With virtualization and cloud computing revolutionizing the data center, it's time that the network has its own revolution. Join the Network Infrastructure channel on all the hottest topics for network and storage professionals such as software-defined networking, WAN optimization and more to maintain performance and service in your infrastructure

Over the past decade IT organizations have discovered the benefits of moving applications and storage to the cloud. Recent trends point to an increase of on-premises hybrid cloud solutions.  Cloud-native applications running in containers have driven the need for high-performance persistent storage that is both easy to deploy and manage.  

In this live webcast, FCIA experts will explore the role that Fibre Channel plays in merging the benefits of a cloud-based infrastructure with the advantages of an on-premises hosting solution for gains in reliability, performance, and scalability - all with cost reduction. With a focus on Kubernetes, we will explain how these best practice environments can be combined for the next generation of application deployments. Join us for a discussion on: 
• Cloud market trends  
• How organizations are deploying cloud  
•	Introduction to containers and persistent storage  
•	The role of Fibre Channel in Kubernetes  
•	Evolution of container storage interfaces and CSI 
•	Fibre Channel fabric requirements and considerations

Kubernetes and Fibre Channel: A Compelling Case

Ransomware is malware that encrypts valuable data and then asks the victim for ransom in lieu of providing the decryption keys. One way to not fall prey to Ransomware is to keep regular backups, and use them as last line of defence. Lately some of the ransomware attacks have started encrypting or destroying the backup images as well. They target predominately Windows as of now, though other systems are also targeted.
  
This webinar is about solutions built from the ground up to lockdown disk-based backup images. It goes beyond storage, and protects certain specific processes from code injection and masquerading to gain trust. Here we will discuss our experience of designing and developing this solution on Windows platform.

In this session we will:
- Explain ransomware behaviour around backup data with concrete examples
- Explain best practices when dealing with 3rd party products, anti-virus etc.
- Share experiences with customers involving real ransomware attacks
- Discuss future directions

Mitigating the Ransomware Threat: a Backup Solution Perspective

As storing data in the cloud has become ubiquitous and mature, many organizations have adopted a multi-cloud strategy. Eliminating dependence on a single cloud platform is quite a compelling case.

But multi-cloud environments are not without challenges. Taking advantage of the benefits without increasing complexity requires a strategy that ensures applications are not tightly coupled to cloud-specific technologies. Supporting a storage abstraction layer that insulates the application from the underlying cloud provider's interfaces allows an application to be easily used with multiple clouds. It allows storage features specific to a cloud to be exposed in a standardized manner and enables data to be transparently accessed and migrated as needed in order to take advantage of cloud-specific features without the application being aware of the underlying mechanics, thus reducing or eliminating the limits and vulnerabilities of any one cloud.

How, and why, to support a storage abstraction layer will be the focus of this live webcast where our experts will cover:

• Risk mitigation of multiple clouds
• Transparent movement of data from cloud to cloud
•	Political, regulatory and compliance considerations
•	Multi-cloud as part of a business continuity strategy
•	Exit cost reduction
•	Running work in parallel across clouds

Why Use Multiple Clouds?

The automotive industry is effectively transforming the vehicle into a data center on wheels. Connectedness, autonomous driving, and media & entertainment bring in more and more storage onboard and into the networked data centers. But all the storage in (and for) a car is not created equal. There are 10s if not 100s of different processors on the car. Some are attached to storage and some are not. Each application demands different characteristics from the storage device. Let’s explore all of this in an informational journey with the industry experts from both the storage and automotive worlds.

• What’s driving growth in automotive storage?  
•	Special requirements for autonomous vehicles 
•	Where automotive data is typically stored?  
•	Special use cases
•	Vehicle networking & compute changes and challenges

Revving Up Storage for Automotive

Storing objects has become commonplace. Object storage provides bulk and undifferentiated storage for unstructured data like photos, video & audio, DNA sequences, files, backups, and it can even protect against ransomware. Object access is also simplified because there are no built-in hierarchies or filesystems of objects, and no devices to manage that look like disks. 

So, what’s new? Object storage has traditionally been accomplished in the software stack and is now being accomplished directly on the media. In this presentation, we’ll highlight how this is happening and discuss: 
 
• Object storage characteristics    
• The differences and similarities between object and key value storage  
•	Security options unique to object storage including ransomware mitigation  
•	Why use object storage: Use cases and applications    
•	Object storage and containers: Why Kubernetes’ COSI (Container Object Storage Interface)?

Object Storage: Trends, Use Cases

NVMe® IP-based SANs (including TCP, RoCE, iWARP) have the potential to provide significant benefits in application environments ranging from the Edge to the Data Center.  However, before we can fully unlock NVMe IP-based SAN’s potential, we first need to overcome the NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) discovery problem.  This discovery problem, specific to IP based fabrics, can result in the need for Host administrators to explicitly configure each Host to access each of the NVM subsystems in their environment.  In addition, any time an NVM Subsystem interface is added or removed, the Host administrator may need to explicitly update the configuration of impacted hosts.  This process does not scale when more than a few Host and NVM subsystem interfaces are in use.  Also, due to the de-centralized nature of this process, it also adds complexity when trying to use NVMe IP-based SANs in environments that require a high-degrees of automation.
  
