The Magic and Mystery of In-Memory Apps

Building a cloud storage architecture requires both storage vendors, cloud service providers and large enterprises to consider new technical and economic paradigms in order to enable a flexible and cost efficient architecture.

Economic:
Cloud infrastructure is often procured by service providers and large enterprises in the traditional way – prepay for expected future storage needs and over provision for unexpected changes in demand. This requires large capital expenditures with slow cost recovery based on fluctuating customer adoption. Giving these cloud service providers flexibility in the procurement model for their storage allows them to more closely align the expenditure on infrastructure resources with the cost recovery from customers, optimizing the use of both CapEx and OpEx budgets.

Technical:
Clouds inherently require often unpredictable scalability – both up and down. Building a storage architecture with the ability to rapidly allocate resources for a specific customer need and reallocate resources based on changing customer requirements allows the cloud service provider to optimize storage capacity and performance pools in their data center without compromising the responsiveness to the change in needs. Such architecture should also align to the datacenter level orchestration system to allow for even higher level of resource optimization and flexibility.

In this webcast, you will learn:
•How modern storage technology allows you to build this infrastructure
•The role of software defined storage
•Accounting principles
•How to model cloud costs of new applications and or re-engineering existing applications
•Performance considerations

For datacenter applications requiring low-latency access to persistent storage, byte-addressable persistent memory (PM) technologies like 3D XPoint and MRAM are attractive solutions. Network-based access to PM, labeled here PM over Fabrics (PMoF), is driven by data scalability and/or availability requirements. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network protocols are a good match for PMoF, allowing direct RDMA Write of data to remote PM. However, the completion of an RDMA Write at the sending node offers no guarantee that data has reached persistence at the target. This webcast will outline extensions to RDMA protocols that confirm such persistence and additionally can order successive writes to different memories within the target system.

The primary target audience is developers of low-latency and/or high-availability datacenter storage applications. The presentation will also be of broader interest to datacenter developers, administrators and users.

After you watch, check-out our Q&A blog from the webcast: http://bit.ly/2DFE7SL

The recent data explosion is a huge challenge for storage and IT system designers. How do you crunch all that data at a reasonable cost? Fortunately, your familiar SAS comes to the rescue with its new 24G speed. Its flexible connection scheme already allows designers to scale huge external storage systems with low latency. Now the new high operating speed offers the throughput you need to bring big data to its knobby knees! Our panel of storage experts will present practical solutions to today’s petabyte problems and beyond.

Protocol Analysis for High-Speed Fibre Channel Fabrics in the Data Center: Aka, Saving Your SAN (& Sanity)

The driving force behind adopting new tools and processes in test and measurement practices is the desire to understand, predict, and mitigate the impact of Sick but not Dead (SBND) conditions in datacenter fabrics. The growth and centralization of mission critical datacenter SAN environments has exposed the fact that many small yet seemingly insignificant problems have the potential of becoming large scale and impactful events, unless properly contained or controlled.

Root cause analysis requirements now encompass all layers of the fabric architecture, and new storage protocols that usurp the traditional network stack (i.e. FCoE, iWARP, NVMe over Fabrics, etc.) for purposes of expedited data delivery place additional analytical demands on the datacenter manager.
To be sure, all tools have limitations in their effectiveness and areas of coverage, so a well-constructed “collage” of best practices and effective and efficient analysis tools must be developed. To that end, recognizing and reducing the effect of those limitations is essential.

This webinar will introduce participants to Protocol Analysis tools and how they may be incorporated into the “best practices” application of SAN problem solving. We will review:
•The protocol of the Phy
•Use of “in-line” capture tools
•Benefits of purposeful error injection for developing and supporting today’s high-speed Fibre Channel storage fabrics

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://bit.ly/2P0hsqp

The Long Term Retention Technical Working Group and the Data Protection Committee will review the results of the 2017 100-year archive survey. In addition to the survey results, the presentation will cover the following topics:
· How the use of storage for archiving has evolved in ten years
· What type of information is now being retained and for how long
· Changes in corporate practices
· Impact of technology changes such as Cloud

This webinar is part of BrightTALK's Ask the Expert Series.

