The Future of Server Virtualization

Hundreds of companies, both old and new, are providing technology designed to improve customer engagement, ultimately raising customer experience scores. Everything from contact center to CRM to user sentiment to in-app contextual communications to many more areas are part of the customer engagement movement.

This first episode of our Digital Customer Experience series serves as a tutorial of technology categories and providers assisting in any customer interaction and analytics to evaluate success.

The “Great Storage Debates” webcast series continues, this time on FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER. Like past “Great Storage Debates,” the goal of this presentation is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide vendor-neutral education on the capabilities and use cases of these technologies so that attendees can become more informed and make educated decisions.

One of the features of modern data centers is the ubiquitous use of Ethernet. Although many data centers run multiple separate networks (Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC)), these parallel infrastructures require separate switches, network adapters, management utilities and staff, which may not be cost effective.

Multiple options for Ethernet-based SANs enable network convergence, including FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) which allows FC protocols over Ethernet and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) for transport of SCSI commands over TCP/IP-Ethernet networks. There are also new Ethernet technologies that reduce the amount of CPU overhead in transferring data from server to client by using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which is leveraged by iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) to avoid unnecessary data copying.

That leads to several questions about FCoE, iSCSI and iSER:

•If we can run various network storage protocols over Ethernet, what
differentiates them?
•What are the advantages and disadvantages of FCoE, iSCSI and iSER?
•How are they structured?
•What software and hardware do they require?
•How are they implemented, configured and managed?
•Do they perform differently?
•What do you need to do to take advantage of them in the data center?
•What are the best use cases for each?

Join our SNIA experts as they answer all these questions and more on the next Great Storage Debate.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog from our presenters http://bit.ly/2NyJKUM

FICON (Fibre Channel Connection) is an upper-level protocol supported by mainframe servers and attached enterprise-class storage controllers that utilize Fibre Channel as the underlying transport. Mainframes are built to provide a robust and resilient IT infrastructure, and FICON is a key element of their ability to meet the increasing demands placed on reliable and efficient access to data. What are some of the key objectives and benefits of the FICON protocol? And what are the characteristics that make FICON relevant in today’s data centers for mission-critical workloads?

Join us in this live FCIA webcast where you’ll learn:

• Basic mainframe I/O terminology
• The characteristics of mainframe I/O and FICON architecture
• Key features and benefits of FICON

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog: https://fibrechannel.org/ficon-webcast-qa/

Are you a control freak? Have you ever wondered what was the difference between a storage controller, a RAID controller, a PCIe Controller, or a metadata controller? What about an NVMe controller? Aren’t they all the same thing?

In part Aqua of the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcast series, we’re going to be taking an unusual step of focusing on a term that is used constantly, but often has different meanings. When you have a controller that manages hardware, there are very different requirements than a controller that manages an entire system-wide control plane. From the outside looking in, it may be easy to get confused. You can even have controllers managing other controllers!
Here we’ll be revisiting some of the pieces we talked about in Part Chartreuse [https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/215131], but with a bit more focus on the variety we have to play with:
•What do we mean when we say “controller?”
•How are the systems being managed different?
•How are controllers used in various storage entities: drives, SSDs, storage networks, software-defined
•How do controller systems work, and what are the trade-offs?
•How do storage controllers protect against Spectre and Meltdown?
Join us to learn more about the workhorse behind your favorite storage systems.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://bit.ly/2JgcHlM

The SNIA Swordfish™ specification helps to provide 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. Swordfish builds on the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF’s) Redfish® specification using the same easy-to-use RESTful methods and lightweight JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formatting. Join this session to receive an overview of Swordfish including the new functionality added in version 1.0.6 released in March, 2018.

File vs. Block vs. Object Storage

When it comes to storage, a byte is a byte is a byte, isn’t it? One of the truths about simplicity is that scale makes everything hard, and with that comes complexity. And when we’re not processing the data, how do we store it and access it?

