Smartphones, Tablets and Mobile: Collaborative Tools or Productivity Killers?

Networks are changing. With the vast expansion of IoT, we're experiencing the transition of enterprise and operator infrastructure from networks of people to networks of people, places and things.

Join Christian Renaud, Research Director, IoT at 451 Research, as he looks at the impacts of the growing number of instrumented environments and objects on enterprise and carrier networks, capacities, signaling protocols, and emerging opportunities for value creation beyond simple connectivity.

This webinar will cover:
- Possible bottlenecks and roadblocks on the path to the Internet of Things
- What leading organizations are doing today to prepare for the coming influx of new types of devices

Fibre Channel (FC) is the storage networking protocol for enterprise data centers, with over 11 million ports deployed. Fibre Channel is purpose-built –and engineered to meet the demands for enterprise data centers that require rock solid reliability, high performance and scalability. It can even transport new storage protocols like NVMe natively.

Flexible and resilient, Fibre Channel frames can be encapsulated in both an IP packet (FCIP) as well as a Layer 2 frame (FCoE) and provide unparalleled performance for storage systems. Even so, many people don’t actually understand how it works. This live webcast will help you understand the basics so that you can make informed decisions yourself.

In this “Foundations” webcast, we’ll answer key questions, such as:
- What is Fibre Channel?
- What makes Fibre Channel so reliable?
- How is Fibre Channel different from other storage protocols?
- What are the best practices for designing Fibre Channel solutions?
- And more

If you’re not familiar with Fibre Channel and want to learn more, or if you are interested in learning about how Fibre Channel is purpose-built for storage and future proofed for next-gen NVMe storage arrays, join us at this live event. Our experts will be available to answer your specific questions on the spot.

The Internet of Things is upon us. Vast amounts of big data are quickly approaching and network traffic, latency and bandwidth are at higher demands than ever. Storing, transmitting, and analyzing this data from IoT devices will require a secure and agile network architecture. Network failover and network security will be of the utmost importance.

How will these changes in demand and technologies have an impact on new standards and protocols? Will network communications between devices and the cloud be safe? Tune into this dynamic panel discussion with leading IoT and network experts for the state of IoT networks.

Panelists:
Ahmed Banafa, SJSU Faculty Member and LinkedIn IoT Influencer
Ryan Allphin, CTO, Cradlepoint
Brenda Boehm, Chief Strategy Officer & Board Advisor, IoT Smart Solutions, TIA

30 percent of all deliveries worldwide do not reach their destination on time, €21 billion in losses are inflicted each year due to freight theft and the value of spoiled products caused by interruptions in the refrigeration chain is €850 billion.

With IoT devices set to reach 50 Billion by 2020 it’s not just the logistics sector that sets for change - join us to understand how innovative IoT & M2M technologies are delivering game changing capabilities from Health care to Connected Building Sites & everything in between.

The IoT represents a significant challenge for companies new to supplying connected products and in particular the associated security implications. Traditionally security was often seen as something that was firmly in the domain of the IT or related department. However, with IoT systems being dependant upon a variety of sensors and embedded devices, the impact of supplying secure IoT products spans the whole of the company business; from the supply chain to how an organisation handles vulnerability disclosure. This session will go through some of the challenges that face businesses delivering secure IoT products and the guidance available to help companies take secure IoT products to market and having launched them, ensuring that they are able to support them from a security perspective.

Urban mobility has always been about moving people from location to location through motorized personal or public transport. However, the proliferation of sensors, smartphones and intelligent high bandwidth networks are compelling towns & cities around the world to re-think urban mobility and consider technology enablers to drive towards a vision of “smart” mobility. Furthermore, the fundamental assumptions underpinning mobility are being challenged.

The Internet Of Things (IoT) has been touted as a promising technology enabler to deliver on a vision of smart mobility. We will examine the current state of IoT ecosystems, IoT enabled smart mobility efforts across the globe and help delineate the architectural considerations and cross-industry industry collaboration that would be essential to successfully deliver on smart mobility initiatives. A simple use case around a town/city smart mobility service will be used to illustrate our approach.

Creating smarter cities requires urban infrastructures that accelerates the transition to a smarter city. This is a project that requires much more than connected technologies.

