Get a Witness? Technical Witness Bootcamp” session on February 17. The following week, February 21-23, join SNIA at Container World in Santa Clara CA. Enabling access to memory is an important concern to container designers, and Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group Co-Chair from SMART Modular, will speak on Boosting Performance of Data Intensive Applications via Persistent Memory. Integrating containers into legacy solutions will be a focus of a panel where Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair from Toshiba, will speak on Container Adoption Paths into Legacy Infrastructure. SNIA experts will be joined by other leaders in the container ecosystem like Docker, Twitter, ADP, Google, and Expedia . The SNIA booth will feature cloud infrastructure and storage discussions and a demonstration of a multi-vendor persistent memory solution featuring NVDIMM!  (P.S. – Are you new to containers? Get a head start on conference discussions by checking out a December 2016 SNIA blog on Containers, Docker, and Storage.)   Closing out February, find SNIA at their booth at USENIX FAST from February 27-March 2 in Santa Clara, CA, where you can engage with SNIA Technical Council leaders on the latest activities in file and storage technologies. We look forward to seeing you at one (or more) of these events!  

Would you like some ros̩ with your iSCSI? I'm guessing that no one has ever asked you that before. But we at the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum like to get pretty colorful in our "Everything You Wanted To Know about Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask" webcast series as we group common storage terms together by color rather than by number. In our next live webcast, Part Ros̩ РThe iSCSI Pod, we will focus entirely on iSCSI, one of the most used technologies in data centers today. With the increasing speeds for Ethernet, the technology is more and more appealing because of its relative low cost to implement. However, like any other storage technology, there is more here than meets the eye. We've convened a great group of experts from Cisco, Mellanox and NetApp who will start by covering the basic elements to make your life easier if you are considering using iSCSI in your architecture, diving into:

• iSCSI definition
• iSCSI offload
• Host-based iSCSI
• TCP offload

Like nearly everything else in storage, there is more here than just a protocol. I hope you'll register today to join us on March 2^nd and learn how to make the most of your iSCSI solution. And while we won't be able to provide the rosé wine, our panel of experts will be on-hand to answer your questions. Update: If you missed the live event, it's now available  on-demand. You can also  download the webcast slides.

Would you like some rosé with your iSCSI? I’m guessing that no one has ever asked you that before. But we at the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum like to get pretty colorful in our “Everything You Wanted To Know about Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcast series as we group common storage terms together by color rather than by number.

In our next live webcast, Part Rosé – The iSCSI Pod, we will focus entirely on iSCSI, one of the most used technologies in data centers today. With the increasing speeds for Ethernet, the technology is more and more appealing because of its relative low cost to implement. However, like any other storage technology, there is more here than meets the eye.

We’ve convened a great group of experts from Cisco, Mellanox and NetApp who will start by covering the basic elements to make your life easier if you are considering using iSCSI in your architecture, diving into:

• iSCSI definition
• iSCSI offload
• Host-based iSCSI
• TCP offload

Like nearly everything else in storage, there is more here than just a protocol. I hope you’ll register today to join us on March 2^nd and learn how to make the most of your iSCSI solution. And while we won’t be able to provide the rosé wine, our panel of experts will be on-hand to answer your questions.

