Storage Clouds:  Limitations, Challenges and Enablers

Looking for more cost-effective ways to implement fibre channel cabling? Learn why proper cabling is important and how it fits into data center designs. Join this webcast to hear FCIA experts discuss:
- Cable and connector types, cassettes, patch panels and other cabling products
- Variables in Fiber Optic and Copper Cables: Reflectance, Insertion Loss,
Crosstalk, Speed/Length Limitations and more
- Different variations of Structured Cabling in an environment with FC
- Helpful tips when planning and implementing a cabling infrastructure within a SAN

The SNIA Swordfish™ specification helps to provide a unified approach for the management of storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments, making it easier for IT administrators to integrate scalable solutions into their data centers. Swordfish builds on the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF’s) Redfish® specification using the same easy-to-use RESTful methods and lightweight JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formatting. Join this session to receive an overview of Swordfish including the new functionality added in version 1.0.6 released in March, 2018.

Storage and infrastructure are going through a lot of changes. With technologies like Software-defined Storage as well as new infrastructure like Hyper-converged, there is a lot for IT admins to consider.

Join us in this webinar where we’ll cover Software-defined Storage, Flash, Hyper-converged and Cloud Storage. You learn why these technologies and infrastructure models are or aren't being utilized by companies and the areas where they have not lived up to their promises.

File vs. Block vs. Object Storage

When it comes to storage, a byte is a byte is a byte, isn’t it?

One of the enduring truths about simplicity is that scale makes everything hard, and with that comes complexity. And when we’re not processing the data, how do we store it and access it?

The only way to manage large quantities of data is to make it addressable in larger pieces, above the byte level. For that, we’ve designed sets of data management protocols that help us do several things: address large lumps of data by some kind of name or handle, organize it for storage on external storage devices with different characteristics, and provide protocols that allow us to programmatically write and read it.

In this webcast, we'll compare three types of data access: file, block and object storage, and the access methods that support them. Each has its own use cases, and advantages and disadvantages; each provides simple to sophisticated data management; and each makes different demands on storage devices and programming technologies.

Perhaps you’re comfortable with block and file, but are interested in investigating the more recent class of object storage and access. Perhaps you’re happy with your understanding of objects, but would really like to understand files better, and what advantages or disadvantages they have compared to each other. Or perhaps you want to understand how file, block and object are implemented on the underlying storage systems – and how one can be made to look like the other, depending on how the storage is accessed. Join us as we discuss and debate:

Storage devices
oHow different types of storage drive different management & access solutions
Block
oWhere everything is in fixed-size chunks
oSCSI and SCSI-based protocols, and how FC and iSCSI fit in
Files
oWhen everything is a stream of bytes
oNFS and SMB
Objects
oWhen everything is a blob
oHTTP, key value and RESTful interfaces
Altogether…
oWhen files, blocks and objects collide

Organizations looking to deploy database applications, like Cassandra, Postgres and Couchbase, need persistent storage so if the instance fails data survives. Many storage vendors are jumping on the “containers” bandwagon, but the level of support and understanding of the true need varies.

Join experts from Datera, Portworx, StorageOS, Storage Switzerland, Virtuozzo and WekaIO for a roundtable discussion on “The State of Persistent Storage for Containers.” In this webinar we will discuss why persistent storage for containers are still needed, what are today’s use cases for it and what the future holds.

Register now to join us for the live roundtable event on April 17th at 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT

Containers can make it easier for developers to know that their software will run, no matter where it is deployed. What do customers, storage developers, and the industry want to see to fully unlock the potential of persistent memory in a container environment? This presentation will discuss how persistent memory is a revolutionary technology which will boost the performance of next-generation packaging of applications and libraries into containers.

