SNIA is a not-for-profit global organization made up of corporations, universities, startups, and individuals. The members collaborate to develop and promote vendor-neutral architectures, standards, and education for management, movement, and security for technologies related to handling and optimizing data. SNIA focuses on the transport, storage, acceleration, format, protection, and optimization of infrastructure for data.

In this webinar, we’ll introduce the PCI Express (PCIe) interface which is an essential component of AI systems due to its ability to provide high bandwidth and low latency over short distances. We’ll introduce the basics, then discuss the evolution, requirements and benefits. We’ll cover features in PCIe Gen6 including bandwidth, AER (Advanced Error Reporting), DPC (Downstream Port Containment), different modes and signaling techniques. We will also cover PCIe switching and its applications for AI. Join us for an insightful discussion on:
- What is PCIe and why it matters? 
- Discovery/Enumeration and Hot-plugging 
- NTB (Non-Transparent Bridging) applications and uses
- Shared credit/received buffer
- Selective NAK vs. Standard NAK for Flits replay
- PCIe Gen6 Enhancements
- PCIe Switch and applications for AI

Everything You Wanted to Know About PCIe But Were Too Proud to Ask

During SNIA's Cloud Object Storage (COS) multi-vendor compatibility plugfests, it became apparent to the community that a lack of commonly accepted open-source COS test tools is one of the more obvious pain points for the industry. The consensus from the plugfest participants is that we need to collaborate on test tools because often tools are proprietary and biased, and given the number of tools, it is nearly impossible to test them all. Participants found that working together, using other people's test code and results, was highly beneficial, providing broader coverage vs. testing solely with their own tools.

With this ongoing COS Plugfest effort, SNIA member companies aim to create and publish COS interoperability test software suites that help automate protocol compatibility testing for popular industry cloud object storage APIs, wire protocols, and services. If you’re curious about cross-vendor S3 compatibility, join us to learn about the work within our community. 

In this webinar, experts engaged in proprietary and/or open-source software development will discuss:
· The real-world need for COS interoperability test tools
· Examples of compatibility gaps
· Highlight open-source test suites (e.g., Ceph, Versity and others) 
· Progress to date from ongoing testing
· How to get involved

SNIA Cloud Object Storage Test Tools (Open-Source Industry Interoperability Project)

Agentic AI is an emergent and disruptive paradigm beyond generative AI that carries great promise and great risk. With generative AI, a large language model (LLM) generates content as the result of a prompt. With agentic AI, the language model now generates actions to execute on behalf of a user using tools at its disposal. It has agency to act on your behalf and even run autonomously.  But how can this be done safely and effectively for enterprises?
 
This webinar will introduce Agentic AI and cover:
• What is agentic AI?
• What makes it different from generative AI?
• Adoption challenges and what to consider when evaluating solutions for enterprise use
• Sample use case
 
Join us to understand both the risks and benefits of agentic AI for enterprises use cases.

Agentic AI – Use Cases, Benefits, Risks

Explore cutting-edge innovations in solid-state drive (SSD) power efficiency and liquid cooling, designed to mitigate AI workload bottlenecks and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in data centers. By focusing on optimizing SSD performance per watt, we can significantly enhance data center sustainability, operational efficiency, and economic viability.
Key topics include:
1. NVMe® Power Tuning Techniques: Maximizing performance per watt through advanced power management strategies.
2. SSD Controller Architecture Breakthroughs: Leveraging hardware offloads and computational storage innovations to improve energy efficiency.
3. Liquid-Cooled SSD Technologies: Pioneering advancements in liquid cooling that enable significant reductions in power consumption and facilitate the transition to fan-less server designs.
By examining the latest trends in immersion and liquid cooling technologies, this presentation will demonstrate their critical role in driving data center performance, sustainability, and cost-effectiveness forward. Join us to discover how these advancements can help overcome challenges in high-density AI environments.

Unlocking Sustainable Data Centers: Optimizing SSD Power Efficiency and Liquid Cooling for AI Workloads

SNIA's Cloud Object Storage community organized and hosted the industry first open multi-vendor compatibility testing (Plugfest) at SDC’24, in Santa Clara, CA. Most of the participants focused on their S3 server and client implementations. Community driven testing revealed significant areas to collaborate, including ambiguities among protocol options, access control mechanisms, missing or incorrect response headers, unsupported API calls and unexpected behavior (as well as sharing best practices and fixes). The success of this event led to community demand for more SNIA Cloud Object Storage Plugfests.

