Is 10GbE coming of age? Many of us within the SNIA-ESF think so. We have co-authored a new and objective white paper on the subject, “10GbE – Comes of Age.” You can download it at http://snia.org/sites/default/files/10GbElookto40GbE_Final.pdf

In this paper we dive deep into why we believe 2012 is the year for wide 10GbE adoption. There are numerous technical and economic justifications that will compel organizations to take advantage of the significant benefits 10GbE delivers. From virtualization and network convergence, to the general availability of LOM and 10GBASE-T there is no shortage of disruptive technologies converging to drive this protocol forward.

This paper is the foundation for much of our activity for the rest of the year. Our 10GbE live Webcast a couple of weeks ago was very well received. In fact hundreds of people either attended the live event or have viewed it on demand. I encourage you to check it out at http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/50385. We also have two more Webcasts scheduled, one on NFS in August and the other on Flash technology in September. Keep checking this blog for details.

This paper is the result of a collaboration of industry leaders from Broadcom, Dell, Emulex, Intel, and  NetApp. We pride ourselves on keeping things “vendor-neutral.” If you’re in IT, we hope you find this cooperation refreshing. If you’re a vendor, we welcome your participation and urge you to consider joining SNIA and the ESF. Get more info on joining SNIA at http://www.snia.org/member_com/join

With opening day of the Del Mar races in my home town on Wednesday, it seems only fitting to note that the SSSI PCIe SSD taskforce is rounding the last turn in its informational call schedule. If you have a stake in this fast growing technology area, you won't want to miss the final two calls on July 16 and July 30 at 7:00 pm ET/4:00 PM PT. The July 16 call will feature a talk by Narinder Lall of eASIC on PCIe Controllers and a presentation by Walt Hubis of the SNIA Security Technical Work Group on Security and Removable NVRAM PCIe Storage. Join the teleconference at 1-866-439-4480 passcode 25478081# and the webex at snia.webex.com meeting id 797-289-257 passcode pcie2012. Finally, if you've missed any calls to this point, catch up by visiting http://snia.org/forums/sssi/pcie. See you at the races!

With opening day of the Del Mar races in my home town on Wednesday, it seems only fitting to note that the SSSI PCIe SSD taskforce is rounding the last turn in its informational call schedule.

If you have a stake in this fast growing technology area, you won’t want to miss the final two calls on July 16 and July 30 at 7:00 pm ET/4:00 PM PT.

The July 16 call will feature a talk by Narinder Lall of eASIC on PCIe Controllers and a presentation by Walt Hubis of the SNIA Security Technical Work Group on Security and Removable NVRAM PCIe Storage.

Join the teleconference at 1-866-439-4480 passcode 25478081# and the webex at snia.webex.com meeting id 797-289-257 passcode pcie2012.

Finally, if you’ve missed any calls to this point, catch up by visiting http://snia.org/forums/sssi/pcie.

See you at the races!

The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) will be presenting a live Webcast on 10GbE on Thursday, July 19^th.  Together with my SNIA colleagues, David Fair and Gary Gumanow, we’ll be discussing the technical and economic justifications that will likely make 2012 the “breakout year” for 10GbE.  We’ll cover the disruptive technologies moving this protocol forward and highlight the real-world benefits early adopters are seeing. I hope you will join us!

The Webacast will begin at 8:00 a.m. PT/11:00 a.m. ET. Register Now: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/50385

This event is live, so please come armed with your questions. We’ll answer as many as we can on the spot and include the full Q&A here in a SNIA ESF blog post.

We look forward to seeing you on the 19^th!

The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) will be presenting a live Webcast on 10GbE on Thursday, July 19^th.  Together with my SNIA colleagues, David Fair and Gary Gumanow, we’ll be discussing the technical and economic justifications that will likely make 2012 the “breakout year” for 10GbE.  We’ll cover the disruptive technologies moving this protocol forward and highlight the real-world benefits early adopters are seeing. I hope you will join us!

The Webacast will begin at 8:00 a.m. PT/11:00 a.m. ET. Register Now: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/50385

This event is live, so please come armed with your questions. We’ll answer as many as we can on the spot and include the full Q&A here in a SNIA ESF blog post.

We look forward to seeing you on the 19^th!

