Best Practice: Optimizing Data Center Efficiency & Sustainability

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

Collaboration apps like Cisco Webex Teams, Google Hangouts Chat, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral Glip, and Slack are rapidly taking over the workplace, enabling groups to communicate in context and weave together workflows and data.
• But how to do organizations successfully adopt team collaboration?
• How do they integrate it into their existing application and collaboration environment while meeting governance, security, and compliance requirements?
• And how do they drive user awareness and adoption?
In this webinar we’ll look at the trends around team collaboration and the characteristics of successful deployments and provide a roadmap that IT leaders should follow to measurable business benefits.

In this back-to-basics Fibre Channel webinar, we’re going to be talking about one of the most fundamental functions of the protocol and what makes it so reliable, predictable and secure: Zoning. The ability to ensure that end devices are able to communicate only with the set of devices explicitly permitted is part of what makes Fibre Channel so powerful. This ability to secure those connections in zones adds built-in security to these connections.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:
What is Zoning
Why you’d want to Zone
The Different Types of Zoning
Zoning Configuration Flow
Consequences of Zoning
Zoneset Activation Flow
Zoning best practices for different types of applications
Advances in Zoning

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.

Enterprises have embraced cloud computing to unlock the opportunity offered by digital transformation. The cloud’s flexibility and agility enable enterprises to grow their business without borders and ensure productivity and efficiency.

While enterprise applications continue to migrate to the cloud, the necessary change in the wide area network (WAN) is often overlooked. The hub-and-spoke WAN architecture that served the needs of the enterprise when applications were delivered from the datacenter, must evolve to serve the needs of the era of cloud applications. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is the WAN's response to this paradigm shift in application traffic to the cloud.

While SD-WAN has emerged as a key enabler of secure and seamless direct cloud application access with the benefits of transport independence, better security and path selection, it has brought into focus the importance of the transport underlay and the technology investment — both past and future — that an enterprise needs to consider before adopting SD-WAN.

This webinar spotlights two critical success factors for driving mainstream enterprise adoption of SD-WAN:

*Predictable and robust Internet connectivity
*Investment protection (of installed legacy network equipment or in new technology) as the WAN evolves to support applications delivered from the cloud.

Join us at this webinar as we make sense of SD-WAN adoption for your company.

Over the last few years, a major shift has occurred in the Quality Assurance (QA) and Software Testing Management space. Organizations are adopting smart test automation, but continue to find the need for traditional PMO-level reporting offered by tools like Micro Focus ALM and Quality Center. Often, this results in a tool mismatch that negatively impacts the ability to report in real-time across all phases of manual and automated testing.

Smart test automation is no longer a “nice to have” but rather a foundational aspect of the testing process, and this is impacting the toolchain. Organizations are adding new test management tools like Selenium, Tricentis Tosca and others to their suite to better align with their Agile and test automation efforts. Global QA Directors are recognizing a multi-vendor and multi-tool approach to software quality assurance with commercial and open-source tools yields the best results.

With test planning, design, execution, and reporting now split across multiple tools, organizations have lost their visibility into key QA metrics for measuring manual vs. automated test execution effectiveness, test automation progress, automated testing execution progress, and defect remediation for all phases of the software testing lifecycle.

Join Senior Value Stream Architect, Matt Angerer, to learn how Tasktop can help you:

•Modernize test management by adding new, specialized tools for test automation
•Improve collaboration between QA teams working in their preferred tools of choice
•Eliminate the laborious effort of manual synchronization and report generation
•Centralize test data from automated and manual tests spanning multiple tools and instances for real-time reporting

Over the last few years, a major shift has occurred in the Quality Assurance (QA) and Software Testing Management space. Organizations are adopting smart test automation, but continue to find the need for traditional PMO-level reporting offered by tools like Micro Focus ALM and Quality Center. Often, this results in a tool mismatch that negatively impacts the ability to report in real-time across all phases of manual and automated testing.

Smart test automation is no longer a “nice to have” but rather a foundational aspect of the testing process, and this is impacting the toolchain. Organizations are adding new test management tools like Selenium, Tricentis Tosca and others to their suite to better align with their Agile and test automation efforts. Global QA Directors are recognizing a multi-vendor and multi-tool approach to software quality assurance with commercial and open-source tools yields the best results.

With test planning, design, execution, and reporting now split across multiple tools, organizations have lost their visibility into key QA metrics for measuring manual vs. automated test execution effectiveness, test automation progress, automated testing execution progress, and defect remediation for all phases of the software testing lifecycle.

Join Senior Value Stream Architect, Tina Dankwart, to learn how Tasktop can help you:

•Modernize test management by adding new, specialized tools for test automation
•Improve collaboration between QA teams working in their preferred tools of choice
•Eliminate the laborious effort of manual synchronization and report generation
•Centralize test data from automated and manual tests spanning multiple tools and instances for real-time reporting

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

The cloud strategy of today's enterprise spans across multiple clouds and hundreds of applications. Point security solutions no longer work, so enterprises are turning toward a more orchestrated approach to achieving security and compliance in the cloud.

