Understanding SSD Performance

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

Software defined storage, or SDS, is growing in popularity in both cloud and enterprise accounts. But what makes it different from traditional storage arrays? Does it really save money? Is it more complicated to support? Is it more scalable or higher-performing? And does it have different networking requirements than traditional storage appliances?

Watch this SNIA webcast to learn:
•How software-defined storage differs from integrated storage appliances
•Whether SDS supports block, file, object, or all three types of storage access
•Potential issues or pitfalls with deploying SDS
•How SDS affects storage networking
•Scale-up vs. scale-out vs. hyperconverged vs. cloud

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

What does it mean to be protected and safe? You need the right people and the right technology. This presentation is going to go into the broad introduction of security principles in general. This will include some of the main aspects of security, including defining the terms that you must know, if you hope to have a good grasp of what makes something secure or not. We’ll be talking about the scope of security, including threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks – and what that means in real storage terms. In this live webcast we will cover:

•Protecting the data (Keeping “the bad” out)
•Threat landscape, Bad actors/hackers
•Attack vectors, attack surfaces, vulnerabilities
•Physical security issues
•Layers of protection (encryption – last line of defense)
•Remediation after a breach/incident

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog: http://bit.ly/2JQ1s5L

Kubernetes is great for running stateless workloads, like web servers. It’ll run health checks, restart containers when they crash, and do all sorts of other wonderful things. So, what about stateful workloads?

This webcast will take a look at when it’s appropriate to run a stateful workload in cluster, or out. We’ll discuss the best options for running a workload like a database on the cloud, or in the cluster, and what’s needed to set that up.

We’ll cover:
•Secrets management
•Running a database on a VM and connecting it to Kubernetes as a service
•Running a database in Kubernetes using a `stateful set`
•Running a database in Kubernetes using an Operator
•Running a database on a cloud managed service

After you watch the webcast, check out our Kubernetes Links & Resources blog at http://bit.ly/KubeLinks and our webcast Q&A blog at http://bit.ly/KubeQuestions

The SNIA EMEA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) will return to Tel Aviv in early February 2020.

SDC EMEA is organised by SNIA, the non-profit industry association responsible for data storage standards and education, and the conference is designed to provide an open and independent platform for technical education and knowledge sharing amongst the local storage development community.

SDC is built by developers – for developers.

This session will offer a preview of what is planned for the 2020 agenda ahead of the call for presentations and will also give potential sponsors the information they need to be able to budget for their participation in the event. If you have attended previously as a delegate, this is a great opportunity to learn more about how you can raise your profile as a speaker or get your company involved as a sponsor. There will be time allocated during the webcast to ask questions about the options available. Companies who have significant storage development teams will learn why this conference is valuable to the local technical community and why they should be directly engaged.

As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. Decisions surrounding what technologies to use is one, but they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. The storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in weeks, days or hours, but in minutes.

In part one of this three part series, we covered the high level aspects of Kubernetes. This presentation will discuss key capabilities IT vendors are creating based on open source technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes to build self-service infrastructure to support hybrid multi-cloud deployments.We’ll cover:

•Persistent storage and how to specify it
•Ensuring application portability between Private and Public Clouds
•Building a self-service infrastructure (Helm, Operators)
•Selecting Block, File, Object (Traditional Storage, SDS)

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog here: http://bit.ly/2M3IVpm

Real-world digital workloads often behave very differently from what might be expected. The equipment used in a computing system may function differently than anticipated. Unknown quirks in complicated software and operations running alongside the workload may be doing more or less than the user initially supposed. To truly understand what is happening, the right approach is to test and monitor the systems’ behaviors as real code is executed. By using measured data designers, vendors and service personnel can pinpoint the actual limits and bottlenecks that a particular workload is experiencing. Join the SNIA Solid State Storage Special Interest Group to learn how to be a part of the real-world workload revolution

Swordfish School: Introduction to SNIA Swordfish™ Features and Profiles
Ready to ride the wave to what’s next in storage management? As a part of an ongoing series of educational materials to help speed your SNIA Swordfish™ implementation in this Swordfish School webcast, Storage standards expert Richelle Ahlvers (Broadcom Inc.) will provide an introduction to the Features and Profiles concepts, describe how they work together, and talk about how to use both Features and Profiles when implementing Swordfish.
Features are used by implementations to advertise to clients what functionality they are able to support. Profiles are detailed descriptions that describe down to the individual property level what functionality is required for implementations to advertise Features. The Profiles are used for in-depth analysis during development, making it easy for clients to determine which Features to require for different configurations. They are also used to determine certification / conformance requirements.