You’ll learn:
•What SNIA is doing to advance persistent memory
•What the ecosystem enablement efforts are around persistent memory solutions
•How NVDIMMs are paving the way for plug-n-play adoption into container environments

About the presenter:
Arthur is Co-Chair of the SNIA Persistent Memory and NVDIMM Special Interest Group, which accelerates the awareness and adoption of Persistent Memories and NVDIMMs for computing architectures.

As a Director of Product Marketing at SMART Modular Technologies. Arthur has been driving new product launch and business development activities at SMART since 1998. Prior to Smart, Arthur worked as a product manager at Hitachi Semiconductor America. While there, his focus was on DRAM, SRAM and Flash technologies.

Arthur holds a MBA from San Francisco State University and a MS from Arizona State University

Watson is a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy! (where it beat its human competitors) and was then used in commercial applications, the first of which was helping with lung cancer treatment.

NetApp is now using IBM Watson in Elio, a virtual support assistant that responds to queries in natural language. Elio is built using Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities. These enable Elio to analyze unstructured data by using natural language processing to understand grammar and context, understand complex questions, and evaluate all possible meanings to determine what is being asked. Elio then reasons and identifies the best answers to questions with help from experts who monitor the quality of answers and continue to train Elio on more subjects.

Elio and Watson represent an innovative and novel use of large quantities of unstructured data to help solve problems, on average, four times faster than traditional methods. Join us at this webcast, where we’ll discuss:

•The challenges of utilizing large quantities of valuable yet unstructured data
•How Watson and Elio continuously learn as more data arrives, and navigates an ever growing volume of technical information
•How Watson understands customer language and provides understandable responses

Learn how these new and exciting technologies are changing the way we look at and interact with large volumes of traditionally hard-to-analyze data.

After the webcast, check-out the Q&A blog http://www.sniacloud.com/?p=296

Cloud computing innovation will power enterprise transformation in 2018. Cloud growth is also driving a rapid rise in the big data storage market, exacerbating the enterprise challenge around storage cost and complexity.

Join this webinar with Kevin L. Jackson, CEO, GovCloud Network LLC and globally recognized cloud computing thought leader. He will show how Cloud Storage 2.0 can be used to address this proliferation of real-time data from the web, mobile devices, social media, sensors, log files, and transactional applications, and how all of these are affecting today's data centers.

NVMe adoption has taken the Data Center by storm. And while the technology has proven itself to outperform all other competing SSD implementation, it is still quite limited and restricted to the local server it is attached to. This is where NVMe Targets come into the picture. In this presentation, we will explore how NVMe devices can be exported across a network and attached to remote server nodes.

Benchmarking storage performance is both an art and a science. In this 5th installment of the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum’s “Storage Performance Benchmarking” series, our experts take on optimizing performance for various workloads. Attendees will gain an understanding of workload profiles and their characteristics for common Independent Software Vendor (ISV) applications and learn how to identify application workloads based on I/O profiles to better understand the implications on storage architectures and design patterns. This webcast will cover:
•An introduction to benchmarking storage performance of workloads
•Workload characteristics
•Common Workloads (OLTP, OLAP, VMware, etc.)
•Graph fun!

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://bit.ly/2GME6OR

There are many developments going on in the industry for storing and managing information. This webinar will cover the major trends, explaining the development and status as well as the potential impact on data center environments. Technologies such as advanced flash and storage class memory and enabling software and systems for digital transformation will be covered. Randy will give the industry analyst view of the trends and provide background on the maturity and adoption.

Join this webcast with Ian Smith, CEO and Reuben Thompson, VP Technology at Gospel Technology, as they discuss:

- Private enterprise blockchains vs public ecosystems (i.e. crypto)
- Enabling data transactional trust without compromising speed
- How blockchain can be used to store and protect data

Gospel is an enterprise data platform built on blockchain, providing data storage for the distributed era, as well as enterprise data security and data breach avoidance.

About the speakers:
Ian is a serial entrepreneur and experienced enterprise technology executive, at one point holding a VP Product Management role for IBM Storage, and has been involved in solving some of the largest and most complex infrastructure and data problems in enterprise business.

