The Journey to the Efficient Data Centre

In the ongoing evolution of the datacenter, a popular debate involves how storage is allocated and managed. There are three competing visions about how storage should be done; those are Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Disaggregated Storage, and Centralized Storage.

IT architects, storage vendors, and industry analysts argue constantly over which is the best approach and even the exact definition of each. Isn’t Hyperconverged constrained? Is Disaggregated designed only for large cloud service providers? Is Centralized storage only for legacy applications?

Tune in to debate these questions and more:
• What is the difference between centralized, hyperconverged, and disaggregated infrastructure, when it comes to storage?
• Where does the storage controller or storage intelligence live in each?
• How and where can the storage capacity and intelligence be distributed?
• What is the difference between distributing the compute or application and distributing the storage?
• What is the role of a JBOF or EBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash or Ethernet Bunch of Flash) in these storage models?
• What are the implications for data center, cloud, and edge?

Join us on May 4, 2021 for another SNIA Networking Storage Forum Great Storage Debate as leading storage minds converge to argue the definitions and merits of where to put the storage and storage intelligence.

The storage industry is working on ways to meet the demand for the very high throughput required for the volume of transactions per second in Blockchain operations.

There have been numerous advancements in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) logics to improve the number of transactions per second for Blockchain operations. But these FPGA/ASIC improvements will not be sufficient for increasing the demand of hardware resources required for Blockchain. Smart network interface cards (NICs) offload low-level functions from server CPUs, dramatically increasing network and application performance, offloading all network related processing.

In this webcast, you will learn:
• The features of a Smart Network Interface Card (SMART-NIC) and how this will improve Blockchain transactions
• Why using SCM is ideal for in-memory databases
• Advantages of direct data movement without involving filesystems
• Benefits of using SCM to improve Blockchain transactions

As businesses embrace new digital business models and accelerate their adoption of cloud-based services, traditional network services are struggling to keep pace. The emergence of technologies such as SDN and NFV is creating a new generation of faster, more agile and intelligent networks that are fundamentally changing how businesses provision and experience connectivity.
 
Embracing network automation can help businesses as they build and manage increasingly complex and global IT environments by enabling them to orchestrate networks to meet their needs. Yet network automation already means different things to different people, and it is becoming harder for businesses to understand the short and long-term implications of intelligent networking.
 
In this BrightTALK panel, we’re bringing together networking experts, enterprises and technology providers to discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by intelligent networking. Join us to learn:
 
-          How your business can begin the move to intelligent networking
-          How network automation can play a role in improving access to the cloud and other current use cases.  
-          Why open APIs are an essential part of the move to intelligent networks
-          How industry standards are also helping to advance network automation
-          What truly autonomous and intelligent networks can mean for business in the future

Big data analytic remain of the top projects to complete this year. Why? Because data analytics can be applied in so many ways from improving business processes to customer experience to cybersecurity posture. These projects often fail because the storage subsystem are unable to keep up with the workload demands in realtime and at scale.

Join Kong Yang as he walks through the storage journeys that customers are undertaking for big data projects, especially where the desired outcome will ultimately improve a business’s bottom line.
The key takeaways from this conversation are:
Current big data analytics storage trends
Customer examples covering considerations, challenges, and what success looks like
Tips for your analytics storage strategy that you can put into practice

Is a DCIM toolset a simple way to manage the most complex of Data Centers? Or is it like many “single panes of glass” that set great expectations, but there is a hidden need to change people and processes before value is delivered. It is likely that some DCIM features will cause conflict with other team’s roles – so don’t expect everyone to” buy in”.

Too many focus on the technical features of many DCIM packages (asset, connectivity, monitoring, capacity, workflow, etc.) thinking that gaps in standards, processes, data and skills will disappear. These gaps can only be solved by management initiatives, so there are basic issues to address before any toolset can deliver against expectations. Often existing toolsets can be better utilised so that projects can be implemented faster, risks reduced, change controlled, etc. – many of the expectations that are set where a DCIM tool is promoted as the only answer. Many organisations have managed their data centres effectively before DCIM toolsets, so not all get the same value.

If your organisation or a client is currently considering a DCIM platform, then you will want to watch this webinar.