About SNIA Swordfish™
Designed with IT administrators and DevOps engineers in mind to provide simplified and scalable storage management for data center environments, SNIA Swordfish™ is a standard that defines the management of data storage and services as an extension to the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF) Redfish application programming interface specification. Unlike proprietary interfaces, Swordfish is open and easy-to-adopt with broad industry support.
Your one stop shop for everything SNIA Swordfish is https://www.snia.org/swordfish.

For a long time, the architecture and best practices of storage networks have been relatively well-understood. Recently, however, advanced capabilities have been added to storage that could have broader impacts on networks than we think.

The three main storage network transports - Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and InfiniBand – all have mechanisms to handle increased traffic, but they are not all affected or implemented the same way. For instance, placing a protocol such as NVMe over Fabrics can mean very different things when looking at one networking method in comparison to another.

Unfortunately, many network administrators may not understand how different storage solutions place burdens upon their networks. As more storage traffic traverses the network, customers face the risk of congestion leading to higher-than-expected latencies and lower-than expected throughput. Watch this webinar to learn:

•Typical storage traffic patterns
•What is Incast, what is head of line blocking, what is congestion, what is a slow drain, and when do these become problems on a network?
•How Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand handle these effects
•The proper role of buffers in handling storage network traffic
•Potential new ways to handle increasing storage traffic loads on the network

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://bit.ly/323kyNj

In the short period from 2014-2018, Ethernet equipment vendors have announced big increases in line speeds, shipping 25, 50, and 100 Gigabits-per -second (Gb/s) speeds and announcing 200/400 Gb/s. At the same time Fibre Channel vendors have launched 32GFC, 64GFC and 128GFC technology while InfiniBand has reached 200Gb/s (called HDR) speeds.

But who exactly is asking for these faster new networking speeds, and how will they use them? Are there servers, storage, and applications that can make good use of them? How are these new speeds achieved? Are new types of signaling, cables and transceivers required? How will changes in PCIe standards keep up? And do the faster speeds come with different distance limitations?

Watch this SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast to learn how these new speeds are achieved, where they are likely to be deployed for storage, and what infrastructure changes are needed to support them.

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

Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components.

We build effective systems in a cost-optimal way by using appropriate quantities of expensive and fast memory (DRAM for instance) to cache our cheaper and slower storage. But currently fast memory has no persistence at all; it’s only storage that provides the application the guarantee that storing, modifying or deleting data does exactly that.

Memory and storage differ in other ways. For example, we load from memory to registers on the CPU, perform operations there, and then store the results back to memory by using byte addresses. This load/store technology is different from storage, where we tend to move data back and fore between memory and storage in large blocks, by using an API (application programming interface).

New memory technologies are challenging these assumptions. They look like storage in that they’re persistent, if a lot faster than traditional disks or even Flash based SSDs, but we address them in bytes, as we do memory like DRAM, if more slowly. Persistent memory (PM) lies between storage and memory in latency, bandwidth and cost, while providing memory semantics and storage persistence. In this webcast, SNIA experts will discuss:

•Traditional uses of storage and memory as a cache
•How can we build and use systems based on PM?
•What would a system with storage, persistent memory and DRAM look like?
•Do we need a new programming model to take advantage of PM?
•How we might take better advantage of this new technology

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://bit.ly/32F2l98.

Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes promises simplified management of cloud workloads at scale, whether on-premises, hybrid, or in a public cloud infrastructure, allowing effortless movement of workloads from cloud to cloud. By some reckonings, it is being deployed at a rate several times faster than virtualization.