Join cloud and security leaders in an interactive discussion to learn about:
- Key security and compliance challenges associated with a multi-cloud strategy
- Recommendations for managing and automating security across multiple clouds and applications
- The future of cloud
- Improving enterprise security in an ever-changing threat landscape

Panellists
James Hughes, Field CTO, Rubrik
Dave Barnett, Head of CASB, Forcepoint EMEA
Patrick Grillo, Senior Director - Security Solutions, Fortinet

Moderated by Alex Hilton, Chief Executive, Cloud Industry Forum

This webinar is brought to you by the Vivit Automation and Cloud Builders Special Interest Group (SIG).

In this webinar, you will learn all about Micro Focus PlateSpin; what it is and how can this tool be used to migrate workload from one place to another. The speaker will also explain how the migration to different platforms is setup. After attending this webinar, you will know:

• The core principles of 'lift-and-shift" server migration
• How ATOS is using PlateSpin to successfully migrate customer applications to the cloud and other platforms
• What major features were recently added to PlateSpin and what the future road map looks like

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

This webinar is brought to you by the Vivit Testing Quality ALM Special Interest Group (SIG).

Join this webinar that will demonstrate how BNP Paribas started and performed evaluation of ALM Octane and is now using the tool to run complete agile testing lifecycles. The testing lifecycle will be presented as a live demo that follows Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) methodology and uses Gherkin notation for defining test suites.

The testing lifecycle starts with definition of requirements and user stories, heavily builds on test automation and advanced reporting, manages and synchronizes defects across tools, and feeds learnings from testing back into the requirements. It uses an integrated development and testing infrastructure including products like Confluence, Jira, Micro Focus ALM, Micro Focus ALM Octane, Jenkins, GIT, Cucumber, IntelliJ, TestCafe, and others.

BNP Paribas’s journey with agile test automation using ALM Octane started in 2017. The webinar presents in a nutshell how evaluation of ALM Octane was approached and conducted. It explains how new methods were introduced with the objective to leverage full tool functionality. The initiative has soon helped to increase testing efficiency and created important business value.

Webinar participants will learn:

• How BNP Paribas has conducted evaluation of ALM Octane
• Why ALM Octane is much more than just a successor of ALM/Quality Center
• How ALM Octane eases flexible management of its entire surrounding tool chain
• Why methodology like BDD shall precede tools, and not vice versa
• How Gherkin establishes a common language for the entire agile development lifecycle that helps integrating business, development, and testing
• How to use ALM Octane for pipeline management, reporting, defect synchronization, import of performance testing and BPT results, integration of in-sprint testing etc.

There are many challenges facing those who work in the ITSM field. It seems the most significant challenge is the constant changes, whether they are within the tools and customers you are supporting, the on-and-off boarding of employees, or the changes in your ITSM solution from upgrades or total replacement. The Micro Focus Adoption Readiness Tool can help you guard against these changes affecting your business.

• How to stop your knowledge leaving the building when the SME’s move on
• How to put together a knowledge repository and maintain your content efficiently
• How to create new content on the fly
• How to make this knowledge available for everyone at the point of need

As Enterprise DevOps adoption hits the mainstream, organizations are looking to streamline and simplify their Development and Testing practices through the use of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). Whilst CI and CD practices can provide significant benefits, such transformations are often led by Development teams, where little thought is given about the impact that the process and technology changes will have upon testing organizations, and the need to fully align all areas of the application delivery pipeline.
In this live webinar, join Micro Focus to understand:
• How development, test and release processes and pipelines can be easily and simply aligned
• How test automation can be a core component of your CD pipeline and why an orchestrated DevOps toolchain is key to successful DevOps transformation

This webinar is brought to you by the Vivit DevOps Special Interest Group (SIG).

SecOps teams are always looking to strike a balance between staying ahead of new threats and not getting burned by older ones, all while having to do a hundred other things at once. The SecOps team at VMware will share their experience adopting a DevOps process for continuous improvement, while working to reduce the extreme utilization level of the Security Operations Center (SOC) team and to improve the overall security posture. The session will offer practical lessons learned, from a real 24/7 global SOC, without all the fancy buzzwords and feel good tips that don’t actually work in the real world.

Join this webinar to learn:

• How shifting the method of working has improved Security Monitoring, without having to spend more money
• What to be aware of when adopting new methods or techniques
• How to plan out goals and achieve them in environments where priorities constantly are shifting

Oftentimes when it comes to celebrating women in technology, we hear a lot about individual change-makers and one person's astonishing journey up the corporate ladder. However, what we hear about much less frequently is peer-to-peer support and guidance.

How are female leaders in hi-tech careers growing both their teams and their company's product? How do women in different business functions successfully build out high-performing diverse teams, get products to market, and drive revenue?

Tune into this live panel discussion with experts across industries, fields and backgrounds for an in-depth, peer-to-peer fireside chat to answer these questions and more. Learn how we can better support and enable one another to be successful women leaders, from creation, to ideation, to innovation and beyond.

Moderator: Sowmya Murthy, Chief Customer Officer, Seven Lakes Technologies
Panelists: Karen Greenberg, Client Champion and Sherry Harmon, CRO, ModuleQ