Cloud Storage: Solving Interoperability Challenges

Are there basic storage terms you should understand, but maybe you don’t?

Then welcome to this webcast series, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Storage, but were too Proud to Ask” where we’re going to take an irreverent, yet still informative look, at the parts of a storage solution in Data Center architectures. We’ll start with the very basics – The Naming of the Parts. We’ll break down the entire storage picture and identify the places where most of the confusion falls. Join us in this first webcast – Part Chartreuse – where we’ll cover:

•What an initiator is
•What a target is
•What a storage controller is
•What a RAID is, and what a RAID controller is
•What a Volume Manager is
•What a Storage Stack is

Oh, and why is this series named after colors, instead of numbers? Because there is no order - each is a standalone seminar. So don’t let pride get in your way.

Register now for our live event on June 22nd.

As part of the successful “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” series, we’ve discussed numerous topics about storage devices, protocols, and networks. As we examine some of these topics further, we begin to tease out some subtle nuances; subtle, yet important nevertheless.

In Part Sepia, we’re going to 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 versus Tunneling
•IOPS vs Latency vs Jitter
•Quality of Service (QoS)

Each of these topics has a profound impact on storage designs and performance, but they are often misunderstood. We’re going to help you become clear on all of these very important storage concepts so that you can grok storage just a little bit more.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=629

Modern storage systems offer a dizzying range of IOPS (from hundreds to millions), as well as different latencies and storage capacities. Many IT managers find it difficult to determine which SSD or flash array to buy for their needs, or even whether they can get the speed they need from standard HDDs. This webcast will present results from a 2012 and follow-up 2016 survey of IT professionals to understand performance, capacity, and cost requirements, including IOPS, storage capacity, and latency, of various applications.

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:

• Major Components of the IP Based Drive Management Standard
• How the standard leverages the DMTF Redfish management standard to manage Kinetic and other IP-Based Drives
• Providing a standard management interface for drives that are part of JBOD or JBOF enclosures

This standard allows drive management to scale to datacenters and beyond, enabling automation and Software Defined Datacenters.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://www.sniacloud.com/?p=257

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. In this talk we 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. In this webcast you’ll learn:

•Why latency is important in accessing solid state storage
•How to determine the appropriate use of networking in the context of a latency budget
•Do’s and don’ts for Load/Store access

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

Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) along with Cluster or Cloud In Box (CIB) are popular trend topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption. As part of data infrastructures, CI, CIB and HCI enable simplified deployment of resources (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software) 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 SNIA-ESF webcast where expert Greg Schulz, founder and analyst of Server StorageIO, will move beyond the hype to discuss:

· What are the storage considerations for CI, CIB and HCI
· Fast applications and fast servers need fast server storage I/O
· Networking and server storage I/O considerations
· How to avoid aggravation-causing aggregation (bottlenecks)
· Aggregated vs. disaggregated vs. hybrid converged
· Planning, comparing, benchmarking and decision-making
· Data protection, management and east-west I/O traffic
· Application and server I/O north-south traffic

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=613

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.

In this webcast, we will be focusing entirely on iSCSI. We’ll start by covering the basic elements that will make your life easier if you are considering using iSCSI in your architecture. In particular we will be talking about:

•iSCSI Definition
•iSCSI offload
•Host-based iSCSI
•TCP offload

Like nearly everything else in storage, there is more here than just a protocol. If you are interested in making the most of your iSCSI solution, this webcast is for you.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=608

The demand for digital data preservation has increased drastically in recent years. Maintaining a large amount of data for long periods of time (months, years, decades, or even forever) becomes even more important given government regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, OSHA, and many others that define specific preservation periods for critical records.

While the move from paper to digital information over the past decades has greatly improved information access, it complicates information preservation. This is due to many factors including digital format changes, media obsolescence, media failure, and loss of contextual metadata. The Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) was created by SNIA to facilitate long-term data storage and preservation. SIRF can be used with disk, tape, and cloud based storage containers, and is extensible to any new storage technologies. 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

SNIA experts that developed the SIRF standard will be on hand to answer your questions.

Buffers, Queues, and Caches, oh my! 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. A well-implemented buffer can mean the difference between a finely run system and a confusing nightmare of troubleshooting. Knowing how buffers and queues work in storage can help make your storage system shine.

However, there is something of a mystique surrounding these different data center components, as many people don’t realize just how they’re used and why. 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 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.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=615

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. Created by SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG), SNIA 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. This session will present an overview of SNIA Swordfish including the new functionality added in version 1.1 released in January 2017.

Get a glimpse of the future of Persistent Memory - it's NOW! Join SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group in another in our series of webcasts on the NVDIMM Cookbook - how to incorporate NVDIMM into your systems and what non-volatile DIMM applications now available. We'll even highlight some of the "knobs" to turn to optimize use of NVDIMM in your applications to ease the way to simple, plug-n-play adoption!

Now that you have become acquainted with basic container technologies and the associated storage challenges in supporting applications running within containers in production; let’s take a deeper dive into what differentiates this technology from what you are used to with virtual machines. Containers can both complement virtual machines and also replace them as they promise the ability to scale exponentially higher. They can easily be ported from one physical server to another or to one platform—such as on-premise—to another—such as public cloud providers like Amazon AWS. In this Webcast, we’ll explore “container best practices” that discuss how to address the various challenges around networking, security and logging. We’ll also look at what types of applications more easily lend themselves to a microservice architecture versus which applications may require additional investment to refactor/re-architect to take advantage of microservices.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://www.sniacloud.com/?p=233

When the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) last looked at the Ethernet Roadmap for Networked Storage in 2015, we anticipated a world of rapid change. The list of advances in 2016 is nothing short of amazing:

•New adapters, switches, and cables have been launched supporting 25, 50, and 100Gb Ethernet speeds including support from major server vendors and storage startups
•Multiple vendors have added or updated support for RDMA over Ethernet
•The growth of NVMe flash and release of the NVMe over Fabrics standard are driving demand for both faster speeds and lower latency in networking
•The growth of cloud, virtualization, hyper-converged infrastructure, object storage, and containers are all increasing the popularity of Ethernet as a storage fabric

The world of Ethernet in 2017 promises more of the same. Now we revisit the topic with a look ahead at what’s in store for Ethernet in 2017. With all the incredible advances and learning vectors, SNIA ESF is here to help you keep up. Here’s some of the things to keep track of in the upcoming year:
•Learn what is driving the adoption of faster Ethernet speeds and new Ethernet storage models
•Understand the different copper and optical cabling choices available at different speeds and distances
•Debate how other connectivity options will compete against Ethernet for the new cloud and software-defined storage networks
•And finally look ahead with us at what Ethernet is planning for new connectivity options and faster speeds such as 200 and 400 Gigabit Ethernet

The momentum is strong with Ethernet, and we’re here to help you keep on top of the lightning-fast changes.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=586

The first wave of adoption of container technology was focused on micro services and ephemeral workloads. The next wave of adoption won’t be possible without persistent, shared storage. This webcast will provide an overview of Docker containers and the inherent challenge of persistence when containerizing traditional enterprise applications. We will then examine the different storage solutions available for solving these challenges and provide the pros and cons of each.

In this webcast we will cover
•Overview of Containers
◦Quick history, where we are now
◦Virtual machines vs. Containers
◦How Docker containers work
◦Why containers are compelling for customers
◦Challenges
◦Storage
•Storage Options for Containers
◦NAS vs. SAN
◦Persistent and non-persistent
•Future Considerations
◦Opportunities for future work

This webcast should appeal to those interested in understanding the basics of containers and how it relates to the storage used with containers.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=580