Everything You Wanted To Know about Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Buffering

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

To compete in today's digital economy, it's essential that businesses make branch offices an integral part of the network. Cloud-based applications - including global collaboration ones whose use has skyrocketed due to COVID-19 - require bandwidth that is robust and highly scalable, and with data centers becoming more virtualized and distributed than ever, MPLS can no longer cut it.

With SD-WAN a key part of the puzzle piece of successful Digital Transformation, it’s crucial that business looking to adopt SD-WAN as part of their DX strategy have all bases covered, namely:

- Ensuring they have a dynamic SD-WAN that recognizes and supports business-critical applications
- Making sure the have the ability to modify WAN policies to cater for application criticality, performance needs and security requirements
- Establishing an SD-WAN strategy in the age of the Edge that understands the need for centralized visibility spans the distributed network

But how do businesses ensure that their SD-WAN strategy and toolkit address the above? Join this panel of experts as they explore the key points of a winning SD network, and help drive your business to Digital Transformation success.

Next-Generation Networking [Ep.5]: The New WAN Economics

Enterprise WAN traffic patterns are shifting. The application mix is changing. And the WAN is becoming core to digital transformation (and to resilience in the post-COVID-19 era).

The two fundamental questions that network and telecom managers must answer right now are these: How much should I be spending on my WAN to achieve measurable success, and what services and solutions deliver the greatest bang for the buck (in terms of quantitative success per dollars invested)?

This webinar shares the findings of the 2020-2021 Next Generation Networks research study and compares a cost analysis of solutions such as:
*WAN Cloud Exchanges (WAN-CX)
* Direct Cloud Connect (DCC)
* MPLS
* Carrier Ethernet
* SD-WAN
* Business and Broadband Internet
* Fiber and wavelength services

We compare the network spend by users of solutions and services from providers such as AT&T, Centurylink, Cisco, Citrix, Comcast, Juniper, Oracle/Talari, VMWare Velocloud, Verizon and others. And we correlate the spend and provider with success overall.

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

Next-Generation Networks [Ep.4]

New wireless standards like 5G and Wifi 6 aren't just "more of the same". They're dramatically transforming how networks are designed, architected, and delivered.

Whether you're an equipment provider, a carrier, or an enterprise user, you'll want to get the insight from Nemertes' hot-off-the-presses research into success strategies and best practices for those early adopters rolling out these technologies.

You'll learn the use cases and vertical industries that are seeing the greatest success, and find out the hiccups and stumbling blocks that organizations are experiencing. And you'll walk away with a blueprint for success when it comes to deploying these next-generation technologies.

With the need to deliver exceptional customer experience, the concept of the zero touch network has been gaining ground. While not a new idea, in 2020 the zero touch network is defined by most as being a network that ensures high availability, reliability and efficiency - automatically. Behind this is a management system that relies on many of the principles of software-defined networking and virtualization.

As 5G begins to be deployed around the globe, the requirements for network transformation has ramped up quickly and is having a significant impact on network operations.

Join this panel of networking experts as they share insights and lessons on how to navigate the new zero touch network and its demands on operations around capacity, latency, reliability and scalability.

Speakers:
Steve Brumer, Partner, BH IoT Group (Moderator)
Brandon Heller, CTO & Co-Founder, Forward Networks
Rama Darbha, Director, Consulting Services, Culumus
Nathan McMahon, Solutions Architect, Avi Networks

Next-Generation Networking Series [Ep.3]: New Normal - The Case for SD-WAN in 2020

SD-WAN is rapidly becoming the new normal in enterprise WANs - this session will explore why and how, and do a deeper dive into adoption, deployment, and operations data from Nemertes' 2020-2021 Next Generation Networking Research Study.

QUIC is a new UDP-based transport protocol for the Internet, and specifically, the web. Originally designed and deployed by Google, it already makes up 35% of Google's egress traffic, which corresponds to about 7% of all Internet traffic. The strong interest by many other large Internet players in the ongoing IETF standardization of QUIC is likely to lead to an even greater deployment in the near future. This webcast will highlight:

•Unique design aspects of QUIC
•Differences to the conventional HTTP/TLS/TCP web stack
•Early performance numbers
•Potential side effects of a broader deployment of QUIC

After you watch the presentation, check out the Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/QUICQ-A

The current coronavirus pandemic has forced many organizations to rapidly implement work-from-home programs. But how do organizations know if they have the right tools to support virtual work? And what insights do they require to ensure that employees are able to remain productive?

During this webinar Nemertes will share insight both from our research, and our experience of being a completely virtual organization for almost 20 years. Specifically we'll cover key areas to address including:

- Collaboration tools
- Ensuring adequate network performance
- Managing remote workers

We look forward to sharing this information with you.

We rely on technical standards for all facets of daily life. Yet it is easy to take technology standards for granted, forgetting that they underpin the technology used every day. As participants in the IT sector it is important for us to learn how standards are developed, why standards matter and how we all benefit from them.

