Storage Performance Benchmarking: Part 2

With all the different storage arrays and connectivity protocols available today, knowing the best practices can help improve operational efficiency and ensure resilient operations. VMware’s storage global service has reported many of the common service calls they receive. In this webcast, we will share those insights and lessons learned by discussing:
- Common mistakes when setting up storage arrays
- Why iSCSI is the number one storage configuration problem
- Configuring adapters for iSCSI or iSER
- How to verify your PSP matches your array requirements
- NFS best practices
- How to maximize the value of your array and virtualization
- Troubleshooting recommendations

Kick off the new year with a new SNIA Persistent Memory and NVDIMM Special Interest Group webcast on how applications can take advantage of Persistent Memory today with NVDIMM - the go-to Persistent Memory technology for boosting performance for next generation storage platforms. NVDIMM standards have paved the way to simple, plug-n-play solutions. If you're a developer or integrator who hasn't yet realized the benefits of NVDIMMs in your products, you will want to attend to learn about NVDIMM functionality, applications, and benefits. You'll come away with an understanding of how NVDIMMs fit into the persistent memory landscape.

Join SSSI members and respected analysts Tom Coughlin and Jim Handy for a look into their new Emerging Memory and Storage Technologies Report. Tom and Jim will examine emerging memory technologies and their interaction with standard memories, how a new memory layer improves computer performance, and the technical advantages and economies of scale that contribute to the enthusiasm for emerging memories. They will provide an outlook on market projections and enabling and driving applications. The webcast is the perfect preparation for the 2019 SNIA Persistent Memory Summit January 24, 2019.

If you’re a storage equipment vendor, management software vendor or end-user of the ISO approved SNIA Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), you won’t want to miss this presentation. Enterprise storage industry expert Mike Walker will provide an overview of new indications, methods, properties and profiles of SMI-S 1.7 and the newly introduced version, SMI-S 1.8. If you haven’t yet made the jump to SMI-S 1.7, Walker will explain why it’s important to go directly to SMI-S 1.8.

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.

Scale-out storage is increasingly popular for cloud, high-performance computing, machine learning, and certain enterprise applications. It offers the ability to grow both capacity and performance at the same time and to distribute I/O workloads across multiple machines.

But unlike traditional local or scale-up storage, scale-out storage imposes different and more intense workloads on the network. Clients often access multiple storage servers simultaneously; data typically replicates or migrates from one storage node to another; and metadata or management servers must stay in sync with each other as well as communicating with clients. Due to these demands, traditional network architectures and speeds may not work well for scale-out storage, especially when it’s based on flash. Join this webinar to learn:

•Scale-out storage solutions and what workloads they can address
•How your network may need to evolve to support scale-out storage
•Network considerations to ensure performance for demanding workloads
•Key considerations for all flash

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog: http://bit.ly/scale-out-q-a

Building a cloud storage architecture requires both storage vendors, cloud service providers and large enterprises to consider new technical and economic paradigms in order to enable a flexible and cost efficient architecture.

Economic:
Cloud infrastructure is often procured by service providers and large enterprises in the traditional way – prepay for expected future storage needs and over provision for unexpected changes in demand. This requires large capital expenditures with slow cost recovery based on fluctuating customer adoption. Giving these cloud service providers flexibility in the procurement model for their storage allows them to more closely align the expenditure on infrastructure resources with the cost recovery from customers, optimizing the use of both CapEx and OpEx budgets.

Technical:
Clouds inherently require often unpredictable scalability – both up and down. Building a storage architecture with the ability to rapidly allocate resources for a specific customer need and reallocate resources based on changing customer requirements allows the cloud service provider to optimize storage capacity and performance pools in their data center without compromising the responsiveness to the change in needs. Such architecture should also align to the datacenter level orchestration system to allow for even higher level of resource optimization and flexibility.

In this webcast, you will learn:
•How modern storage technology allows you to build this infrastructure
•The role of software defined storage
•Accounting principles
•How to model cloud costs of new applications and or re-engineering existing applications
•Performance considerations

For datacenter applications requiring low-latency access to persistent storage, byte-addressable persistent memory (PM) technologies like 3D XPoint and MRAM are attractive solutions. Network-based access to PM, labeled here PM over Fabrics (PMoF), is driven by data scalability and/or availability requirements. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network protocols are a good match for PMoF, allowing direct RDMA Write of data to remote PM. However, the completion of an RDMA Write at the sending node offers no guarantee that data has reached persistence at the target. This webcast will outline extensions to RDMA protocols that confirm such persistence and additionally can order successive writes to different memories within the target system.