In this webinar, SNIA Cloud Object Storage Plugfest participants will discuss real-world issues hampering interoperability among various S3 implementations, from both server and client perspectives, covering:

• Goals and collaborative efforts of this multi-vendor community
• S3 compatibility challenges and why they happen
• This Community’s effort to identify and fix issues at SNIA Cloud Object Storage Plugfests
• The value of multi-vendor compatibility testing

Community Driven S3 Compatibility Testing

Join Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, Mahesh Natu of the CXL Consortium, and Torry Steed of SMART Modular Technologies as they delve into Compute Express Link® (CXL), a groundbreaking technology that expands server memory beyond traditional limits and boosts bandwidth. CXL enables seamless memory sharing, reduces costs by optimizing resource utilization, and supports different memory types. Discover how CXL is transforming computing systems with its economic and performance benefits, and explore its future impact across various market segments.

Unlocking CXL's Potential: Revolutionizing Server Memory and Performance

In today's world of AI/ML, high-performance computing, and data centers, RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) is essential due to its ability to provide high-speed, low-latency data transfer. This technology enhances scalability, reduces CPU overhead, and ensures efficient handling of massive data volumes, making it crucial for modern computing environments. But how does it actually work?

In this session, we'll define RDMA, explore its historical development, and its significant benefits. In addition, we’ll provide an in-depth look at RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and InfiniBand (IB), cover the fundamental objects, Verbs API, and wire protocol. 

Key Takeaways:
1. Insights into the historical development and evolution of RDMA technology.
2. Comprehensive understanding of RDMA and its role in modern computing.
3. Detailed exploration of RDMA implementations
4. Explanation of fundamental RDMA components, such as the Verbs API and wire protocol (e.g., IB and RocE)

Join us for an insightful SNIA Data, Storage & Networking webinar on RDMA.

Everything You Wanted to Know About RDMA But Were Too Proud to Ask

As artificial intelligence continues to transform industries, the demands on storage systems are evolving at an unprecedented pace. Join STA for a dynamic roundtable discussion featuring industry experts, including Patrick Kennedy of ServeTheHome, J Metz, Chair of SNIA, and STA board member Jeremiah Tussey. Together, they’ll explore the trends and technologies shaping the future of storage in an AI-driven world and how organizations can prepare for these changes.

What You’ll Learn:
- The impact of AI on storage architectures, including advances in SAS and other technologies.
- How storage scalability and performance requirements are adapting to AI workloads.
- Emerging innovations in storage management and data processing for AI-driven applications.
- Real-world insights into optimizing storage solutions for machine learning and deep learning.
- Predictions for the future of storage in AI, including opportunities and challenges.

Don't miss this opportunity to gain expert insights and join the conversation about the next wave of storage innovation.

Storage Trends in AI 2025

Artificial intelligence and Machine learning (AI/ML) is a hot topic in every business at the moment, and there is a growing dialog about what constitutes an Open Model, is it the weights? Is it the data?

Those are important questions, but equally important is ensuring that the tooling and frameworks to train, validate, fine-tune, and perform inference are open source. Storage systems are a crucial component of these workflows, how can open-source solutions address the needs for high capacity and high performance?

Data is key to any and all AI/ML workflows, without it there would be no data to use as an input for model training, re-evaluation and refinement of models, or even just securely storing models once training is complete, especially if they have taken weeks to produce!

