File vs. Block vs. Object Storage

One of the most important aspects of security is how to protect the data that is just “sitting there.” How easy is it to get to? Who can get to it? If someone does get access to the data, can they read it? What are the potential risks of the wrong people reading the data? These are just a few of the questions that we try to answer when we go through the process of securing data.

Contrary to popular belief, however, securing “data at rest” is not simply encrypting the data. While it is true that data encryption plays a major role in securing “data at rest,” there are several other factors that come into play and are equally as important – if not more so.

For this webcast, we’re going to talk about those other factors (Encryption is deserving of its own, specific webcast). We will present the end-to-end process to securing “data at rest,” and discuss all the factors and trade-offs that must be considered, and some of the general risks that need to be mitigated, discussing:

• How requirements for “data at rest” differ from “data in flight”
• Legal and regulatory reasons to protect (or delete) data at rest
• Where and how data could be attacked
• Understanding the costs of ransomware
• How to protect cryptographic keys from malicious actors
• Using key managers to properly manage cryptographic keys
• Strengths and weaknesses of relying on government security recommendations
• The importance of validating data backups... how stable is your media?

Encryption has been used through the ages to protect stored secrets, authenticate messages, communicate secretly in broad daylight, and even to check that messages were properly transmitted and received without tamper. Now, it’s often our first go-to tool for making sure that data simply isn’t readable to prying eyes, ears or AI bots.

But how does encryption actually work, what makes it tick, and how is it managed? How do we ensure compatibility? How do we protect the keys; i.e., “Who will guard the guards themselves?”

It’s a big topic that we’re breaking down into three parts: Encryption 101, Key Management 101, and Applied Cryptography.

Join us on May 20th for the first encryption webcast: Storage Networking Security: Encryption 101 where security experts will cover:

•A brief history of Encryption
•Cryptography basics
•Definition of terms – Entropy, Cipher, Symmetric & Asymmetric Keys, Certificates and Digital signatures, etc.
•Introduction to Key Management

After you watch the webcast, check out the Encryption 101 Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/2ZGMisl

More and more we are seeing compute and inference move to the edge. This is driven by the growth in capability to not only generate data from sensors, devices and by people operating in the field, but also by the interaction between those devices.

This new source of data and information brings with it unique challenges to the way we store and transmit data as well as the way we need to curate it. In this webcast we will look at:
•New patterns generated by the explosion of the Internet of Things
•How IoT is impacting storage and data strategies
•Security and privacy issues and considerations
•How to think about the lifecycle of our information in this new environment

SNIA Swordfish is an extension of the DMTF Redfish specification to provide a unified approach for the management of storage and services in converged, hyperconverged, hyperscale, and cloud infrastructure environments. Swordfish uses a client-centric approach to develop the dynamic resource models as part of the specification, which describes client needs, management requirements, and use cases.

NVMe-oF currently support fabric transports like RDMA (iWarp, RoCE, IB), TCP, and FC. NVMe / NVMe-oF currently lacks efficient remote configuration and provisioning management mechanisms to enable NVMe-oF scaling to large converged infrastructures – something Redfish and Swordfish can provide.

The SNIA Swordfish specification is currently growing to include full NVMe and NVMe-oF enablement and alignment across DMTF, NVMe, and SNIA for NVMe and NVMe-oF use cases. SNIA members are contributing to specification development and helping to shape the ecosystem. This presentation will provide an overview of the work in progress to map these standards together to ensure NVMe and NVMe-oF environments can be represented entirely in Swordfish and Redfish environments.

Join us! We welcome your feedback, and encourage participation.

In this webcast, we will explore why your storage may be acting strangely now that it’s been subjected to the whims of data scientists. We’ll look at how and why the I/O patterns have changed, where this will lead, and some of the tactics and strategies you can deploy now to prevent impact from this new movement of storage saboteurs! We’ll discuss:

•Why are data scientists here? (the benefits a data scientist brings to the organisation)
•How to spot a data scientist in the wild (data patterns to look out for)
•Feeding and watering your data scientist (what they need and how to provide it)
•Planning for more data scientists (how to make your infrastructure data scientist ready)
•How does data flow through an AI/ML system?
•Is the data packaged in unusual or specific ways?
•What stresses does it place on the storage system? Capacity? Performance? Or both?

Research firm IDC projects that by the end of 2020, the world will generate 44 zettabytes (44 trillion gigabytes) of data per year. Data storage, therefore, is no longer simple, and in the age of cloud maturity and Digital Transformation, storage infrastructure strategies are shifting. With object stores having a very different set of characteristics than file and block storage, it can be confusing to know which is the right strategy that will keep up with an expanding digital universe.

Even small businesses struggle to manage the ever-growing pile of files stored on various networks and systems, so the challenges for enterprise companies can be hard to wrap your head around.