Fibre Channel (FC) networks run on a highly streamlined protocol designed to offer persistently high performance. The FC protocol has built-in feedback mechanisms to avoid congestion and to alleviate it if it occurs. There are many new technologies being developed to monitor and manage performance and availability issues that may arise from time to time. Moreover, many of these tools are available across the ecosystem and are part of the FC standard.
Come listen to Fibre Channel technology experts to understand:
• New technologies like FPIN notification
• Exciting new innovations coming to the FC network
• How to ensure predictable performance
• QoS considerations
• Why FC is the best transport protocol for storage environments

It is time to take advantage of the proficiency of the next-gen storage architectural solutions and develop your business to a platform of innovative success. Some businesses are still in hybrid function. This creates a "chatter" between on-premises and cloud solutions relaying confusion within an organization. We will dive into the transition-mode of how to become "tech savvy" by reducing costs, increasing production and increasing customer satisfaction without slowing down production in this transitional process but still keeping your personal touch with the brick-and-mortar philosophy. Old School mentality with an innovative approach to our on-going changing world.

The Benefits of Next-Gen Storage Solutions
What is it
Why to implement into your current process
What are the numbers and example of companies seeing success
How to streamline Next-Gen into your current business plan
See the future of how this will scale your business to the next level

The evolution of digital infrastructure must also involve the systems that manage it all. DCIM’s maturity in the data center industry has evolved from reactive and real-time management to data-driven solutions, AI, and even augmented or virtual reality integration. In this session, we’ll explore the evolution of DCIM, the transformation into digital infrastructure management, and critical features to look for when focusing on digital transformation.

Specifically, we’ll cover:
DCIM today is very different from DCIM, even five years ago
Exploring the DCIM maturity model
Working with next-gen DCIM concepts like cloud, edge, and more
Beyond traditional DCIM: AI, VR/AR, and data-driven intelligence
Getting started doesn’t have to be challenging: Best Practices

As Covid began to emerge and spread throughout the world, industries that had built themselves on face to face interactions were dramatically impacted. Given the slow rate of technology change in HealthCare, many found themselves caught flat-footed. How did the digital transformation take place and what does this mean for data and digital within Healthcare?

· Significant compute and associated Big-Data storage is accumulating in AWS, Azure, Google, and other Public Clouds.

o Data Egress Fees, Storage API Call Fees, and Migration Time for large data sets are an impediment to Multi-Cloud collaboration

· Public Cloud-Adjacent Storage as a Service (STaaS) provides a lower cost, stable storage environment where the compute can migrate but the data sets remain in place.

o Customers add or re-route high-speed, low-latency links to connect compute to large data sets in a global Multi-Cloud fabric.

· Cloud-Adjacent STaaS solves the following business problems

o Organizations who need to leverage Best of Breed Cloud Services from multiple CSPs who cannot afford the time or fees to migrate data

o Organizations who consider Time to Market and/or Global Delivery to be essential elements of their competitive advantage

o Organizations who require global ingest for IoT or Edge Cloud processes with no-fee replication across a global storage fabric (consumed capacity/connectivity only)

o Organizations who need to collaborate globally with large data sets for Bioinformatics, Analytics, HPC, or AI/ML/DL workloads in different Public Clouds

Data centers’ mission critical nature, increasing reliance on them for digital information and significant energy consumption, have created a need to adequately monitor and manage these facilities. This talk will go through the multidimensional approach for data center key indicators, comprising performance and risk, which has been recently added to data center standards and best practices. Performance is examined across productivity, efficiency, sustainability and operations. Risks are also contemplated. Novel multidimensional data center key indicators aim to improve decision-making and contribute to assess data centers.

In the world of cloud services development, it's necessary to gain an edge on the myriad of competition facing your product or service. Volume and variety are not just characteristics of cloud data, but also of the software needed to deliver accurate decisions. While a variety of software techniques exist to create effective development teams, sometimes it's worthwhile to look elsewhere for additional success factors. In this webcast, we'll be focusing on adapting some of the principles of modern manufacturing to add to the development toolbox. A Continuous Delivery methodology ensures that the product is streamlined in its feature set while building constant value to the customer via the cloud. Attendees will learn the following:

- Structuring development and testing resources for Continuous Delivery
- A flexible software planning cycle for driving new features throughout the process
- A set of simple guidelines for tracking success
- Ways to ensure new features are delivered before moving to the next plan

