Storage Clouds:  Limitations, Challenges and Enablers

In the past couple of years since its introduction, NVMe™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) has not been resting on any laurels. Work has been ongoing, and there are several updates that are worth talking about.

There is more to a technology than its core standard, of course, and many different groups have been hard at work at improving upon, and fleshing out, many of the capabilities that are related to NVMe-oF.

This webcast will explore a few of these projects and how they relate to implementing the technology. In particular, we’ll be looking at:

•A summary of new items in NVMe-oF 1.1
•Updates about what is happening in FC-NVMe-2
•How SNIA’s provisioning model helps NVMe-oF Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) devices
•Managing and provisioning NVMe-oF devices with SNIA Swordfish™

The need for rapid deployment of scalable clusters is creating an opportunity for container solutions such as Kubernetes. But what are the implications of multiple Kubernetes clusters in a broad deployment? What happens if a cluster goes down? What’s the impact on business resiliency? Managing and securing multiple clusters is becoming a key topic and area of debate. Multi-cluster Kubernetes that provides robustness & resilience is rapidly moving from “best practice” to a “must have”.

In this webcast we’ll dive into:
•The history of multi-cluster Kubernetes
•How multi-cluster setups could affect data heavy workloads (such as multiple microservices backed by independent data stores)
•Managing multiple clusters
•Keeping the business functioning if a cluster goes down
•How to prepare for the coming datapocalypse

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at: https://bit.ly/2DE91fL

As data growth in enterprises continues to skyrocket, datacenter cloud scalability, whether on premises, in hybrid cloud or in multicloud deployments, is key for businesses. So, what are enterprise IT organizations supposed to do, given that 'run anything anywhere' is becoming more important than ever? Customers are finding that hybrid cloud storage solutions better meet their IT and business growth needs, so they can rapidly scale their IT infrastructure and cover a wider array of services. This webcast will help architects and consumers of hybrid cloud storage solutions better understand:
oTrends and benefits of hybrid cloud storage and multicloud deployments
oThe range of technologies and capabilities under development to help enterprise hyperscalers and cloud service providers (CSPs) serve IT customers
oHow scalability differs in block vs. file workloads
oThe important requirements to keep in mind when considering a 'run anything anywhere' objective

In order to effectively use cryptography to protect information, one has to ensure that the associated cryptographic keys are also protected. Attention must be paid to how cryptographic keys are generated, distributed, used, stored, replaced and destroyed in order to ensure that the security of cryptographic implementations are not compromised.

This webinar will introduce the fundamentals of cryptographic key management including key lifecycles, key generation, key distribution, symmetric vs asymmetric key management and integrated vs centralized key management models. Relevant standards, protocols and industry best practices will also be presented.

After you watch the webcast, check-out the Q&A blog at: https://bit.ly/3dcnpId

The T11 specification for NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe) was completed in 2018, since that time, the FCIA has held numerous plugfest events and products have been shipping for a few years. So where are we today with NVMe over Fibre Channel solutions?

This webcast will take an early 2020 point-in-time snapshot of where the industry is, discuss products available today, and address common questions around:

•Which host environments can use FC-NVMe
•What is required from the fabric
•Breadth of supporting storage solutions
•Application benefits we have seen so far
•FC-NVMe strengths and differentiators

And most importantly, is FC-NVMe ready for prime time?

Discover how the themes of computational storage, persistent memory, and solid state come together in a webcast from the new SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative. We’ll explore how expertise in these three areas can help understand storage architectures, common solution areas, and their impacts on storage devices, systems, and software.

One of the most important aspects of security is how to protect the data that is just “sitting there.” How easy is it to get to? Who can get to it? If someone does get access to the data, can they read it? What are the potential risks of the wrong people reading the data? These are just a few of the questions that we try to answer when we go through the process of securing data.

Contrary to popular belief, however, securing “data at rest” is not simply encrypting the data. While it is true that data encryption plays a major role in securing “data at rest,” there are several other factors that come into play and are equally as important – if not more so.

For this webcast, we’re going to talk about those other factors (Encryption is deserving of its own, specific webcast). We will present the end-to-end process to securing “data at rest,” and discuss all the factors and trade-offs that must be considered, and some of the general risks that need to be mitigated, discussing:

• How requirements for “data at rest” differ from “data in flight”
• Legal and regulatory reasons to protect (or delete) data at rest
• Where and how data could be attacked
• Understanding the costs of ransomware
• How to protect cryptographic keys from malicious actors
• Using key managers to properly manage cryptographic keys
• Strengths and weaknesses of relying on government security recommendations
• The importance of validating data backups... how stable is your media?

Encryption has been used through the ages to protect stored secrets, authenticate messages, communicate secretly in broad daylight, and even to check that messages were properly transmitted and received without tamper. Now, it’s often our first go-to tool for making sure that data simply isn’t readable to prying eyes, ears or AI bots.

But how does encryption actually work, what makes it tick, and how is it managed? How do we ensure compatibility? How do we protect the keys; i.e., “Who will guard the guards themselves?”

