Storage Field Day

Storage Field Day, hosted by analyst Stephen Foskett, brings together thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format with a carefully selected delegate panel of independent bloggers, speakers, freelance writers, and other social media tech influencers.
 
On March 10, 2017 Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair, will lead a discussion on Hyperscaler storage. As large enterprise customers build their own storage systems using software defined storage and best-in-class commodity components, assembled in racks, a range of issues around drives, APIs and tail latency are emerging. Mark will discuss how the industry can respond to these technical requirements to promote adoption and standards for Hyperscaler storage.
 
Check it out via live stream at 9:00 am PT and on YouTube after the event.

Important Announcement for Prospective SNIA Certification Exam Candidates

SNIA would like to thank all our exam takers for their patience while we transitioned our certification exam program from Prometric to Kryterion. This program is now complete and we are pleased to announce that our exams are now available immediately for on-site test takers in the U.S.  We expect to make an announcement regarding global availability of the exams in early March.
 
Notes for exam takers:

1. Click here and select option 1 to create a new profile with Kryterion.
2. Select ‘Register for an exam,’ select your chosen exam, select a date and time and make payment.
3. Cost for a SNIA exam in the US is now $220.

Please contact us if you have any questions about your exam.
 
The Kryterion Testing Network utilizes over 900 Testing Centers in 120 countries to securely proctor exams worldwide. Click here to learn more about Kryterion or locate your nearest testing center.

Get Straight Answers from the SNIA Swordfish™ Spec Authors

SDC Call for Presentations is Now Open

SNIA welcomes new members:
 
Kalray

Yadro



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

Cloud Architecture in the Data Center and the Impact on the Storage Ecosystem

What Does Hyperconverged Mean to Storage
March 15, 2017
Greg Schulz, Server StorageIO
John Kim, Mellanox
 
Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), along with Cluster or Cloud In Box (CIB) are popular topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption. As part of data infrastructures, CI, CIB and HCI enable simplified deployment of resources across different environments. However, what do these approaches mean for a hyperconverged storage environment? What are the key concerns and considerations related specifically to storage? Most importantly, how do you know that you’re asking the right questions in order to get to the right answers? Find out in this live webcast.
 
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.  Hear Microsoft’s Ned Pyle, program manager of the SMB protocol, discuss the current state of SMB.
 
Architectural Principles for Networked Solid State Storage Access - Part 2
April 19, 2017
Doug Voigt, HPE
J Metz, Cisco
 
New solid state storage technologies are forcing the industry to refine distinctions between networks and other types of system interconnects. The question on everyone’s mind is: when is it beneficial to use networks to access solid state storage, particularly persistent memory? The answer to this question involves application, interconnect, memory technology and scalability factors that can be analyzed in the context of a latency budget. This webcast will explore latency budgets for various types of solid state storage access. These can be used to determine which combinations of interconnects, technologies and scales are compatible with Load/Store instruction access and which are better suited to IO completion techniques such as polling or blocking.
 
Object Drives Now Have a Management Standard
April 20, 2017
Erik Riedel, Dell EMC
Enrico Signoretti, OpenIO
David Slik, NetApp
Alex McDonald, NetApp
 
The growing popularity of object-based storage has resulted in the development of Ethernet-connected storage devices, herein referred to as IP-Based Drives and subsystems supporting object interfaces and in some cases the ability to run localized applications. Typical scale-out storage nodes consist of relatively inexpensive enclosures with IP network connectivity, CPU, Memory and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). While inexpensive to deploy, these solutions become harder to manage over time. To ease management of these drives, SNIA has approved the release of the IP-Based Drive Management Specification. In this webcast, you’ll hear from authors of the specification who’ll discuss how this standard allows drive management to scale to data centers and beyond, enabling automation and software defined data centers.
 
Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask: Getting from Here to There - Sepia Pod
May 9, 2017
Chad Hintz, Cisco
Fred Zhang, Intel
John Kim, Mellanox
Alex McDonald, NetApp
 
This webcast will take a look at some of the terms and concepts that affect Storage Architectures as a whole. In particular, we’ll be looking at those aspects that can help or hinder storage systems inside the network: Encapsulation vs. Tunneling, IOPS vs. Latency vs. Jitter, and Quality of Service, as each of these topics has a profound impact on storage designs and performance, but they are often misunderstood.

Hyper-V Windows Server 2016 Storage QoS and Protocol Updates
Matt Kurjanowicz and Adam Burch, Microsoft
 
Listen to a discussion of the Hyper-V Storage Quality of Service protocol (MS-SQOS) and updates to networked storage requirements for Windows Server 2016 virtual machine hosts.