The only way to manage large quantities of data is to make it addressable in larger pieces, above the byte level. For that, we’ve designed sets of data management protocols that help us do several things: address large lumps of data by some kind of name or handle, organize it for storage on external storage devices with different characteristics, and provide protocols that allow us to programmatically write and read it.

In this webcast, we'll compare three types of data access: file, block and object storage, and the access methods that support them. Each has its own use cases, and advantages and disadvantages; each provides simple to sophisticated data management; and each makes different demands on storage devices and programming technologies.

Join us as we discuss and debate:

Storage devices
- How different types of storage drive different management & access solutions
Block
- Where everything is in fixed-size chunks
- SCSI and SCSI-based protocols, and how FC and iSCSI fit in
File
- When everything is a stream of bytes
- NFS and SMB
Object
- When everything is a blob
- HTTP, key value and RESTful interfaces
- When files, blocks and objects collide

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog: https://wp.me/p1kTSa-bh

Recently in the IT world it has been announced that VMware may make a reverse merger/acquisition of its current parent company Dell. Reverse mergers, especially with companies as large as these, are pretty rare in the tech world and if it goes through, this could be the biggest tech deal yet.

Does this type of reverse model hold water as a successful digital transformation strategy? In regards to process innovation and business model innovation, what does it mean for customer value creation?

Join this expert panel with Jeanne Morain, Digital Catalyst & Cloud Expert, George Crump, Chief Steward, Storage Switzerland, and Simon Kozlowski, Business Model Innovation Specialist at KNect365 Learning, as they discuss:

- Whether or not the reverse acquisition makes a difference for the customer
- How this impacts consolidation of debt for involved companies
- If/how going public again makes a difference both internally and externally
- What can other companies and parent companies learn/take away from this type of deal?

Join us for a fast-paced and informative 60-minute roundtable as we discuss the latest—and potentially most game-changing—technology disruptors to traditional storage architectures since flash: NVMe over fabric and Storage Class Memory.

It was just five years ago that Flash technology transformed the traditional storage market forever. Modern flash-first arrays are now the new normal for traditional storage. Will a new shared storage access protocol called NVM express over Fabric (NVMe-oF) combined with the advent of storage class memory (SCM) be equally disruptive to traditional storage over the next five years as NAND flash technology was in the past?

Vendors are now announcing new products and future architectures to enable them to support these new technologies. With the help of a lively panel of experts from HPE, Pivot3, and Mellanox, we will unpack this topic and explore how their innovative approaches to leveraging Storage Class Memory and NVMe-oF can radically improve storage products and solutions.

As people learn more about Fibre Channel and are curious about NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe), more questions arise that relate to how storage solutions are going to be affected by the new technology. Perhaps the least understood aspect of storage networks involves distance solutions, and so FCIA has decided to tackle this issue next.

In this webinar you will learn:

•How does Fibre Channel work over distances?
•What are some of the limitations of distance?
•What happens when you are using FC-NVMe?
•What special equipment do you need?

Come spend time with FCIA and speaker Mark Allen, Technical Marketing Engineer Manager for Cisco, to learn how to understand and plan for distance solutions using Fibre Channel.

Agile works well for small, co-located teams that can hover around sticky notes on a Kanban board, and collaborate on-demand. But as initiatives become more complex, and teams become dispersed, Agile can be difficult to scale across the enterprise.

What’s missing in Agile practices today is the ability to see the whole picture. With user stories as the source of record for an application, it’s hard to connect all the dots to see the complete functionality of a feature or capability. Think about the new team who will be developing additional features on that capability - where can they learn everything it does today? How will they know the impact their changes will have on that capability or potentially other capabilities? How will they collaborate on those changes and get them reviewed in a timely manner? How will your business stakeholder understand the impact of new those changes to the overall business process? Storyteller provides a centralized reusable searchable repository of exiting business and technical process models and requirements (business, non-functional and regulatory). In addition we also offer rich visualization, collaboration and review functionalities. These base capabilities are being used today to address the questions above. And - we do it in a way that everyone can understand from Business Stakeholders down to developers and testers.