The primary target audience is developers of low-latency and/or high-availability datacenter storage applications. The presentation will also be of broader interest to datacenter developers, administrators and users.

After you watch, check-out our Q&A blog from the webcast: http://bit.ly/2DFE7SL

The recent data explosion is a huge challenge for storage and IT system designers. How do you crunch all that data at a reasonable cost? Fortunately, your familiar SAS comes to the rescue with its new 24G speed. Its flexible connection scheme already allows designers to scale huge external storage systems with low latency. Now the new high operating speed offers the throughput you need to bring big data to its knobby knees! Our panel of storage experts will present practical solutions to today’s petabyte problems and beyond.

The Long Term Retention Technical Working Group and the Data Protection Committee will review the results of the 2017 100-year archive survey. In addition to the survey results, the presentation will cover the following topics:
· How the use of storage for archiving has evolved in ten years
· What type of information is now being retained and for how long
· Changes in corporate practices
· Impact of technology changes such as Cloud

In the history of enterprise storage there has been a trend to move from local storage to centralized, networked storage. Customers found that networked storage provided higher utilization, centralized and hence cheaper management, easier failover, and simplified data protection, which has driven the move to FC-SAN, iSCSI, NAS and object storage.

Recently, distributed storage has become more popular where storage lives in multiple locations but can still be shared. Advantages of distributed storage include the ability to scale-up performance and capacity simultaneously and--in the hyperconverged use case--to use each node (server) for both compute and storage. Attend this webcast to learn about:
•Pros and cons of centralized vs. distributed storage
•Typical use cases for centralized and distributed storage
•How distributed works for SAN, NAS, parallel file systems, and object storage
•How hyperconverged has introduced a new way of consuming storage

After the webcast, please check out our Q&A blog http://bit.ly/2xSajxJ

Network-intensive applications, like networked storage or clustered computing, require a network infrastructure with high bandwidth and low latency. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) supports zero-copy data transfers by enabling movement of data directly to or from application memory. This results in high bandwidth, low latency networking with little involvement from the CPU.

In the next SNIA ESF “Great Storage Debates” series webcasts, we’ll be examining two commonly known RDMA protocols that run over Ethernet; RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and IETF-standard iWARP. Both are Ethernet-based RDMA technologies that reduce the amount of CPU overhead in transferring data among servers and storage systems.

The goal of this presentation is to provide a solid foundation on both RDMA technologies in a vendor-neutral setting that discusses the capabilities and use cases for each so that attendees can become more informed and make educated decisions.

Join to hear the following questions addressed:

•Both RoCE and iWARP support RDMA over Ethernet, but what are the differences?
•Use cases for RoCE and iWARP and what differentiates them?
•UDP/IP and TCP/IP: which uses which and what are the advantages and disadvantages?
•What are the software and hardware requirements for each?
•What are the performance/latency differences of each?

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

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://bit.ly/2OH6su8

What new security requirements apply to Persistent Memory (PM)? While many existing security practices such as access control, encryption, multi-tenancy and key management apply to persistent memory, new security threats may result from the differences between PM and storage technologies. The SNIA PM security threat model provides a starting place for exposing system behavior, protocol and implementation security gaps that are specific to PM. This in turn motivates industry groups such as TCG and JEDEC to standardize methods of completing the PM security solution space.

We’re increasingly in a multi-cloud environment, with potentially multiple private, public and hybrid cloud implementations in support of a single enterprise. Organizations want to leverage the agility of public cloud resources to run existing workloads without having to re-plumb or re-architect them and their processes. In many cases, applications and data have been moved individually to the public cloud. Over time, some applications and data might need to be moved back on premises, or moved partially or entirely from one cloud to another.

That means simplifying the movement of data from cloud to cloud. Data movement and data liberation – the seamless transfer of data from one cloud to another – has become a major requirement.

In this webcast, we’re going to explore some of these data movement and mobility issues with real-world examples from the University of Michigan. Register now for discussions on:

•How do we secure data both at-rest and in-transit?
•Why is data so hard to move? What cloud processes and interfaces should we use to make data movement easier?
•How should we organize our data to simplify its mobility? Should we use block, file or object technologies?
•Should the application of the data influence how (and even if) we move the data?
•How can data in the cloud be leveraged for multiple use cases?