In this presentation, we’ll introduce Kubernetes and present use cases that make clear where and why you would want to use it in your IT environment. We’ll also focus on the enterprise requirements of orchestration and containerization, and specifically on the storage aspects and best practices.

•What is Kubernetes? Why would you want to use it?
•How does Kubernetes help in a multi-cloud/private cloud environment?
•How does Kubernetes orchestrate & manage storage? Can Kubernetes use Docker?
•How do we provide persistence and data protection?
•Example use cases

Has hybrid cloud reached a tipping point? According to research from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), IT organizations today are struggling to strike the right balance between public cloud and their on-premises infrastructure. In this SNIA webcast, ESG senior analyst, Scott Sinclair, will share research on current cloud trends, covering:

•Key drivers behind IT complexity
•IT spending priorities
•Multi-cloud & hybrid cloud adoption drivers
•When businesses are moving workloads from the cloud back on-premises
•Top security and cost challenges
•Future cloud projections

The research will be followed by a panel discussion with Scott Sinclair and SNIA cloud experts Alex McDonald, Michelle Tidwell, Mike Jochimsen and Eric Lakin.

We’re all accustomed to transferring money from one bank account to another; a credit to the payer becomes a debit to the payee. But that model uses a specific set of sophisticated techniques to accomplish what appears to be a simple transaction. We’re also aware of how today we can order goods online, or reserve an airline seat over the Internet. Or even simpler, we can update a photograph on Facebook. Can these applications use the same models, or are new techniques required?

One of the more important concepts in storage is the notion of transactions, which are used in databases, financials, and other mission critical workloads. However, in the age of cloud and distributed systems, we need to update our thinking about what constitutes a transaction. We need to understand how new theories and techniques allow us to undertake transactional work in the face of unreliable and physically dispersed systems. It’s a topic full of interesting concepts (and lots of acronyms!). In this webcast, we’ll provide a brief tour of traditional transactional systems and their use of storage, we’ll explain new application techniques and transaction models, and we’ll discuss what storage systems need to look like to support these new advances.

And yes, we’ll explain all the acronyms and nomenclature too.

You will learn:

• A brief history of transactional systems from banking to Facebook
• How the Internet and distributed systems have changed and how we view transactions
• An explanation of the terminology, from ACID to CAP and beyond
• How applications, networks & particularly storage have changed to meet these demands

Join SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) Education Chair and leading analyst Tom Coughlin and SSSI member Motti Beck of Mellanox Technologies for a journey into the requirements and trends in worldwide data storage for entertainment content acquisition, editing, archiving, and digital preservation. This webcast will cover capacity and performance trends and media projections for direct attached storage, cloud, and near-line network storage. It will also include results from a long-running digital storage survey of media and entertainment professionals. Learn what is needed for digital cinema, broadcast, cable, and internet applications and more.

This webcast will present an overview of scale-out file system architectures. To meet the increasingly higher demand on both capacity and performance in large cluster computing environments, the storage subsystem has evolved toward a modular and scalable design. The scale-out file system is one implementation of the trend, in addition to scale-out object and block storage solutions. This presentation will provide an introduction to scale-out-file systems and cover:

•General principles when architecting a scale-out file system storage solution
•Hardware and software design considerations for different workloads
•Storage challenges when serving a large number of compute nodes, e.g. name space consistency, distributed locking, data replication, etc.
•Use cases for scale-out file systems
•Common benchmark and performance analysis approaches

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

Tools for speeding your implementation of the next-generation storage management standard

The SNIA Swordfish™ specification for the management of storage systems and data services is an extension of the DMTF Redfish® specification. Together, these specifications provide a unified approach for the management of servers and storage in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.

To help speed your Swordfish development efforts, SNIA has produced open source storage management tools available now on GitHub for your use. Join this session for an overview of these open source tools, which include a Swordfish API Emulator, a Swordfish Basic Web Client, an example Swordfish plugin for the Microsoft Power BI business analytics service, and an example Swordfish plugin for the Datadog monitoring service.