The backbone of SNIA is its passionate and dedicated volunteers – over 3,500 from 160 companies involved in storage and technology.  At the end of each year, SNIA members vote anonymously to recognize both individuals and groups who have made significant contributions over that year to advancing SNIA’s mission to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards, and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement, and security of information. At the January 2017 Annual Members Symposium, SNIA was pleased to honor the following volunteer members and groups: Individual Awards Jim Pappas from Intel Corporation received the Exceptional Leadership Award for his outstanding leadership advancing the cause of persistent memory within SNIA leading to an impact both on the industry and the Association.  The recent 5^th annual SNIA Persistent Memory Summit, chaired by Pappas, drew over 500 attendees both live and online, and featured sessions demonstrating the deliverance of convergence of storage and memory.   Patrick Boyd from Dell Corporation received the Unsung Hero Award for working tirelessly under the radar, expecting no accolades for his major contributions to the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group.   Doug Voigt from Hewlett Packard Enterprise received the Volunteer of the Year Award for his consistent contributions during 2016 furthering the work of the SNIA Non-Volatile Memory Programming Technical Work Group.   Richelle Ahlvers from Broadcom Limited received the New Contributor of the Year Award for her leadership of a new SNIA program within the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group and contributions to driving a new SNIA Swordfish v.1.0 specification in nine months.   Group Awards   The SNIA Storage Management Initiative received the Outstanding Achievement of a SNIA Technology Community Award for advancing for SNIA the cause of storage management with its achievements leading to an impact on the industry.   SNIA Japan received the Significant Contribution(s) by a Committee or Regional Affiliate Award for its work to advance data storage technology in the industry. The SFF Task Force received the Significant Impact by a Previously Existing Technical Work Group (TWG) or Task Force Award for its member work and efforts to establish the SNIA SFF Technology Affiliate (TA) Technical Work Group to carry forth the longstanding SFF Committee work efforts that has operated since 1990 until mid-2016. The SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group received the New SNIA Group of the Year Award for its innovative, groundbreaking work in providing a unified approach for the management of storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments, making it easier for IT administrators to integrate scalable solutions into their data centers.  

Here at the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF), we’ve been discussing how hyperconverged adoption will impact storage. Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), along with Cluster or Cloud In a Box (CIB) are popular trend topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption. As part of data infrastructures, CI, HCI, and CIB enable simplified deployment of resources (servers, storage, I/O networking, hypervisor, application software) across different environments.

But what do these approaches mean for the storage environment? What are the key concerns and considerations related specifically to storage? How will the storage be connected to (or included in) the platform? Who will protect and backup the data? And most importantly, how do you know that you’re asking the right questions in order to get to the right answers?

Find out on March 15th in a live SNIA-ESF webcast, “What Does Hyperconverged Mean to Storage.” We’ve invited expert Greg Schulz, founder and analyst of Server StorageIO, to answer the questions we’ve been debating. Join us, as Greg will move beyond the hype (pun intended) to discuss:

• What are the storage considerations for CI, CIB and HCI
• Why fast applications and fast servers need fast I/O
• Networking and server-storage I/O considerations
• How to avoid aggravation-causing aggregation (bottlenecks)
• Aggregated vs. disaggregated vs. hybrid converged
• Planning, comparing, benchmarking and decision-making
• Data protection, management and east-west I/O traffic
• Application and server north-south I/O traffic

Register today and please bring your questions. We’ll be on-hand to answer them during this event. We hope to see you there!

Buffers and Queues are part of every data center architecture, and a critical part of performance – both in improving it as well as hindering it. A well-implemented buffer can mean the difference between a finely run system and a confusing nightmare of troubleshooting. Knowing how buffers and queues work in storage can help make your storage system shine. However, there is something of a mystique surrounding these different data center components, as many people don't realize just how they're used and why. Join our team of carefully-selected experts on February 14^th in the next live webcast in our "Too Proud to Ask" series, "Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Teal: The Buffering Pod" where we'll demystify this very important aspect of data center storage. You'll learn:

• What are buffers, caches, and queues, and why you should care about the differences?
• What's the difference between a read cache and a write cache?
• What does "queue depth" mean?
• What's a buffer, a ring buffer, and host memory buffer, and why does it matter?
• What happens when things go wrong?

These are just some of the topics we'll be covering, and while it won't be exhaustive look at buffers, caches and queues, you can be sure that you'll get insight into this very important, and yet often overlooked, part of storage design. Register today and spend Valentine's Day with our experts who will be on-hand to answer your questions on the spot! Update: If you missed the live event, it's now available  on-demand. You can also  download the webcast slides.

Buffers and Queues are part of every data center architecture, and a critical part of performance – both in improving it as well as hindering it. A well-implemented buffer can mean the difference between a finely run system and a confusing nightmare of troubleshooting. Knowing how buffers and queues work in storage can help make your storage system shine.