The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) will be presenting a live Webcast on 10GbE on Thursday, July 19^th.   Together with my SNIA colleagues, David Fair and Gary Gumanow, we'll be discussing the technical and economic justifications that will likely make 2012 the "breakout year" for 10GbE.  We'll cover the disruptive technologies moving this protocol forward and highlight the real-world benefits early adopters are seeing. I hope you will join us! The Webacast will begin at 8:00 a.m. PT/11:00 a.m. ET. Register Now: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/50385 This event is live, so please come armed with your questions. We'll answer as many as we can on the spot and include the full Q&A here in a SNIA ESF blog post. We look forward to seeing you on the 19^th!

I recently attended Cisco Live in San Diego last week and wanted to share some of my impressions of the show.

First of all, the weather was a disappointment. I’m a native Californian (the northern state of course) and I was looking forward to some sweet weather instead of the cool overcast climate. It’s been so nice in Boston, I have been spoiled.

Attendance was huge. I heard something north of 17,000 attendees. I don’t know if that was actual attendees or registrations. But, it was a significant number and I had several engaging conversations about data center trends, applications, as well as general storage inquiries with the attendees.

Presenting at the Intel Booth

My buddies at Intel asked to make a couple of presentations at their booth and I spoke on the current status of 10GbE adoption and the value it offers. My two presentations were in the morning of the first two full days of the show. Things didn’t look good when only a few attendees were seated at the time we were about to start. My first impression seeing the empty seats in the theater was, “the Intel employees better make a great audience.”

Fortunately, the 20 or so seats filled just as I started with more visitors standing in the back and side. The number of attendees doubled the second day, so maybe I built a reputation.  Yeah, right.

Anyway, let me share just a couple of the ideas from my presentation here:

1)      10GbE is an ideal network infrastructure that offers great flexibility and performance with the ability to support a variety of workloads and applications. For storage, both block and file based protocols are supported which is ideal for today’s highly virtualized infrastructures.

2)      The ability to consolidate data traffic over a shared network promises significant capital and operational benefits for organizations currently supporting data centers with mixed network technologies. These benefits include fewer ports, cables, and components which mean less equipment to purchase, manage, power and cool. Goodness all around.

3)      There are a couple of applications in particular that are making 10GbE particularly useful.

1. Virtualization – high VM density drives increase bandwidth requirements from server to storage
2. Flash / SSD – flash memory drives increased performance at both the server and storage which requires increased bandwidth

After the presentation, I asked for questions and was pleased with the number and quality of questions. Sure, we were giving away swag (Intel t-shirts). But, the relevance of the questions was particularly interesting. Many customers were considering deploying converged networks or just moving to Ethernet from Fibre Channel infrastructures. Some of the questions included, where would you position iSCSI vs FCoE? What are the ideal use cases for each? When do you expect to see 40GbE or 100GbE and for what applications? What about other network technologies, such as Infiniband?

Interestingly, very few if any were planning to move to 16Gb Fibre Channel. Now, this was a Cisco show, so I would expect attendees to be there because they favor Cisco’s message and technology or are in the process of evaluating it. So, given Cisco’s strength and investment in 10GbE, it shouldn’t be a surprise that most attendees at the show, or at least my presentation, were leaning that direction. But, I didn’t expect it to be so one sided.

Conclusion

Interest in vendor technology shows is clearly surpassing other industry events, and Cisco Live is no exception. And each Cisco Live event continues to reflect greater interest from customers in 10GbE in the datacenter.

I recently attended Cisco Live in San Diego last week and wanted to share some of my impressions of the show. First of all, the weather was a disappointment. I'm a native Californian (the northern state of course) and I was looking forward to some sweet weather instead of the cool overcast climate. It's been so nice in Boston, I have been spoiled. Attendance was huge. I heard something north of 17,000 attendees. I don't know if that was actual attendees or registrations. But, it was a significant number and I had several engaging conversations about data center trends, applications, as well as general storage inquiries with the attendees. Presenting at the Intel Booth My buddies at Intel asked to make a couple of presentations at their booth and I spoke on the current status of 10GbE adoption and the value it offers. My two presentations were in the morning of the first two full days of the show. Things didn't look good when only a few attendees were seated at the time we were about to start. My first impression seeing the empty seats in the theater was, "the Intel employees better make a great audience." Fortunately, the 20 or so seats filled just as I started with more visitors standing in the back and side. The number of attendees doubled the second day, so maybe I built a reputation.   Yeah, right. Anyway, let me share just a couple of the ideas from my presentation here: 1)           10GbE is an ideal network infrastructure that offers great flexibility and performance with the ability to support a variety of workloads and applications. For storage, both block and file based protocols are supported which is ideal for today's highly virtualized infrastructures. 2)           The ability to consolidate data traffic over a shared network promises significant capital and operational benefits for organizations currently supporting data centers with mixed network technologies. These benefits include fewer ports, cables, and components which mean less equipment to purchase, manage, power and cool. Goodness all around. 3)           There are a couple of applications in particular that are making 10GbE particularly useful.