Many organizations are drowning in unstructured data, which can break traditional storage infrastructure. We'll take a look at different ways to handle unstructured data with particular emphasis on object storage.

Join this live Q&A with Erik Ottem, Director of Product Marketing at Western Digital, to:

- Understand the definition of unstructured data
- Review storage infrastructure block/file/object strengths and weaknesses
- Discuss data integrity and system availability
- Learn about data management at scale

In the history of enterprise storage there has been a trend to move from local storage to centralized, networked storage. Customers found that networked storage provided higher utilization, centralized and hence cheaper management, easier failover, and simplified data protection, which has driven the move to FC-SAN, iSCSI, NAS and object storage.

Recently, distributed storage has become more popular where storage lives in multiple locations but can still be shared. Advantages of distributed storage include the ability to scale-up performance and capacity simultaneously and--in the hyperconverged use case--to use each node (server) for both compute and storage. Attend this webcast to learn about:
•Pros and cons of centralized vs. distributed storage
•Typical use cases for centralized and distributed storage
•How distributed works for SAN, NAS, parallel file systems, and object storage
•How hyperconverged has introduced a new way of consuming storage

After the webcast, please check out our Q&A blog http://bit.ly/2xSajxJ

Interoperability is a primary basis for the predictable behavior of a Fibre Channel (FC) SAN. FC interoperability implies standards conformance by definition. Interoperability also implies exchanges between a range of products, or similar products from one or more different suppliers, or even between past and future revisions of the same products. Interoperability may be developed as a special measure between two products, while excluding the rest, and still be standards conformant. When a supplier is forced to adapt its system to a system that is not based on standards, it is not interoperability but rather, only compatibility.

Every FC hardware and software supplier publishes an interoperability matrix and per product conformance based on having validated conformance, compatibility, and interoperability. There are many dimensions to interoperability, from the physical layer, optics, and cables; to port type and protocol; to server, storage, and switch fabric operating systems versions; standards and feature implementation compatibility; and to use case topologies based on the connectivity protocol (F-port, N-Port, NP-port, E-port, TE-port, D-port).

In this session we will delve into the many dimensions of FC interoperability, discussing:

•Standards and conformance
•Validation of conformance and interoperability
•FC-NVMe conformance and interoperability
•Interoperability matrices
•Multi-generational interoperability
•Use case examples of interoperability

After you watch the webcast, check out the FC Interoperability Q&A blog https://fibrechannel.org/a-qa-on-fibre-channel-interoperability/

Network-intensive applications, like networked storage or clustered computing, require a network infrastructure with high bandwidth and low latency. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) supports zero-copy data transfers by enabling movement of data directly to or from application memory. This results in high bandwidth, low latency networking with little involvement from the CPU.

In the next SNIA ESF “Great Storage Debates” series webcasts, we’ll be examining two commonly known RDMA protocols that run over Ethernet; RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and IETF-standard iWARP. Both are Ethernet-based RDMA technologies that reduce the amount of CPU overhead in transferring data among servers and storage systems.

The goal of this presentation is to provide a solid foundation on both RDMA technologies in a vendor-neutral setting that discusses the capabilities and use cases for each so that attendees can become more informed and make educated decisions.

Join to hear the following questions addressed:

•Both RoCE and iWARP support RDMA over Ethernet, but what are the differences?
•Use cases for RoCE and iWARP and what differentiates them?
•UDP/IP and TCP/IP: which uses which and what are the advantages and disadvantages?
•What are the software and hardware requirements for each?
•What are the performance/latency differences of each?