In this webcast, we’ll pull back the curtain on the standard development process, explain what makes something a standard, and decode a few funky common acronyms. You’ll learn:

•The differences between a standard and a specification
•Who is INCITS and what’s their role?
•T11 Fibre Channel standards development process
•T11 Fibre Channel Standards
•Current Fibre Channel standards under development
•Benefits of standards when architecting Fibre Channel solutions

Next-Generation Networking [Ep.2] Pull Yourself Together! Enterprise WANs for the Hybrid Multicloud Era

Enterprises operate across many clouds, but their WANs are typically still built around a data-center-centric architecture. Join Nemertes as we use the results of our Next Generation Networking 2020-2021 Research Study to highlight how forward-looking enterprises are reshaping their WANs to meet the needs of their multicloud.

Several SSD and networking vendors have recentl¬y demonstrated ways to connect SSDs directly to an Ethernet network. They propose that deploying Ethernet SSDs will be more scalable, easier to manage, more performant, and/or lower cost than traditional storage networking solutions that use a storage controller (or hyperconverged node) between the SSDs and the network.

Who would want to attach SSDs directly to the network? Are these vendors brilliant or simply trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist? What are the different solutions that could benefit from Ethernet SSDs? Which protocols would one use to access them? And how do Ethernet SSDs relate to computational storage? Join this SNIA Networking Storage Forum webcast to learn all this and more as SNIA experts discuss:

•What are the appropriate use cases for Ethernet SSDs?
•Why Ethernet SSDs could be appealing and more efficient
•How Ethernet SSDs compare to other forms of storage networking
•Different ways Ethernet SSDs can be accessed, such as JBOF/NBOF, NVMe-oF, and Key Value
•How do Ethernet-attached SSDs enable composable infrastructures?

Next-Generation Networking [Ep.1] Net Win: Remaking Your Network for Next Generation Success

Networking is undergoing a transformation. Wireless standards and services like 5G, Wifi6, LTE and Ongo are changing how wireless WANs and private networking operate. SD-WAN is driving a sea change in how WANs are provisioned and secured. Technologists are confronting emerging use cases like edge computing and IoT.

All of these shifts are driving the need to re-architect, re-engineer, and re-think how networking is done, from private and local networks to the WAN.

But how should they measure success? What does it mean to “successfully” redesign a network?

This webinar delves into the operational and business success metrics for networking, and delivers the technologies and practices that correlate with that success.

Participants will walk away with a set of usable metrics and pointers for crafting their own success strategies for next-generation networks.

Fibre Channel (FC) SAN workloads are not difficult, but there are several people who do not understand how the workloads line up to appropriate storage protocol and their characteristics. Different workloads have different “Fingerprints,” so to speak. Since FC SANs are block, they work very well with applications that have a lot of transactional data, a lot of random read/write loads, and are particularly good for virtual machine file systems.

This webinar will discuss:
•I/O fingerprints: I/O block sizes & IOPS requirements for various “FC SAN applications”
•An overview of application access patterns, guided by best practices and experience
•How FC fulfills these IOPS requirements and how CPU BW is as important as IOPS

We will briefly investigate application sensitivity to latency, and show how protocol can affect performance.

After you watch, check out the Q&A blog from this session at http://bit.ly/2VQeuqX

With the cloud transformation taking mainstream traditional data center based technology solutions seems to have impact of disruption and aiming to find new balance in continued existence. Most organizations still have firm believe having own data center is a good thing as long as advances in the areas of power, cooling, communication, hardware and software are adopted with operations based on AI.

Continuing to manage existing Data Centers, Hybrid Cloud has become the reality of most IT organizations, enabling appropriate design and architecture plays critical role in success of adopting to owning data center in the modern world.

Key takeaways:
- Data Center Innovations
- Best practices
- Top service providers
- Hybrid Governance

Join to learn, new methods, models and tools are needed which help to put the Data Center Strategy into action improving functionality and performance!

Modern data centers are tasked with delivering intelligent multi-media responses to real-time human interactions. Massive amounts of data are being churned and sifted by highly parallel applications, such as Online Data Intensive Services (OLDI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which historically required specialized High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure.

New advancements in high-speed distributed solid-state storage, coupled with remote direct memory access (RDMA) and new networking technologies to better manage congestion, are allowing these parallel environments to run atop more generalized next generation Cloud infrastructure. Generalized cloud infrastructure is also being deployed in the telecommunication operator’s central office.

The key to advancing cloud infrastructure to the next level is the elimination of loss in the network; not just packet loss, but throughput loss and latency loss.

There simply should be no loss in the data center network. Congestion is the primary source of loss and in the network, congestion leads to dramatic performance degradation. This presentation summaries work from the IEEE 802 Network Enhancements for the Next Decade Industry Connections Activity (Nendica).

The Nendica report describes the need for new technologies to combat loss in the data center network and introduces promising potential solutions.

2019 will be the year of application explosion and extension of the datacenter’s edge as we know it. This massively distributed application environment is being fueled by digital transformation projects in hybrid networking, multi-cloud and IIoT.

Do you have an architecture in place to support and future-proof your network in this new application-centric world?

Join this webinar to learn how to develop a strategy that is agile, reliable and secure and by design.

Industry experts will discuss:

- How this new edge-to-cloud landscape will change your network’s architecture

- Game-changing technology advances including Microsoft Azure & AWS Outpost

- How traditional networks must evolve to support the modern digital enterprise

- Why you need to pay attention to a Zero Trust security approach

- Real-world examples of network typologies for the cloud era

If you are involved in the digital transformation of your datacenter’s edge, this is a must-see educational webinar.

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