Explore New SNIA Swordfish™ Resources

If you’re looking for a unified approach in cloud data center environments to manage storage equipment and services in addition to servers, you’ll want to take a look at the recently SNIA approved V1.0.3 of the SNIA Swordfish specification here. SNIA Swordfish is an extension of the DMTF Redfish™ specification, so the same easy-to-use RESTful interface is used, along with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Open Data Protocol (OData), simplifying the way storage can be allocated, monitored and managed.

Download the most recent SNIA Swordfish User’s Guide, which contains several new use cases, best practices, common tasks and education for the users of the Swordfish API. Please visit the SNIA Swordfish website frequently, as new resources are continually being updated.

New SNIA Technical Work Available for Public Review

During the development of technical work, SNIA makes available work-in-progress draft and approved specifications for public review and feedback. New technical work on SMI-S v1.6.1 rev 6, Encrypted Object CDMI Extension 1.1.1i, Simple IP Based Drive Mockup-4, and IP Based Drive Array Mockup-2 can all be reviewed here.

SNIA also develops a wide range of standards to enhance the interoperability of various storage systems. Some of the latest involve Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) Specification v1.0, Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API v1.0, and IP-Based Drive Management Specification v1.0. See the complete standards portfolio here.

PM Summit Presentations and Videos Available

Last month’s SNIA Persistent Memory Summit was filled to capacity bringing together industry leaders, solution providers, and users of technology to understand the ecosystem driving system memory and storage into a single, unified “persistent memory” entity. You can now download the presentations from the Summit or watch the presentations on-demand through the SNIAVideo channel.

SDC 2017 Call for Presentations

SDC Call for Presentations is now open:  SNIA's Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is the only event created BY storage developers FOR storage developers. SDC 2017 will take place September 11-14 in Santa Clara, CA.

The SDC planning team is now seeking storage development professionals willing to share their knowledge and experience by submitting a presentation proposal for consideration at SDC. We are looking for presentations on a wide range of storage development topics. Each session will be 50 minutes in length. We are also looking for proposals for tutorials and panel discussions. View details on topics, deadlines and submission process here.

New Member

SNIA welcomes new member:

Quest Software

SNIA membership continues to grow. See our full list of SNIA members here.

SNIA Volunteers Honored

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 to SNIA. Read the full list of volunteers who were honored at this year’s Annual Members’ Symposium.

Featured Video

How Persistent Memory Will Bring an Entirely New Structure to Large Data Computing

As data proliferation continues to explode, computing architectures are struggling to get the right data to the processor efficiently, both in terms of time and power. But what if the best solution to the problem is not faster data movement, but new architectures that can essentially move the processing instructions into the data? Persistent memory arrays present just such an opportunity, however, there are challenges and obstacles that must be overcome. Industry veterans, Jim Pappas, Co-chair SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative from Intel, and Steve Pawlowski of Micron, outline a vision for the future of computing and why persistent memory systems have the potential to be more revolutionary than perhaps anyone imagines.

Upcoming Webcasts

Everything You Wanted To Know about Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Buffering
February 14, 2017
J Metz, Cisco
Mark Rogov, Dell EMC
Dave Minturn, Intel
Rob Davis, Mellanox
Alex McDonald, NetApp

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. Knowing how buffers and queues work in storage can help make your storage system shine. In this pod of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, we’re going to be demystifying 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 an 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.

Long-term Data Retention: Challenges, Standards and Best Practices
February 16, 2017
Simona Rabinovici-Cohen, IBM
Phillip Viani, IBM
Sam Fineberg

While the move from paper to digital information over the past decades has greatly improved information access, it complicates information preservation due to digital format changes, media obsolescence, media failure, and loss of contextual metadata. The Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) facilitates long-term data storage and preservation. It provides an effective and efficient way to preserve and secure digital information for many decades, even with the ever-changing technology landscape.  Join this webcast to learn:

Key challenges of long-term data retention
How the SIRF format works and its key elements
How SIRF supports different storage containers - disks, tapes, CDMI and the cloud
Availability of Open SIRF

Everything You Wanted To Know about Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: iSCSI
March 2, 2017
J Metz, Cisco
Loy Evans, Cisco
Rob Davis, Mellanox
Alex McDonald, NetApp

One of the most used technologies in data centers today is the storage protocol iSCSI. 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. This webcast will cover the basic elements when considering using iSCSI in your architecture, discussing:

iSCSI definition
iSCSI offload
Host-based iSCSI
TCP offload

Like nearly everything else in storage, there is more here than just a protocol.

Rockin’ and Rollin’ with SMB3
April 5, 2017
Ned Pyle, Microsoft
John Kim, Mellanox
Alex McDonald, NetApp

Server Message Block (SMB) is the core file-transfer protocol of Windows, MacOS and Samba, and has become widely deployed. The latest iteration of SMB3 is almost unrecognizable when compared to versions only a few years old. Extensive reengineering has led to advanced capabilities that include multichannel, transparent failover, scale out, and encryption. SMB Direct makes use of RDMA networking, creates block transport system and provides reliable transport to zetabytes of unstructured data, worldwide.

Microsoft’s Ned Pyle, program manager of the SMB protocol, will discuss the current state of SMB, including:

Brief background on SMB
An overview of the SMB 3.x family
What changed in SMB 3.1.1
Understanding SMB security, scenarios, and workloads
The deprecation and removal of the legacy SMB1 protocol
How SMB3 supports hyperconverged and scale-out storage

Education and Certification

Announcement for Prospective SNIA Certification Exam Candidates

SNIA was recently advised by our exam hosting company, Prometric, of their intention to withdraw from hosting all IT Computer Based Training (CBT) exams on a global basis, including SNIA exams. SNIA has been working over recent weeks to establish a worldwide testing platform with a new provider, and we are pleased to announce that we have reached agreement with Kryterion to provide access to their global testing centers. The transition of the SNIA exams from Prometric to Kryterion will be completed during February. A further announcement will be made when the exams go live with Kryterion.

Please contact us at certification@snia.org with any questions.

White Papers and Articles

Featured Events

Join SNIA at Container World

SNIA will be presenting and exhibiting at this month’s Container World. Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group Co-Chair from SMART Modular, will speak on Boosting Performance of Data Intensive Applications via Persistent Memory, and Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair from Toshiba, will participate in a panel on Container Adoption Paths into Legacy Infrastructure. The SNIA booth will feature information on cloud standards and a multi-vendor persistent memory solution featuring NVDIMM. Use code SNIA15 here for 15% off conference fees.

Find SNIA at these Events

Container World – Santa Clara, CA – February 21-23, 2017
USENIX FAST - Santa Clara, CA - February 27 - March 2, 2017
Cloud Expo Europe – London, England – March 15-16, 2017
OSCON – Austin, TX – May 8-11. 2017
Creative Storage Conference – Culver City, CA - May 24, 2017
SDC India – Bangalore, India - May 25-16, 2017
Flash Memory Summit – Santa Clara, CA – August 7-10, 2017
Storage Developer Conference - Santa Clara, CA – September 11-14, 2017

We value your feedback. Please send any comments or suggestions to the SNIA Matters editor, Diane Marsili.