Emerging innovations will be critical, as will engaged businesses and citizens — and together these change-agents are reshaping the city. Such new tools are radically altering our urban assets (water, energy, transport, buildings); shifting the ways that we design and use such systems; transforming our economies; disrupting our societies. Smart and connected urban infrastructure is now a reality, and autonomous vehicles driving themselves is only one of visible elements . Smarter policies that match the smarter tech makes possible the multimodal / integrated transportation systems which provide commuters with more options; the data analytics which manage the flows inside data-powered energy and water grids. Hyper-efficient cities should be much more than hyper-productive; they must be more livable and more equitable.

Gordon Feller will provide a few glimpses around the corners, with a clear-eyed view of urban futures which are emergent.

As part of the successful “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” series, we’ve discussed numerous topics about storage devices, protocols, and networks. As we examine some of these topics further, we begin to tease out some subtle nuances; subtle, yet important nevertheless.

In Part Sepia, we’re going to take a look at some of the terms and concepts that affect Storage Architectures as a whole. In particular, we’ll be looking at those aspects that can help or hinder storage systems inside the network:

•Encapsulation versus Tunneling
•IOPS vs Latency vs Jitter
•Quality of Service (QoS)

Each of these topics has a profound impact on storage designs and performance, but they are often misunderstood. We’re going to help you become clear on all of these very important storage concepts so that you can grok storage just a little bit more.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=629

New solid state storage technologies are forcing the industry to refine distinctions between networks and other types of system interconnects. The question on everyone’s mind is, when is it beneficial to use networks to access solid state storage, particularly persistent memory? The answer to this question involves application, interconnect, memory technology and scalability factors that can be analyzed in the context of a latency budget. In this talk we will explore latency budgets for various types of solid state storage access. These can be used to determine which combinations of interconnects, technologies and scales are compatible with Load/Store instruction access and which are better suited to IO completion techniques such as polling or blocking. In this webcast you’ll learn:

•Why latency is important in accessing solid state storage
•How to determine the appropriate use of networking in the context of a latency budget
•Do’s and don’ts for Load/Store access

Fibre Channel is the most well known dedicated storage networking protocol in use in data centers today, and is considered the gold standard for storage in terms of availability, reliability, and scalability. However, it does require some specific design and planning requirements. For that, storage administrators use the Fibre Channel Speedmap in order to plan.

In this webcast, you will learn how to use the Fibre Channel Speedmap, what the numbers mean, and why its useful:

- Why do storage administrators use the Speedmap?
- What’s the difference between throughput, bandwidth, baud rates, and speed?
- Why does this matter for Fibre Channel and not, say, Ethernet?

This live webcast will be useful for anyone who wants to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to “speeds and feeds,” and make sense of the numbers.

Server Message Block (SMB) is the core file-transfer protocol of Windows, MacOS and Samba, and has become widely deployed. It’s ubiquitous - a 30-year-old family of network code.

However, the latest iteration of SMB3 is almost unrecognizable when compared to versions only a few years old. Extensive reengineering has led to advanced capabilities that include multichannel, transparent failover, scale out, and encryption. SMB Direct makes use of RDMA networking, creates block transport system and provides reliable transport to zetabytes of unstructured data, worldwide.

SMB3 forms the basis of hyper-converged and scale-out systems for virtualization and SQL Server. It is available for a variety of hardware devices, from printers, network-attached storage appliances, to Storage Area Networks (SANs). It is often the most prevalent protocol on a network, with high-performance data transfers as well as efficient end-user access over wide-area connections.

In this SNIA-ESF Webcast, Microsoft’s Ned Pyle, program manager of the SMB protocol, will discuss the current state of SMB, including:

•Brief background on SMB
•An overview of the SMB 3.x family, first released with Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, MacOS 10.10, Samba 4.1, and Linux CIFS 3.12
•What changed in SMB 3.1.1
•Understanding SMB security, scenarios, and workloads
•The deprecation and removal of the legacy SMB1 protocol
•How SMB3 supports hyperconverged and scale-out storage

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=611

Continuous Testing enables delivery of applications with greater speed and agility, without compromising quality. However, this places a demand on the application team to ensure complete coverage of the test cases, multiplied by the clients and devices that most accurately represent our users. The answer lies in the public cloud, but this isn’t without risks and complexity.