For these and other reasons, several companies have been collaborating on innovations that simplify and automate the discovery process used with NVMe IP-based SANs.  

During this session we will explain:
• NVMe IP-based SAN discovery problem 
• The types of network topologies that can support the automated discovery of NVMe-oF Discovery controllers
• Direct Discovery versus Centralized Discovery
• An overview of the discovery protocol

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog: https://bit.ly/3nI8Tk4

NVMe-oF: Discovery Automation for NVMe IP-based SANs

SNIA develops a wide range of standards to enhance the interoperability of various storage systems.  With new technologies like computational storage, standards do not exist. As companies develop solutions, questions arise.  Should computational storage have standards for recommended behavior for hardware and software?  Should an application programming interface be defined?

At SNIA, over 250 volunteers answered yes, and new work is being defined both within SNIA and in collaboration with other industry standards bodies. Join leaders of the Computational Storage Technical Work Group as they  discuss how they define and develop standards with input from many different companies and users, what they perceive as important today and moving forward, and how you can participate.​

Computational Storage – Driving Success, Driving Standards

This talk will focus on the history of “Big Data” and how it has pushed the storage envelope, eventually resulting in a seemingly perfect relationship with Cloud Storage. But local storage is the 3rd wheel in this relationship, and won’t go down easy. Can this marriage survive when Big Data is being pulled in two directions? Should Big Data pick one, or can the three of them live happily ever after? This webcast will cover:
• The impact of edge computing
• The erosion of the data center
• Managing data-on-the-fly
•	Grid management
•	Next-gen Hadoop and related technologies
•	Supporting AI workloads
•	Data gravity and distributed data
After you watch the presentation, read the Q&A blog: https://bit.ly/3y836re

Cloud Storage and Big Data, A Marriage Made in the Clouds

Modern data centers systems consist of hundreds of sub-systems that are all connected with optical transceivers, copper cables, and industry standards-based connectors and cages. For interconnecting storage subsystems, two things are happening: Speeds are radically increasing making the maximum reach of copper wire interconnects very short and, at the same time, increasingly larger storage systems are expanding in size and much further apart. This is making longer reach optical technologies much more popular. However, optical interconnect technologies are more costly and complex compared to copper with a plethora of new buzz-words and technology concepts. 

The rate of change from the huge uptick in data demand is accelerating new product developments at an incredible pace. While much of the enterprise industry is still on 10G/40G/100GbE speeds, the next generation optics groups are already commercializing 800G with 1.6Tb transceivers in discussion! Today, it’s all about power, cost, and upgrade paths.
 
In this SNIA Network Storage Forum webinar we’ll cover the latest in the impressive array of data center infrastructure solutions designed to address expanding requirements for higher-bandwidth and lower-power. This will include next-generation solutions leveraging copper and optics to deliver high signal integrity, lower-latency, and lower insertion loss to achieve maximum efficiency, speed, and density.

After you watch the presentation, check out the Q&A blog: https://bit.ly/3qmTtU4

Next-generation Interconnects: The Critical Importance of Connectors and Cables

Each SAN transport has its own way to initialize and transfer data. So how do initiators (hosts) and targets (storage arrays) communicate in Fibre Channel (FC) Storage Area Networks (SANs)? 

Find out in this live webcast where Fibre Channel experts will answer:

• How do FC links activate? 
• Is FC routable? 
• What kind of flow control is present in FC?
•	How do initiators find targets and set up their communication?
•	Finally, how does actual data get transferred since that is the ultimate goal?

This session will introduce these concepts to demystify the FC SAN for the network professional.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/3Gh43RU

SAN Overview - How Fibre Channel Hosts and Targets Really Communicate

The use of genomics in modern biology has revolutionized the speed of innovation for the discovery of medicines. The COVID pandemic response has quickened genetic research and driven the rapid development of vaccines. Genomics, however, requires a significant amount of compute and data storage to aid discovery. This session is for IT professionals who are faced with delivering and supporting IT solutions for the required compute and data storage for genomics workflows. It will feature viewpoints from both the bioinformatics and technology perspectives with a focus on some of these compute and data storage challenges.
We will discuss:
• How to best store and manage these large genomics datasets
• Methods for sharing these large datasets for collaborative analysis.
• Legal and ethical implications of storing shareable data in the cloud
•	Transferring large data sets and the impact on storage and networking
After you watch the presentation, check out the Q&A blog: https://bit.ly/SNIAGenomicQA

Moving Genomics to the Cloud: Compute and Storage Considerations

Data gravity has pulled computing to the Edge and enabled significant advances in hybrid cloud deployments. The ability to run analytics from the datacenter to the Edge, where the data is created and lives, also creates new use cases for nearly every industry and company. However, this movement of compute to the Edge is not the only pattern to have emerged. How might these other use cases impact your storage strategy?
This interactive webcast by the SNIA CSTI will focus on the following topics:
•	Emerging patterns of data movement and the use cases that drive them
•	Cloud Bursting
•	Federated Learning across the Edge and Hybrid Cloud
•	Considerations for distributed cloud storage architectures to match these emerging patterns