Open source solutions like Ceph can provide almost limitless scaling capabilities, both for performance and capacity. In this webinar, learn how Ceph can be used as the backing store for AI/ML workloads.
We’ll cover:
• The demands of AI on storage systems
• How open source Ceph storage fits into the picture
• How to approach Ceph cluster scaling to meet AI’s needs
• How to get started with Ceph

Ceph Storage in a World of AI/ML Workloads

New Memories like MRAM, ReRAM, PCM, or FRAM are vying to replace embedded flash and, eventually, even embedded SRAM.  Are there other memory technologies threatened with similar fates?  What will the memory market look like in another 20 years?
Catch up on the latest in new memory technologies in this fast-paced, entertaining panel, as we explain what these new memory technologies are, the applications that have already adopted them in the marketplace, their impact on computer architectures and AI, the outlook for important near-term changes, and how economics dictate success or failure.  Noted analysts Jim Handy of Objective Analysis and Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates, moderated by Arthur Sainio, SNIA PM Special Interest Group Co-Chair, will present the findings of their latest report as they discuss where emerging memories complement CXL, Chiplets, Processing In Memory, Endpoint AI, and wearables, and they explain the inevitability of a conversion from established technologies to new memory types.

A Deep Look at New Memories

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) conducted a poll early in 2024 during a live webinar “Navigating Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility,” citing 72% of organizations have encountered incompatibility issues between various object storage implementations. These results resulted in a call to action for SNIA to create an open expert community dedicated to resolving these issues and building best practices for the industry.  

Since then, SNIA CSTI partnered with the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group (TWG) and successfully organized, hosted, and completed the first SNIA Cloud Object Storage Plugfest (multi-vendor interoperability testing), co-located at SNIA Developer Conference (SDC), September 2024, in Santa Clara, CA. Participating Plugfest companies included engineers from Dell, Google, Hammerspace, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, VAST Data, and Versity Software. Three days of Plugfest testing discovered and resolved issues and included a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session to gain consensus on next steps for the industry. Plugfest contributors are now planning two 2025 Plugfest events in Denver in April and Santa Clara in September.

This webinar will share insights into industry best practices, explain the benefits your implementation may gain with improved compatibility, and welcome your client and server cloud object storage team to join us in building momentum. Join us on November 21st where we’ll discuss:  
• Implications on client applications
• Complexity and variety of APIs 
• Access control mechanisms 
• Performance and scalability requirements
• Real-world incompatibilities found in various object storage implementations
• Missing or incorrect response headers
• Unsupported API calls and unexpected behavior

More information:
• SNIA CSTI https://www.snia.org/groups/csti
• SDC'24 https://www.sniadeveloper.org/
• Cloud Object Storage Plugfest (Sept. 2024)  https://www.sniadeveloper.org/cloud-object-storage-plugfest

Building Community to Tackle Cloud Object Storage Incompatibilities

Join us for an insightful webinar on the transformative impact of AI on networking. This session will delve into the various use cases of AI, the nature of traffic for different workloads, and the network impact of these workloads. We will explore the multiple networking challenges posed by AI and how Ethernet is evolving to meet these demands. Special focus will be given to congestion issues during model training, the role of Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), and the specific requirements related to training large language models (LLMs) and other use cases.

Learning Objectives:
- Understand the different types of Network Topologies typically used with AI workloads.
- Identify the nature of traffic for various AI workloads and their impact on networks.
- Learn about the challenges Ethernet faces with AI workloads and the solutions being implemented.
- Explore a specific use case to see how Ethernet addresses bandwidth and congestion issues.

Don’t miss this opportunity to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving field of AI and networking. Register now to secure your spot and gain valuable insights from industry experts!

Ethernet in the Age of AI: Adapting to New Networking Challenges

This presentation examines the critical role of storage solutions in optimizing AI workloads, with a primary focus on storage-intensive AI training workloads. We will highlight how AI models interact with storage systems during training, focusing on data loading and checkpointing mechanisms. We will explore how AI frameworks like PyTorch utilize different storage connectors to access various storage solutions. Finally, the presentation will delve into the use of file-based storage and object storage in the context of AI training: 
 
Attendees will:
- Gain a clear understanding of the critical role of storage in AI model training workloads
 - Understand how AI models interact with storage systems during training, focusing on data loading and checkpointing mechanisms
- Learn how AI frameworks like PyTorch use different storage connectors to access various storage solutions.
- Explore how file-based storage and object storage is used in AI training

The Critical Role of Storage in Optimizing AI Training Workloads

Unlocking a Sustainable Future for Data Storage

In a world of surging data demands, how can we reduce the environmental toll of storage solutions? Discover the power of the circular economy to reshape the storage industry for a greener tomorrow with this webinar, featuring Jonmichael Hands (Co-Chair SNIA SSD SIG and Board Member, Circular Drive Initiative) and Shruti Sethi (Sr. PM at Microsoft and Leadership Team, Open Compute Project-Sustainability).

