Storage Clouds:  Limitations, Challenges and Enablers

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.

Get prepared for SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit with this webcast from Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates. Following up on their 2018 groundbreaking report on emerging memories, Jim Handy and Tom Coughlin will update us on 2019 advances in support from SNIA, the launch of Optane memory on DIMMs, new MRAM types, and more. You won’t want to miss their analysis on the progress made, and their perspective on the groundwork that still needs to be covered to bring persistent memory to mainstream computing.

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) has gained industry-wide recognition as a framework for building highly performant and efficient storage software with a focus on NVMe. This includes software drivers and libraries for building NVMe-oF host and target solutions. In this presentation, technical leaders from SPDK will provide an overview of the project, NVMe-oF use cases that are best suited for SPDK, and insights into how SPDK achieves its storage networking performance and efficiency, discussing:

•Overview of the SPDK project
•Key NVMe-oF use cases for SPDK
•Examples of NVMe-oF use cases not suited for SPDK
•NVMe-oF Target Architecture and Design
•NVMe-oF Host Architecture and Design
•Performance data

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

Failing to protect sensitive information can put a lot of people at risk of being exploited by cybercriminals, and can make a company face enormous legal penalties.

The way information is shared and stored can put the information at risk.

It is risky to store personal information on portable devices, which are easily lost or stolen.

In addition, the consequences of a data breach can be devastating. Identity theft could lead to financial losses, and a company could face lawsuits and legal penalties.

This presentation will cover what kinds of personal information must be protected & guidelines for keeping this info safe.

After viewing this session, attendees should:
1. Understand how Privacy is defined
2. Highlight some of the Privacy regulations from around the globe
3. Understand what information to safeguard
4. Understand how these privacy regulations affect organizations that handle personal information

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.