In this webinar, HPE will discuss the benefits and issues teams encounter when building a Continuous Testing pipeline using a public or private cloud infrastructure, and how to ensure the highest application quality, at the speed of your business.

In this webinar we will explore:

What tests to run and when
Environment coverage
Optimizing your execution costs
Exploratory testing to fill the gaps

Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) along with Cluster or Cloud In Box (CIB) are popular trend topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption. As part of data infrastructures, CI, CIB and HCI enable simplified deployment of resources (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software) across different environments. However, what do these approaches mean for a hyperconverged storage environment? What are the key concerns and considerations related specifically to storage? Most importantly, how do you know that you’re asking the right questions in order to get to the right answers?

Find out in this live SNIA-ESF webcast where expert Greg Schulz, founder and analyst of Server StorageIO, will move beyond the hype to discuss:

· What are the storage considerations for CI, CIB and HCI
· Fast applications and fast servers need fast server storage I/O
· Networking and server storage I/O considerations
· How to avoid aggravation-causing aggregation (bottlenecks)
· Aggregated vs. disaggregated vs. hybrid converged
· Planning, comparing, benchmarking and decision-making
· Data protection, management and east-west I/O traffic
· Application and server I/O north-south traffic

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=613

One of the most used technologies in Data Centers today is the storage protocol iSCSI. With the increasing speeds for Ethernet, the technology is more and more appealing because of its relative low cost to implement. However, like any other Storage Technology, there is more here than meets the eye.

In this webcast, we will be focusing entirely on iSCSI. We’ll start by covering the basic elements that will make your life easier if you are considering using iSCSI in your architecture. In particular we will be talking about:

•iSCSI Definition
•iSCSI offload
•Host-based iSCSI
•TCP offload

Like nearly everything else in storage, there is more here than just a protocol. If you are interested in making the most of your iSCSI solution, this webcast is for you.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=608

NVMe is one of the most interesting new developments to happen to storage in the past several years, and NVMe over Fabrics extends these capabilities over a Storage Area Network. Given that 80% of all existing Flash storage solutions deployed are interconnected with Fibre Channel (FC), many questions have arisen about what it is, how it works, and why someone might want to consider using Fibre Channel for NVMe-based solutions.

In this technical webinar, we’re going to be addressing some of these fundamental questions:

- How does Fibre Channel and NVMe work together?
- How is NVMe over Fabrics different from “traditional” Fibre Channel?
- What changes do I have to make to my Fibre Channel environment in order to get NVMe over Fabrics to work?
- What would an NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe) architecture look like?
- What advantages would I get using Fibre Channel in an NVMe solution?

Check out this live webinar to learn more about this exciting new technology from the people who are developing it.

Buffers, Queues, and Caches, oh my! Buffers and Queues are part of every data center architecture, and a critical part of performance – both in improving it as well as hindering it. A well-implemented buffer can mean the difference between a finely run system and a confusing nightmare of troubleshooting. Knowing how buffers and queues work in storage can help make your storage system shine.

However, there is something of a mystique surrounding these different data center components, as many people don’t realize just how they’re used and why. In this pod of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, we’re going to be demystifying this very important aspect of data center storage. You’ll learn:

•What are buffers, caches, and queues, and why you should care about the differences?
•What’s the difference between a read cache and a write cache?
•What does “queue depth” mean?
•What’s a buffer, a ring buffer, and host memory buffer, and why does it matter?
•What happens when things go wrong?

These are just some of the topics we’ll be covering, and while it won’t be exhaustive look at buffers, caches and queues, you can be sure that you’ll get insight into this very important, and yet often overlooked, part of storage design.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=615

With the 2017 suite release, HPE’s Data Center Automation (DCA) is recharged for the new year! The DCA suite is HPE’s infrastructure management solution to automate tasks, orchestrate IT processes, enforce compliance, and optimize infrastructure across virtual and physical servers, database and middleware applications. In this webinar, we’ll share what’s new and what’s coming, and equally address top-of-mind questions about the suite.

You will learn:
· Trends shaping infrastructure management
· Vision for HPE Data Center Automation suite
· What’s new and what’s coming - Docker engine automation, analytics, ChatOps, and container delivery model
· Unique benefits of the suite
· Top asked questions about the suite