1. Virtualization – high VM density drives increase bandwidth requirements from server to storage
2. Flash / SSD – flash memory drives increased performance at both the server and storage which requires increased bandwidth

After the presentation, I asked for questions and was pleased with the number and quality of questions. Sure, we were giving away swag (Intel t-shirts). But, the relevance of the questions was particularly interesting. Many customers were considering deploying converged networks or just moving to Ethernet from Fibre Channel infrastructures. Some of the questions included, where would you position iSCSI vs FCoE? What are the ideal use cases for each? When do you expect to see 40GbE or 100GbE and for what applications? What about other network technologies, such as Infiniband? Interestingly, very few if any were planning to move to 16Gb Fibre Channel. Now, this was a Cisco show, so I would expect attendees to be there because they favor Cisco's message and technology or are in the process of evaluating it. So, given Cisco's strength and investment in 10GbE, it shouldn't be a surprise that most attendees at the show, or at least my presentation, were leaning that direction. But, I didn't expect it to be so one sided. Conclusion Interest in vendor technology shows is clearly surpassing other industry events, and Cisco Live is no exception. And each Cisco Live event continues to reflect greater interest from customers in 10GbE in the datacenter.

SNIA's Solid State Storage Initiative has just released a revised Client SSS Performance Test Specification (PTS-Client) which adds a new write saturation test and refines existing tests. The Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (PTS) is a device-level performance test suite for benchmarking and comparing performance among SAS, SATA and PCI Express SSDs Revision 1.1 of the PTS-Client updates tests for IOPS, throughput and latency to more accurately reflect the workload conditions under which Client SSDs are used.  The PTS-Client v1.1 also adds a Write Saturation test that measures the initial Fresh-Out-of-Box state of SSDs and their performance evolution as data is randomly written to the device. Eden Kim, Chair of SNIA’s SSS Technical Working Group, describes the primary updates to PTS-Client v1.1 as adjustments to preconditioning ranges and test boundaries.   Taken together, these parameters create a repeatable test stimulus that more accurately reflects the workload characteristics of SSDs used in a single user environment The PTS-Client v1.1 also adds an easily understandable description of each test, which helps the user to understand the purpose of the test, the test flow, and guidance on how to interpret the test results. Sample test results using the PTS-Client v1.1 have been posted to the SNIA SSSI Understanding PTS Performance webpage.  

SNIA’s Solid State Storage Initiative has just released a revised Client SSS Performance Test Specification (PTS-Client) which adds a new write saturation test and refines existing tests.

The Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (PTS) is a device-level performance test suite for benchmarking and comparing performance among SAS, SATA and PCI Express SSDs

Revision 1.1 of the PTS-Client updates tests for IOPS, throughput and latency to more accurately reflect the workload conditions under which Client SSDs are used.  The PTS-Client v1.1 also adds a Write Saturation test that measures the initial Fresh-Out-of-Box state of SSDs and their performance evolution as data is randomly written to the device.

Eden Kim, Chair of SNIA’s SSS Technical Working Group, describes the primary updates to PTS-Client v1.1 as adjustments to preconditioning ranges and test boundaries.   Taken together, these parameters create a repeatable test stimulus that more accurately reflects the workload characteristics of SSDs used in a single user environment The PTS-Client v1.1 also adds an easily understandable description of each test, which helps the user to understand the purpose of the test, the test flow, and guidance on how to interpret the test results.

Sample test results using the PTS-Client v1.1 have been posted to the SNIA SSSI Understanding PTS Performance webpage.