Join this panel of object, file and block storage experts as they discuss:

- The best way to manage unstructured data
- Are there deceptive costs in a file storage strategy?
- Use cases for object storage

Speakers:
Alex McDonald - SNIA Networking Storage Forum and Office of the CTO, NetApp (Moderator)
Tom Christensen, CTO & Customer Advocacy - Northern EMEA, Hitachi Vantara
Anne Blanchard, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Nasuni
Sanjay Jagad, Senior Director of Products and Solutions, Cloudian
Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and Samsung

SNIA’s Persistent Memory Hackathon Program enters its second year with 300+ developers up to speed on the latest in programming persistent memory -- and SNIA’s NVDIMM Programming Challenge just announced its first winner of distinction. Join our webcast to learn the latest developments in PM, new resources available to learn more about programming to PM, and a dive into the winning application introduced at the recent Persistent Memory Summit.

QUIC is a new UDP-based transport protocol for the Internet, and specifically, the web. Originally designed and deployed by Google, it already makes up 35% of Google's egress traffic, which corresponds to about 7% of all Internet traffic. The strong interest by many other large Internet players in the ongoing IETF standardization of QUIC is likely to lead to an even greater deployment in the near future. This webcast will highlight:

•Unique design aspects of QUIC
•Differences to the conventional HTTP/TLS/TCP web stack
•Early performance numbers
•Potential side effects of a broader deployment of QUIC

After you watch the presentation, check out the Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/QUICQ-A

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have been having quite the impact on most industries in the last couple of years, but what about our own IT industry? In this webcast find out how the rise of machine learning has created a new type of demand on IT operations teams as well as how those same teams can utilize new insights and capabilities driven by machine learning. We will explore:
•The demand on infrastructure
•Storage and data pipelines
•The growing field of IT operations leveraging AI (aka AIOps)

Several SSD and networking vendors have recentl¬y demonstrated ways to connect SSDs directly to an Ethernet network. They propose that deploying Ethernet SSDs will be more scalable, easier to manage, more performant, and/or lower cost than traditional storage networking solutions that use a storage controller (or hyperconverged node) between the SSDs and the network.

Who would want to attach SSDs directly to the network? Are these vendors brilliant or simply trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist? What are the different solutions that could benefit from Ethernet SSDs? Which protocols would one use to access them? And how do Ethernet SSDs relate to computational storage? Join this SNIA Networking Storage Forum webcast to learn all this and more as SNIA experts discuss:

•What are the appropriate use cases for Ethernet SSDs?
•Why Ethernet SSDs could be appealing and more efficient
•How Ethernet SSDs compare to other forms of storage networking
•Different ways Ethernet SSDs can be accessed, such as JBOF/NBOF, NVMe-oF, and Key Value
•How do Ethernet-attached SSDs enable composable infrastructures?

There are many types of storage technologies, both in how they are interconnected, consumed and designed. Object storage is no different in that it brings its own set of unique characteristics to the market. In this webinar, storage experts Rick Vanover and Chris Evans will explain:

•What object storage is and what it does
•How to use object storage
•Essential characteristics of typical consumption
•Why object storage is important to the future of storage and computing technologies

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/2xa63fH

Since the initial publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing in 2011, international standards development organizations (SDOs) have sought to refine and expand the cloud computing landscape. This webinar will:

•Identify key published and draft cloud standards
•Discuss their interdependencies
•Highlight their importance
•Identify potential future work.

In addition, related technologies such as virtualization, federation, and fog/edge computing will be addressed. Lastly, the relevance of the standards will be explored to help organizations understand ways these documents can be exploited.

Get prepared for SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit with this webcast from Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates. Following up on their 2018 groundbreaking report on emerging memories, Jim Handy and Tom Coughlin will update us on 2019 advances in support from SNIA, the launch of Optane memory on DIMMs, new MRAM types, and more. You won’t want to miss their analysis on the progress made, and their perspective on the groundwork that still needs to be covered to bring persistent memory to mainstream computing.

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) has gained industry-wide recognition as a framework for building highly performant and efficient storage software with a focus on NVMe. This includes software drivers and libraries for building NVMe-oF host and target solutions. In this presentation, technical leaders from SPDK will provide an overview of the project, NVMe-oF use cases that are best suited for SPDK, and insights into how SPDK achieves its storage networking performance and efficiency, discussing:

•Overview of the SPDK project
•Key NVMe-oF use cases for SPDK
•Examples of NVMe-oF use cases not suited for SPDK
•NVMe-oF Target Architecture and Design
•NVMe-oF Host Architecture and Design
•Performance data

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

Failing to protect sensitive information can put a lot of people at risk of being exploited by cybercriminals, and can make a company face enormous legal penalties.

The way information is shared and stored can put the information at risk.

It is risky to store personal information on portable devices, which are easily lost or stolen.

In addition, the consequences of a data breach can be devastating. Identity theft could lead to financial losses, and a company could face lawsuits and legal penalties.

This presentation will cover what kinds of personal information must be protected & guidelines for keeping this info safe.

After viewing this session, attendees should:
1. Understand how Privacy is defined
2. Highlight some of the Privacy regulations from around the globe
3. Understand what information to safeguard
4. Understand how these privacy regulations affect organizations that handle personal information

What do Hyperscalers like Facebook and Microsoft have in common? They are cloud market leaders using NVMe SSDs in their architectures. Get a close up look into their application requirements and challenges, why they chose NVMe flash for their storage, and how they are successfully deploying NVMe to fuel their businesses.

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