The Magic and Mystery of In-Memory Apps

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

One of Fibre Channel’s greatest strengths is its ability to scale to thousands and thousands of nodes, while providing predictable performance. So, when we say that Fibre Channel has unmatched scalability, what does that actually mean? And how does it work?

We often hear about “designed from the ground up,” but in this case it’s actually true. From each individual link, to the overall domain architecture, each step along the way is intended to be approached in a scalable fashion.

In this webinar, we’ll be breaking down the pieces of the puzzle that help give Fibre Channel its robustness when you’re working at fabrics even greater than 10,000 nodes. We’ll be talking about:

•What a deterministic storage network is
•Fabric management principles
•Negotiated credit transfers (buffer-to-buffer credits)
•Network Engineering/Design Principles
•Oversubscription and Fan-In Ratios
•Topologies that help scale
•Domains and Fabric limits
•Consistency of performance at scale

Along the way, we’ll be talking about some of the ways that Fibre Channel differs from other popular storage networks as they approach large-scale environments, and how it handles issues that arise in such cases.

Please join us on November 6th at 10:00 am PT/1:00 pm ET for another educational webinar on Fibre Channel!

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

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep.6]: Setting Budgets, Finding Stakeholders for AI-Enabled DCX Projects

As IT and business leaders evaluate their how to use AI to improve customer experience, one of the biggest roadblocks is funding.

This webinar provides step-by-step guidance on finding stakeholders to fund the projects, with specific data on how much companies are spending today on their AI-enabled initiatives.

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep.5]: CX Success Stories Require Technology, Leadership, Data

A great story requires more than a compelling narrative. Marketing teams can significantly elevate their success with the right combination of leadership, technology, and data derived from well-planned customer interviews.

Crafting that perfect story requires an expanded mindset about what comprises “marketing.”

In this webinar, join Nemertes Research President Robin Gareiss, who recently completed detailed research with 518 companies on how they use advanced technologies and reshape their organizational structure to improve customer experience. Based on this research and her experience as a journalist, marketing content developer, and CX advisor, she will cover:

1. Organizational overhaul: Why a Chief Customer Officer is vital, and how the CMO and CCO work together for joint success.
2. Technology leverage: What are the key technologies and contact-center initiatives that result in measurable CX success—ultimately delivering crucial data to marketing teams that support their success stories?
3. The perfect story: How to conduct interviews that get real-world data to support your mission.

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

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep.4]: Analytics' Role in Improving DCX

Information is king, and without both real-time and historical data, it's nearly impossible to deliver the experience customers are expecting.

Analytics tools are providing incredible insight to companies about customer sentiment, agent performance, and predictive actions.

In this webinar, learn how successful organizations are using analytics to drive more revenue, reduce costs, and improve the customer experience.

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep 3]: The Agent Experience - From Good to Great

Although organizations are busy adding self-service channels, and AI-enabled chatbots or virtual agents to their customer engagement strategies, there is no replacement for the human touch.

Successful companies are transforming the agent experience, delivering better coaching, more analytics, and improved compensation packages.

Learn how you can leverage AI and analytics to reduce contact center agent turnover rates--and ultimately improve the customer experience.

Fibre Channel has long been known to be a very secure protocol for storage. Even so, there is no such thing as a “perfectly secure” technology, and for that reason it’s important to constantly update and protect against threats.

The sheer variety of environments in which Fibre Channel fabrics are deployed makes it very difficult to simply rely only on physical security. In fact, it’s possible to access different storage systems by different users, even when spanned over several sites. Fibre Channel enables security services to specifically address these concerns, and prevent misconfigurations or access to data by non-authorized people and machines.

This webcast is going to dive deep into the guts of security aspects of Fibre Channel, looking closely at the protocols used to implement security in a Fibre Channel fabric. In particular, we’re going to look at:

•The definitions of the protocols to authenticate Fibre Channel devices
•What are the different classes of threats, and what are the mechanisms to protect against them
•What are session keys and how to set them up
•How Fibre Channel negotiates these parameters to insure frame-by-frame integrity and confidentiality
•How Fibre Channel establishes and distributes policies across a fabric

Please join us to learn more about the technical considerations that Fibre Channel brings to the table to secure and protect your data and information.

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep.1] AI Drives Measurable Success in Customer Engagement

Nearly 50% more companies are using or planning to use AI in their customer engagement initiatives.
Nemertes recently studied how 518 companies are using AI and analytics to improve their customer experiences. This webinar details:
• how these companies use AI
• what measurable improvements resulted.

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

The benefits of a cloud-first storage strategy are well-known: scalability, flexibility, agility, avoiding lock-in and spreading risk to name a few. But defining your cloud-first storage strategy requires you to take a hard look at your ecosystem and address the challenges of cloud adoption head on.


Join this panel to hear experts discuss how the key challenges - including taking risks with data assets, ownership, integration, security and compliance - can be overcome so that you can unlock the rewards of going cloud-first.

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