Storyteller is a key player in Enterprise Agile. We bridge the business gaps in the current agile process. For companies struggling with Agile Transformation, we providing guardrails around writing user stories and feature decomposition. Project teams can save time and effort by using our user story and test plan generation which can them be automatically synched over to ALM tools. We are also a key player in the BizDevOps chain by providing that upfront business alignment so what is produced though “Dev” and delivered and maintained by “Ops” is exactly what “Biz” wanted.

Originally restricted to making better use of physical servers, virtualization has grown to power anything and everything in the modern data center. Along with the technology came the luxury to simplify the provisioning of resources as they are needed.

In this webinar, we will explore how virtualization can be leveraged to quickly and cheaply create servers on-demand and avoid the lengthy delays associated with handling and cabling physical hardware.

Join Petros Koutoupis, Lead Linux Systems Developer for IBM Cloud Object Storage, for a technical deep-dive into Linux operating systems running on virtual machines.

Software is eating the world. It is the catalyst that is driving disruptive innovation and has led to marketing-ease such as software-defined data centers, software-defined storage, software-defined networks, and software-defined anything.

In this session, we will discuss how IT professionals can successfully add value to the software-defined ecosystem as they continuously integrate and continuously deliver application services that meet and exceed any customer’s expectation.

Join this webinar to discuss:
- What are the key tenets of software-defined constructs?
- How do I apply a foundational set of skills like monitoring as a discipline to guarantee success as a software-defined professional?

The ICT sector is moving us inexorably towards a software-enabled digital world, but many still fail to understand the power of this trend, how it is going to impact/benefit the ICT Industries and infrastructures delivering them.

Among topics discussed will be:
- Present and future impact of Software Defined technologies on IT (challenges and opportunities)
- How Software-Defined is enabling the digital transformation
- Best practices and recommendation on adopting software-defined technologies with the future in mind.

This Webinar is aimed at IT professionals and CIOs/CDOs/CTOs seeking to understand more about how software-defined impacts the present and future of enterprises.

With the irruption of Open Source and Software-Defined components in the Data Centre, there has been a shift of cost from licensing and appliances - in the traditional IT - to operations. The challenge in this new era, where all the components evolve faster than adoption, learning curves and skill development, resides in keeping the operations efficient while adding innovation, with its inherent complexity.

During this webinar we will go through best practices to navigate that transition and set up your operations teams to the future while keeping cost contained and services competitive.

In this, the seventh entry in the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series we 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 show you more about the following:

•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.

Please join us on August 1st for another edition of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, as we work towards making you feel more comfortable in the strange, mystical world of storage.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=643

Cohesity is one of the rising stars in the world of data management. They have flipped the data protection market on its ear. In this CEO Series webcast, Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst of Taneja Group will interview Mohit Aron, CEO of Cohesity, to understand the concept of Hyperconverged Secondary Storage and why it matters to the industry. We will explore the advantages it provides for your data protection, test/dev, and data analytics workloads and how Cohesity is different from other solutions on the market. It is time to say goodbye to the old, staid methods of protecting data. The traditional methods simply don’t make sense in the new world of Big Data, Multi and Hybrid cloud and web-scale applications. Join the webcast for a whirlwind tour of new ideas and methods in this space.

Speakers:
Arun Taneja, Founder & Consulting Analyst, Taneja Group
Mohit Aron, Founder & CEO, Cohesity

Server Message Block (SMB) is the core file-transfer protocol of Windows, MacOS and Samba, and has become widely deployed. It’s ubiquitous - a 30-year-old family of network code.

However, 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.

SMB3 forms the basis of hyper-converged and scale-out systems for virtualization and SQL Server. It is available for a variety of hardware devices, from printers, network-attached storage appliances, to Storage Area Networks (SANs). It is often the most prevalent protocol on a network, with high-performance data transfers as well as efficient end-user access over wide-area connections.

In this SNIA-ESF Webcast, 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, first released with Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, MacOS 10.10, Samba 4.1, and Linux CIFS 3.12
•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

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=611