Key Highlights:

- Circular Drive Initiative: Rethink the lifecycle of storage devices—from design to end-of-life—to unlock significant environmental benefits.
- Media Sanitization Best Practices: Securely erase data to enable reuse, extend device life, and cut down on e-waste. Explore techniques like:
- - Cryptographic erase
- - Block erase
- - Overwrite methods
- Compliance & Transparency: Learn how standards like IEEE 2883-2022 and ISO/IEC 27040:2024 guide secure data disposal, with organizations like SERI R2 and ADISA leading the charge in setting industry benchmarks.
- Carbon Accounting in Storage: Understand how tracking and reducing carbon emissions in storage aligns with global sustainability goals.

This session is your roadmap to driving real change by adopting circular economy principles, embracing advanced sanitization methods, and leveraging carbon accounting to reduce the industry’s environmental footprint.

Advancing Sustainable Storage: The Impact of the Circular Economy, Media Sanitization Policies, and Carbon Accounting

The key to optimal SAN performance is managing performance impacts due to congestion. The Fibre Channel industry introduced Fabric Notifications as a key resiliency mechanism for storage networks in 2021 to combat congestion, link integrity, and delivery errors. These functions have been implemented by the ecosystem and have enhanced the overall user experience when deploying Fibre Channel SANs. This webinar explores the evolution of Fabric Notifications and the available solutions of this exciting new technology. In this webinar, you will learn the following:
• The state of Fabric Notifications as defined by the Fibre Channel standards.
• The mechanisms and techniques for implementing Fabric Notifications.
• The currently available solutions deploying Fabric Notifications.

The Evolution of Congestion Management in Fibre Channel

This session explores the evolution of transactions, implementation challenges, and insights into distributed database environments. Whether you're a database enthusiast or a tech enthusiast, this presentation offers valuable insights into the world of database management, and will include:
• Historical perspective of transactions 
• Implementing transactions 
• Challenges and trade-offs in ACID properties 
• Distributed transactions in modern databases like Amazon Aurora, DynamoDB, and Google Spanner
Key Takeaways: Understanding the evolution of transactions in databases Insights into the challenges of implementing ACID properties and exploration of distributed transaction models in leading database systems

About the Speaker: Shiv Jha of Nutanix is a seasoned professional with expertise in databases, streams, and application architecture. With a passion for open-source software and community engagement, Shiv brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table.

Navigating Transactions: ACID Complexity in Modern Databases

Large Language models (LLMs) based on Transformers architecture have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance in different code generation benchmarks such as MBPP and HumanEval. In this talk, we will demonstrate how we have used open source LLM models to develop a code generation workflow that can be trained internally in an on-prem infrastructure and used for improving developer productivity by aiding in tasks such as unittest generation, code documentation, code refactoring, code translation, search, and code alignment.

Empowering Developers: Exploring LLM Models for Code Generation

The digital landscape is in hyperdrive, demanding an IT metamorphosis that transcends mere tools. Enter AIOps – not just a technological upgrade, but a paradigm shift redefining how we approach IT operations. This presentation delves beyond the nuts and bolts, unveiling AIOps as a revolution that infuses AI's intelligence into the very fabric of IT thinking and processes.
Key Themes:
• From Dev to Production and Reactive to Proactive: Revolutionizing the IT Mindset: We'll move beyond the "fix it when it breaks" mentality, embracing a shift left, a future-proof approach where AI analyzes risk, anticipates issues, prescribes solutions, and learns continuously.
• Beyond Siloed Solutions: Embracing Holistic Collaboration:  AIOps fosters seamless integration across departments, applications, and infrastructure, promoting real-time visibility and unified action.
• Automating the process: From Insights to Intelligent Action: Dive into the world of self-healing IT, where AI-powered workflows and automation resolve issues and optimize performance without human intervention.

AIOps: Reactive to Proactive – Revolutionizing the IT Mindset

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