It’s a big topic that we’re breaking down into three parts: Encryption 101, Key Management 101, and Applied Cryptography.

Join us on May 20th for the first encryption webcast: Storage Networking Security: Encryption 101 where security experts will cover:

•A brief history of Encryption
•Cryptography basics
•Definition of terms – Entropy, Cipher, Symmetric & Asymmetric Keys, Certificates and Digital signatures, etc.
•Introduction to Key Management

After you watch the webcast, check out the Encryption 101 Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/2ZGMisl

More and more we are seeing compute and inference move to the edge. This is driven by the growth in capability to not only generate data from sensors, devices and by people operating in the field, but also by the interaction between those devices.

This new source of data and information brings with it unique challenges to the way we store and transmit data as well as the way we need to curate it. In this webcast we will look at:
•New patterns generated by the explosion of the Internet of Things
•How IoT is impacting storage and data strategies
•Security and privacy issues and considerations
•How to think about the lifecycle of our information in this new environment

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

SNIA Swordfish is an extension of the DMTF Redfish specification to provide a unified approach for the management of storage and services in converged, hyperconverged, hyperscale, and cloud infrastructure environments. Swordfish uses a client-centric approach to develop the dynamic resource models as part of the specification, which describes client needs, management requirements, and use cases.

NVMe-oF currently support fabric transports like RDMA (iWarp, RoCE, IB), TCP, and FC. NVMe / NVMe-oF currently lacks efficient remote configuration and provisioning management mechanisms to enable NVMe-oF scaling to large converged infrastructures – something Redfish and Swordfish can provide.

The SNIA Swordfish specification is currently growing to include full NVMe and NVMe-oF enablement and alignment across DMTF, NVMe, and SNIA for NVMe and NVMe-oF use cases. SNIA members are contributing to specification development and helping to shape the ecosystem. This presentation will provide an overview of the work in progress to map these standards together to ensure NVMe and NVMe-oF environments can be represented entirely in Swordfish and Redfish environments.

Join us! We welcome your feedback, and encourage participation.

In this webcast, we will explore why your storage may be acting strangely now that it’s been subjected to the whims of data scientists. We’ll look at how and why the I/O patterns have changed, where this will lead, and some of the tactics and strategies you can deploy now to prevent impact from this new movement of storage saboteurs! We’ll discuss:

•Why are data scientists here? (the benefits a data scientist brings to the organisation)
•How to spot a data scientist in the wild (data patterns to look out for)
•Feeding and watering your data scientist (what they need and how to provide it)
•Planning for more data scientists (how to make your infrastructure data scientist ready)
•How does data flow through an AI/ML system?
•Is the data packaged in unusual or specific ways?
•What stresses does it place on the storage system? Capacity? Performance? Or both?

Research firm IDC projects that by the end of 2020, the world will generate 44 zettabytes (44 trillion gigabytes) of data per year. Data storage, therefore, is no longer simple, and in the age of cloud maturity and Digital Transformation, storage infrastructure strategies are shifting. With object stores having a very different set of characteristics than file and block storage, it can be confusing to know which is the right strategy that will keep up with an expanding digital universe.

Even small businesses struggle to manage the ever-growing pile of files stored on various networks and systems, so the challenges for enterprise companies can be hard to wrap your head around.

Join this panel of object, file and block storage experts as they discuss:

- The best way to manage unstructured data
- Are there deceptive costs in a file storage strategy?
- Use cases for object storage

Speakers:
Alex McDonald - SNIA Networking Storage Forum and Office of the CTO, NetApp (Moderator)
Tom Christensen, CTO & Customer Advocacy - Northern EMEA, Hitachi Vantara
Anne Blanchard, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Nasuni
Sanjay Jagad, Senior Director of Products and Solutions, Cloudian
Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and Samsung

Storage is where your data lives and is needed to run your workloads on premise, in a colocation, Cloud or on the move. Many advances have been made in data management capabilities such as virtualizing the storage software layer and utilizing Cloud/hyper-converged hosting platforms. However, the software used to run storage systems continues to rely on traditional RAID and data management methods.

This approach continues to impose limitations on storage performance and agility. Next generation storage software must be built from the ground up to provide better performance and flexibility.

Madison Cloud has teamed with StorONE to deliver new software-defined storage capabilities with an entirely new software stack. Imagine using the same drive pool to simultaneously deliver block, file and object storage services. Forget the complexity of managing RAID groups and lengthy rebuilds. Access the full IOPS potential of your NVMe/SSD/HDD drives. Mix & match different drive types and sizes in a single system. Take as many snapshots as you like, without suffering from performance degradation and consuming valuable drive space. Use the largest available disk drives without RAID overhead and collapse your data center footprint in weeks, not years.

Simplify storage procurement by flattening complex pricing structures into a single pricing tier that provides Petabyte scale block, file and object storage in a single platform, for as little as $0.01/GB/month.

Your new simplified data management fabric now delivers what you need, when you need it, in a 100% utility model.

Join us to learn how Madison Cloud and StorONE can deliver the data management platform you always wanted.

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.