Reuben is responsible for all Gospel platform development and has extensive experience of managing large-scale software projects, scalable, distributed, service-oriented software architectures, and satisfying complex and divergent compliance requirements (FCA, PCI, etc).

Using Splunk to Analyze Performance Metrics

Chris Trimper will show you how to leverage Splunk for storing and analyzing performance data from LoadRunner. This allows for easy trending and possible collaboration with other application metrics stored in Splunk. We will also look at building self-service dashboards showing application performance metrics.

You will be hearing about:

• Introduction to Splunk
• Process of preparing LR data for Splunk consumption
• Building dashboards and performing analytics in Splunk

Join us for the next upcoming SIG Talk on Tuesday, March 13, 2018: http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1073255&group=.

Today's Fibre Channel SANs are tasked with reliably delivering huge amounts of data with almost zero latency in an environment with a large variance of end device capabilities. Fibre Channel is a lossless network protocol but what ramifications does that have? What is considered a good SAN design and what are best practices? What situations can lead to suboptimal performance? How can a device that is not performing well affect the performance of devices even on different parts of the SAN? Can a device that is returning credits without delay affect the SAN just like a device that is returning credits slowly?

Get answers to these questions and more in this live FCIA webcast where you’ll learn:

•How Fibre Channel achieves a lossless data delivery
•The definition of "slow drain“
•Basic slow drain indications and what they mean
•“Over” Utilization - How a device that isn't "slow drain" by the typical definition can affect a SAN in a similar fashion as a slow drain device
•How to prevent, Identify, and resolve performance problems

After you watch the webcast, check-out the the FCIA Q&A blog http://bit.ly/2ouWq4b

In the enterprise, block storage typically handles the most critical applications such as database, ERP, product development, and tier-1 virtualization. The dominant connectivity option for this has long been Fibre Channel SAN (FC-SAN), but recently many customers and block storage vendors have turned to iSCSI instead. FC-SAN is known for its reliability, lossless nature, 2x FC speed bumps, and carefully tested interoperability between vendors. iSCSI is known for running on ubiquitous Ethernet networks, 10x Ethernet speed bumps, and supporting commodity networking hardware from many vendors.

Because, FCoE also delivers increasing performance as Ethernet speeds increase – and, Fibre Channel also delivers increasing performance as FC speeds increase. Historically, FC delivered speed bumps at a more rapid interval (2x bumps), while Ethernet delivered their speed bumps at a slower pace (10x bumps), but that has changed recently with Ethernet adding 2.5G, 5G, 25G, 40G, and 50G to the traditional 1G, 10G, 100G timeline.

As the storage world moves to more flash and other non-volatile memory, more cloud, and more virtualization (or more containers), it’s time to revisit one of the great IT debates: Should you deploy Fibre Channel or iSCSI? Attend this SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum webcast to learn:
•Will Fibre Channel or iSCSI deliver faster performance? Does it depend on the workload?
•How is the wire speed race going between FC and iSCSI? Does anyone actually run iSCSI on 100GbE? When will 128Gb Fibre Channel arrive?
•Do Linux, Windows, or hypervisors have a preference?
•Is one really easier [to install/manage] than the other, or are they just different?
•How does the new NVMe over Fabrics protocol affect this debate?

Join SNIA experts as they compare FC vs. iSCSI and argue in an energetic yet friendly way about their differences and merits of each.

After you watch the webcast check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=680

In a recent survey of enterprise hybrid cloud users, the Evaluator Group saw that nearly 60% of respondents indicated that lack of interoperability is a significant technology-related issue that they must overcome in order to move forward. In fact, lack of interoperability was chosen above public cloud security and network security as significant inhibitors. This webcast looks at enterprise hybrid cloud objectives and barriers with a focus on cloud interoperability within the storage domain and the SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative to promote interoperability and portability of data stored in the cloud.