However, there is something of a mystique surrounding these different data center components, as many people don’t realize just how they’re used and why. Join our team of carefully-selected experts on February 14^th in the next live webcast in our “Too Proud to Ask” series, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Teal: The Buffering Pod” where we’ll demystify this very important aspect of data center storage. You’ll learn:

• What are buffers, caches, and queues, and why you should care about the differences?
• What’s the difference between a read cache and a write cache?
• What does “queue depth” mean?
• What’s a buffer, a ring buffer, and host memory buffer, and why does it matter?
• What happens when things go wrong?

These are just some of the topics we’ll be covering, and while it won’t be exhaustive look at buffers, caches and queues, you can be sure that you’ll get insight into this very important, and yet often overlooked, part of storage design.

Register today and spend Valentine’s Day with our experts who will be on-hand to answer your questions on the spot!

Do you ever feel a bit confused about common storage networking terms? You're not alone. At our recent SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum webcast "Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Mauve," we had experts from Cisco, Mellanox and NetApp explain the differences between:

• Channel vs. Busses
• Control Plane vs. Data Plane
• Fabric vs. Network

If you missed the live webcast, you can watch it on-demand. As promised, we're also providing answers to the questions we got during the webcast. Between these questions and the presentation itself, we hope it will help you decode these common, but sometimes confusing terms. And remember, the "Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask" is a webcast series with a "colorfully-named pod" for each topic we tackle. You can register now for our next webcast: Part Teal, The Buffering Pod, on Feb. 14^th. Q. Why do we have Fibre and Fiber A. Fiber Optics is the term used for the optical technology used by Fibre Channel Fabrics.   While a common story is that the "Fibre" spelling came about to accommodate the French (FC is after all, an international standard), in actuality, it was a marketing idea to create a more unique name, and in fact, it was decided to use the British spelling - "Fibre". Q. Will OpenStack change all the rules of the game? A. Yes. OpenStack is all about centralizing the control plane of many different aspects of infrastructure. Q. The difference between control and data plane matters only when we discuss software defined storage and software defined networking, not in traditional switching and storage. A. It matters regardless. You need to understand how much each individual control plane can handle and how many control planes you have from a overall management perspective. In the case were you have too many control planes SDN and SDS can be a benefit to you. Q. As I've heard that networks use stateless protocols, would FC do the same? A.  Fibre Channel has several different Classes, which can be either stateful or stateless. Most applications of Fibre Channel are Class 3, as it is the preferred class for SCSI traffic, A connection between Fibre Channel endpoints is always stateful (as it involves a login process to the Fibre Channel fabric). The transport protocol is augmented by Fibre Channel exchanges, which are managed on a per-hop basis. Retransmissions are handled by devices when exchanges are incomplete or lost, meaning that each exchange is a stateful transmission, but the protocol itself is considered stateless in modern SCSI-transport Fibre Channel.

iSCSI, as a connection-oriented protocol, creates a nexus between an initiator and a target, and is considered stateful.  In addition, SMB, NFSv4, ftp, and TCP are stateful protocols, while NFSv2, NFSv3, http, and IP are stateless protocols.

Q. Where do CIFS/SMB come into the picture? A. CIFFS/SMB is part of a network stack.   We need to have a separate talk about network stacks and their layers.   In this presentation, we were talking primarily about the physical layer of the networks and fabrics.   To overly simplify network stacks, there are multiple layers of protocols that run on top of the physical layer.   In the case of FC, those protocols include the control plane protocols (such as FC-SW), and the data plane protocols.   In FC, the most common data plane protocol is FCP (used by SCSI, FICON, and FC-NVMe).   In the case of Ethernet, those protocols also include the control plan (such as TCP/IP), and data plane protocols.   In Ethernet, there are many commonly used data plane protocols for storage (such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIFFS/SMB) Update: If you missed the live event, it's now available  on-demand. You can also  download the webcast slides.