Join our SNIA experts as they answer all these questions and more on this next Great Storage Debate

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://bit.ly/2OH6su8

What new security requirements apply to Persistent Memory (PM)? While many existing security practices such as access control, encryption, multi-tenancy and key management apply to persistent memory, new security threats may result from the differences between PM and storage technologies. The SNIA PM security threat model provides a starting place for exposing system behavior, protocol and implementation security gaps that are specific to PM. This in turn motivates industry groups such as TCG and JEDEC to standardize methods of completing the PM security solution space.

We’re increasingly in a multi-cloud environment, with potentially multiple private, public and hybrid cloud implementations in support of a single enterprise. Organizations want to leverage the agility of public cloud resources to run existing workloads without having to re-plumb or re-architect them and their processes. In many cases, applications and data have been moved individually to the public cloud. Over time, some applications and data might need to be moved back on premises, or moved partially or entirely from one cloud to another.

That means simplifying the movement of data from cloud to cloud. Data movement and data liberation – the seamless transfer of data from one cloud to another – has become a major requirement.

In this webcast, we’re going to explore some of these data movement and mobility issues with real-world examples from the University of Michigan. Register now for discussions on:

•How do we secure data both at-rest and in-transit?
•Why is data so hard to move? What cloud processes and interfaces should we use to make data movement easier?
•How should we organize our data to simplify its mobility? Should we use block, file or object technologies?
•Should the application of the data influence how (and even if) we move the data?
•How can data in the cloud be leveraged for multiple use cases?

This webinar is part of BrightTALK's Founders Spotlight Series, where each month we feature inspiring founders and entrepreneurs from across industries.

In this episode, Gleb Budman, CEO and Co-Founder of Backblaze, will share his behind-the-scenes insight into what it's really like to found a tech startup.

Backblaze is a cloud storage and backup solutions for developers and IT teams. Backblaze stores over 150 petabytes of data, is profitable and won a spot on Deloitte's Fast 500 for 917% five-year revenue growth.

Gleb is founder of three companies, leader in two startups from pre-launch through acquisition, and a seasoned executive. He is on a mission to make storing data astonishingly easy and low-cost.

The “Great Storage Debates” webcast series continues, this time on FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER. Like past “Great Storage Debates,” the goal of this presentation is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide vendor-neutral education on the capabilities and use cases of these technologies so that attendees can become more informed and make educated decisions.

One of the features of modern data centers is the ubiquitous use of Ethernet. Although many data centers run multiple separate networks (Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC)), these parallel infrastructures require separate switches, network adapters, management utilities and staff, which may not be cost effective.

Multiple options for Ethernet-based SANs enable network convergence, including FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) which allows FC protocols over Ethernet and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) for transport of SCSI commands over TCP/IP-Ethernet networks. There are also new Ethernet technologies that reduce the amount of CPU overhead in transferring data from server to client by using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which is leveraged by iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) to avoid unnecessary data copying.

That leads to several questions about FCoE, iSCSI and iSER:

•If we can run various network storage protocols over Ethernet, what
differentiates them?
•What are the advantages and disadvantages of FCoE, iSCSI and iSER?
•How are they structured?
•What software and hardware do they require?
•How are they implemented, configured and managed?
•Do they perform differently?
•What do you need to do to take advantage of them in the data center?
•What are the best use cases for each?

Join our SNIA experts as they answer all these questions and more on the next Great Storage Debate.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog from our presenters http://bit.ly/2NyJKUM

FICON (Fibre Channel Connection) is an upper-level protocol supported by mainframe servers and attached enterprise-class storage controllers that utilize Fibre Channel as the underlying transport. Mainframes are built to provide a robust and resilient IT infrastructure, and FICON is a key element of their ability to meet the increasing demands placed on reliable and efficient access to data. What are some of the key objectives and benefits of the FICON protocol? And what are the characteristics that make FICON relevant in today’s data centers for mission-critical workloads?

Join us in this live FCIA webcast where you’ll learn:

• Basic mainframe I/O terminology
• The characteristics of mainframe I/O and FICON architecture
• Key features and benefits of FICON

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog: https://fibrechannel.org/ficon-webcast-qa/