Extending Storage to the Edge - How It Should Affect Your Storage Strategy

To counter the ever-increasing likelihood of catastrophic disruption and cost due to enterprise IT security threats, data center decision makers need to be vigilant in protecting their organization’s data. Confidential Computing is architected to provide security for data in use to meet this critical need for enterprises today. 
This webcast provides insight into how data center, cloud and edge applications may easily benefit from cost-effective, real-world Confidential Computing solutions. This educational discussion will provide end-user examples, tips on how to assess systems before and after deployment, as well as key steps to complete along the journey to mitigate threat exposure.  Presenting are Steve Van Lare (Anjuna), Anand Kashyap (Fortanix), and Michael Hoard (Intel), who will discuss: 
·       What would it take to build-your-own Confidential Computing solution?
·       Emergence of easily deployable, cost-effective Confidential Computing solutions
·       Real world usage examples and key technical, business and investment insights
After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/3DqFKj6

How to Easily Deploy Confidential Computing

Thanks to big data, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of things (IoT), and 5G, demand for data storage continues to grow significantly. The rapid growth is causing storage and database-specific processing challenges within current storage architectures. New architectures, designed with millisecond latency, and high throughput, offer in-network and storage computational processing to offload and accelerate data-intensive workloads.
Join technology innovators as they highlight how to drive value and accelerate SSD storage through the specialized implementation of key value technology to remove inefficiencies through a Data Processing Unit for hardware acceleration of the storage stacks, and a hardware-enabled Storage Data Processor to accelerate compute-intensive functions. 
By joining, you will learn why SSDs are a staple in modern storage architectures. These disaggegated systems use just a fraction of computational load and power while unlocking the full potential of networked flash storage.

Accelerate Disaggregated Storage to Optimize Data-Intensive Workloads

As noted in our panel discussion “What is Confidential Computing and Why Should I Care?,” Confidential Computing is an emerging industry initiative focused on helping to secure data in use. The efforts can enable encrypted data to be processed in memory while lowering the risk of exposing it to the rest of the system, thereby reducing the potential for sensitive data to be exposed while providing a higher degree of control and transparency for users.

As computing moves to span multiple environments from on-premises to public cloud to edge, organizations need protection controls that help safeguard sensitive IP and workload data wherever the data resides. In this live webcast we’ll cover:

•	How Confidential Computing works in multi-tenant cloud environments
•	How sensitive data can be isolated from other privileged portions of the stack
•	Applications in financial services, healthcare industries, and broader enterprise applications 
•	Contributing to the Confidential Computing Consortium

Confidential Compute: Protecting Data in Use

So much of what we discuss in SNIA is the latest emerging technologies in storage. While it’s good to know all about the coming technologies, it’s also important to understand those technologies being sunsetted. In this series, we cover obsolete hardware, protocols, interfaces and other aspects of storage
. 
In our second installment of our Storage Technologies & Practices Ripe for Refresh, we will cover older HDD device interfaces and file systems. Advice will be given on how to replace these in production environments as well as why these changes are recommended. Also, we will be covering protocols that you should consider removing from your networks, either older versions of protocols where only newer versions should be used, or protocols that have been supplanted by superior options and should be discontinued entirely.

Finally, we will look at physical networking interfaces and cabling that are popular today but face an uncertain future as networking speeds grow ever faster.

Storage Technologies & Practices Ripe for Refresh: Part 2

In the "arms race" of security, new defensive tactics are always needed. One significant approach is Confidential Computing: a technology that can isolate data and execution in a secure space on a system, which takes the concept of security to new levels. This SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webcast will provide an introduction and explanation of Confidential Computing and will feature a panel of industry architects responsible for defining Confidential Compute. It will be a lively conversation on topics including:
 
•	The basics of hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and how they work to enable confidential computing
•	How to architect solutions based around TEEs
•	How this foundation fits with other security technologies
•	Adjacencies to storage technologies

What is Confidential Computing and Why Should I Care?

Fibre Channel (FC) is the storage networking protocol for enterprise data centers with over 142 million ports having been shipped. Fibre Channel is purpose built and engineered to meet the demands for enterprise data centers that require rock solid reliability, high performance, and scalability. In other words, Fibre Channel technology transports FC-SB-x, FCP, and FC-NVMe storage protocols natively.

This webcast explains how Fibre Channel is architected for unparalleled performance for storage protocols. If you are interested in this architecture, please join us to learn more on the Fibre Channel:
• Functional levels and components
• Physical model
•	Communication models
•	Interconnect topologies
•	Classes of service
•	General Fabric model
•	Generic Services
This all leads to a future webcast where we’ll dive into:
•	Building blocks and their hierarchy
o	Frames, Sequences, Exchanges, Protocols
•	Segmentation and reassembly
•	Error detection and recovery
•	Current enhancements e.g., Congestion Notifications

Inside a Modern Fibre Channel Architecture - Part 1

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