Do you ever feel a bit confused about common storage networking terms? You’re not alone. At our recent SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum webcast “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Mauve,” we had experts from Cisco, Mellanox and NetApp explain the differences between:

• Channel vs. Busses
• Control Plane vs. Data Plane
• Fabric vs. Network

If you missed the live webcast, you can watch it on-demand. As promised, we’re also providing answers to the questions we got during the webcast. Between these questions and the presentation itself, we hope it will help you decode these common, but sometimes confusing terms.

And remember, the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” is a webcast series with a “colorfully-named pod” for each topic we tackle. You can register now for our next webcast: Part Teal, The Buffering Pod, on Feb. 14^th.

Q. Why do we have Fibre and Fiber

A. Fiber Optics is the term used for the optical technology used by Fibre Channel Fabrics.  While a common story is that the “Fibre” spelling came about to accommodate the French (FC is after all, an international standard), in actuality, it was a marketing idea to create a more unique name, and in fact, it was decided to use the British spelling – “Fibre”.

Q. Will OpenStack change all the rules of the game?

A. Yes. OpenStack is all about centralizing the control plane of many different aspects of infrastructure.

Q. The difference between control and data plane matters only when we discuss software defined storage and software defined networking, not in traditional switching and storage.

A. It matters regardless. You need to understand how much each individual control plane can handle and how many control planes you have from a overall management perspective. In the case were you have too many control planes SDN and SDS can be a benefit to you.

Q. As I’ve heard that networks use stateless protocols, would FC do the same?

A. Fibre Channel has several different Classes, which can be either stateful or stateless. Most applications of Fibre Channel are Class 3, as it is the preferred class for SCSI traffic, A connection between Fibre Channel endpoints is always stateful (as it involves a login process to the Fibre Channel fabric). The transport protocol is augmented by Fibre Channel exchanges, which are managed on a per-hop basis. Retransmissions are handled by devices when exchanges are incomplete or lost, meaning that each exchange is a stateful transmission, but the protocol itself is considered stateless in modern SCSI-transport Fibre Channel.

iSCSI, as a connection-oriented protocol, creates a nexus between an initiator and a target, and is considered stateful. In addition, SMB, NFSv4, ftp, and TCP are stateful protocols, while NFSv2, NFSv3, http, and IP are stateless protocols.

Q. Where do CIFS/SMB come into the picture?

A. CIFFS/SMB is part of a network stack.  We need to have a separate talk about network stacks and their layers.  In this presentation, we were talking primarily about the physical layer of the networks and fabrics.  To overly simplify network stacks, there are multiple layers of protocols that run on top of the physical layer.  In the case of FC, those protocols include the control plane protocols (such as FC-SW), and the data plane protocols.  In FC, the most common data plane protocol is FCP (used by SCSI, FICON, and FC-NVMe).  In the case of Ethernet, those protocols also include the control plan (such as TCP/IP), and data plane protocols.  In Ethernet, there are many commonly used data plane protocols for storage (such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIFFS/SMB)

by Marty Foltyn SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit makes its fifth annual appearance in Silicon Valley next Wednesday, January 18, and if you are in the vicinity of the Westin San Jose, you owe it to yourself to check it out.  SNIA is well known for its technology-focused, no vendor-hype conferences, and this one-day event will feature 12 presentations and two panels that will “level set” the discussion, review persistent memory usage, describe applications incorporating PM available today, discuss the infrastructure and implementation, and provide a vision of the “next generation” of persistent memory. You’ll meet speakers from SNIA member companies Intel, Micron, Microsemi, VMware, Red Hat, Microsoft, AgigA Tech, Western Digital, and Spin Transfer.  Live demonstrations of persistent memory solutions will be featured from Summit underwriters Intel and the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, and Summit sponsors Microsemi, VMware, AgigA Tech, SMART Modular, and Spin Transfer. Registration is complimentary but limited  -visit http://www.snia.org/pm-summit for the complete agenda and how to sign up.  And, if your travels don’t permit you to attend in person, the Persistent Memory Summit will be live-streamed on the SNIAvideo channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/SNIAVideo.