Start-up companies interested in using business analytics have a series of choices regarding different hardware, software, and services available in the cloud. The decision process for established companies, though, is more significant. Considering whether to use existing practices or start anew creates multiple decision points in any process. This SNIA webcast will feature views from both start-up and established companies on how to make the analytics decision. Attendees should expect to learn:
• Real-world examples of the analytics decision process
• How to use cloud resources in unique ways to accomplish business and engineering goals
• Starting from the perspective of business requirements and developing technical metrics
• Thoughts on when to start new vs. adapt existing analytics processes

Over the past several years, many in the NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) ecosystem have used test results demonstrating NVMe-oF’s dramatic reduction in latency as a way to extrapolate the benefit it can provide to application consumers. To date, the focus has been on specialized fabrics like RDMA and Fibre Channel (FC).

Unfortunately, the more important questions have been left as an exercise for the buyer: “How does the transport really impact application performance?” and “How does the transport holistically fit into my environment?”


RDMA based fabrics (e.g., RoCE) provide the lowest possible latency, and FC provides the most reliability, but with the introduction of NVMe/TCP this conversation must also include scale, cost and operations. This webcast will attempt to answer these questions beyond “it depends.”

Gain insights from an industry wide panel of NVMe and fabric technology experts as they discuss the thought process you can use to determine pros and cons of a fabric for your environment, including:
• Use cases driving fabric choices
• NVMe transports and their strengths
• Industry dynamics driving adoption
• Considerations for scale, security, and efficiency

Software development is rapidly adopting containers, Kubernetes and microservices in order to accelerate product evolution. At the same time Covid-19, work-from-home and offshoring are resulting in much more distributed development environments. These combine to make security and compliance a nightmare. This talk will be about the various security threats and how to address them in your development pipelines before they get into your production environment and create havoc.

This talk will address:
* Vulnerabilities
* Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
* Secrets
* Bill of Materials (BoM)
* Open-Source License Types
* Distributed Policy Analysis
* CI/CD Integration
* Continuous Scanning in Kubernetes Run-Time

The cloud offers near-instant scale and numerous security features that organizations can leverage; however, it’s not that way by default. Despite wide adoption of cloud services, many organizations remain unprepared and unknowingly expand their attack surface. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 99% of cloud security issues will be the customer’s fault.

Attend this webcast to better understand the nuances of cloud platforms and how to avoid common mistakes that undermine cloud computing benefits including:

Identity & Access Management – broadly-scoped permissions result in big compromises
Logs? Who needs logs? – critical to investigating security issues
“Drag and Drop” Migration – the cloud-native services that need to be considered
The Power of Security Reviews – cloud environments increase in complexity quickly
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – the quickest cloud win you can get
Secrets Storage – encrypting data sounds obvious but there is a lot to think about
Alert, Alert! – get a heads up to any out of the ordinary activity

Join us for an informative presentation filled with best practices and interactive sessions. MCANTA will even give away four, $100 Visa gift cards provided by our partner, Eggplant, part of Keysight Technologies.

We have all heard that customer experience (CX) can set your business apart, and it has been identified as a key battleground differentiator (Gartner, Zendesk, Deloitte, Forbes and everyone, really). As many as 84% of companies focusing on CX see an uplift in revenue (Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report). Breaking apart working systems (no matter how expensive, complicated, or risky they are to maintain) is high stakes work for any organization.

Incorporating Application Testing and QA before moving forward with major changes leads to better software, better CX and higher customer satisfaction.

According to the World Quality Report (WQR) approximately 74% of responses said QA contributions are essential to business outcomes, and 77% said end user satisfaction was critical. This is great for businesses and consumers alike. With most businesses “getting it”, what does the survey tell us about how they are they doing at meeting their QA goals?

This is where the difficulties begin… Only 29% of respondents felt they always achieve desired QA targets. In other words, over 70% of organizations felt that they didn’t meet their goals. That’s pretty bad. If organizations understand the importance of QA to the success of their business, why is there such a gap in execution? Luckily the WQR responses identify existing major challenges to successful QA programs.

Over the course of this presentation we will share some best practices you can take, and items to consider as you leverage QA, Test Automation, and Robotic Process Automation to ensure your business processes keep running while you charge forward towards micro-services.