SNIA Updates
April 8, 2015, Data Storage Innovation Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Wayne Adams from the SNIA talked about the various activities and functions that the organization is pursuing. The Storage Networking Industry Association works to promulgate the latest technologies and capabilities in storage networks.
The organization works on technical papers, services, best practices, standards, conformance programs, templates, and other technical and business issues for storage networks. Although the group works on standards and tools for next generation systems, they always have to address the impediments to change in user companies, like budgets, resources, inertia, and training. They also understand that storage is not an island, but a part of a whole systems that includes other aspects like protection and security.
One new program is making specifications for object drives. The interfaces are going to be a RESTful-like set of semantics over TCP/IP for cloud apps. The specifications in development will place attributes into the metadata for the object. Another program is the key management protocol based on OASIS. They now have a conformance test available and testing will commence soon. HP and Cryptsoft are the first to have tools that measure conformance. The organization is also working on interoperability with other key management protocols.
The ongoing changes in storage systems and user workloads has driven requirements for new storage system definitions. One member company, Calypso, has helped define some of these new requirements and developed tests and analytics for 100 percent SSD at the system level. Other work on workload emulation has generated various work profiles that may vary with time.
A technical work group has finished the specs for block I/O (spec 355-2014) and benchmarks for the functions. Other TWGs have defined energy profiles for web, media streaming apps, etc. that production equivalents rather than peak performance. The S4 group is involved in NVM in a multi-host configuration, a job that will take a lot of work. anyone with domain expertise in these areas is encouraged to contact the SNIA and join the work group.
Many of the TWGs are working on evaluation issues. In Japan, the focus is on cold store on tape or optical media. The new definition for cold storage and security affects many users. The SNIA can do the research and analysis to bridge industrial developments and user acceptance. For example, how will industry drivers like the IoT affect IT groups? The organization helps to show how all the pieces in a system fit together and how to make them play together better. In big data, they are discussing what constitutes an adequate technology level for storage, and how and when to evolve.
The SNIA is pushing tactical and technical issues with technical conferences and technical papers. They provide support for new interfaces, changing technologies, and how to apply those new features and functions in a working environment, e.g. ISO2740 is for storage security but the attributes and application to actual systems is not defined.
