SNIA on Cloud Storage

Solving Cloud Object Storage Incompatibilities in a Multi-Vendor Community

October 25, 2024October 25, 2024 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) conducted a poll early in 2024 during a live webinar “Navigating Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility,” citing 72% of organizations have encountered incompatibility issues between various object storage implementations. These results resulted in a call to action for SNIA to create an open expert community dedicated to resolving these issues and building best practices for the industry.

Since then, SNIA CSTI has partnered with the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) and successfully organized, hosted, and completed the first SNIA Cloud Object Storage Plugfest (multi-vendor interoperability testing), co-located at SNIA Developer Conference (SDC), September 2024, in Santa Clara, CA. Participating Plugfest companies included engineers from Dell, Google, Hammerspace, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, VAST Data, and Versity Software. Three days of Plugfest testing discovered and resolved issues, and included a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session to gain consensus on next steps for the industry. Plugfest contributors are now planning two 2025 Plugfest events in Denver in April and Santa Clara in September.

It’s a collaborative effort that we’ll discuss in detail on November 21, 2024 at our next live SNIA CSTI webinar, “Building a Community to Tackle Cloud Object Storage Incompatibilities.” At this webinar, we will share insights into industry best practices, explain the benefits your implementation may gain with improved compatibility, and provide an overview of how a wide range of vendors is uniting to address real customer issues, discussing: Read More

Ceph Q&A

May 6, 2024May 6, 2024 Erin Farr Leave a comment

In a little over a month, more than 1,500 people have viewed the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) live webinar, “Ceph: The Linux of Storage Today,” with SNIA experts Vincent Hsu and Tushar Gohad. If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand at the SNIA Educational Library. The live audience was extremely engaged with our presenters, asking several interesting questions. As promised, Vincent and Tushar have answered them here.

Given the high level of this interest in this topic, the CSTI is planning additional sessions on Ceph. Please follow us @SNIACloud or at SNIA LinkedIn for dates.

Q: How many snapshots can Ceph support per cluster? Q: Does Ceph provide Deduplication? If so, is it across objects, file and block storage?

A: There is no per-cluster limit. In the Ceph filesystem (cephfs) it is possible to create snapshots on a per-path basis, and currently the configurable default limit is 100 snapshots per path. The Ceph block storage (rbd) does not impose limits on the number of snapshots. However, when using the native Linux kernel rbd client there is a limit of 510 snapshots per image. Read More

AIOps Q&A

April 25, 2024April 25, 2024 Pratik Gupta Leave a comment

Moving well beyond “fix it when it breaks,” AIOps introduces intelligence into the fabric of IT thinking and processes. The impact of AIOps and the shift in IT practices were the focus of a recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webinar, “AIOps: Reactive to Proactive – Revolutionizing the IT Mindset.” If you missed the live session, it’s available on-demand together with the presentation slides, at the SNIA Educational Library.

The audience asked several intriguing questions. Here are answers to them all:

Q. How do you align your AIOps objectives with your company’s overall AI usage policy when it is still fairly restrictive in terms of AI use and acceptance?

A.There are a lot of misconceptions on company policies and also what constitutes AI and the actual risk. So, there are several steps you can take: Read More

AIOps: The Undeniable Paradigm Shift

March 4, 2024March 4, 2024 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

AI has entered every aspect of today’s digital world. For IT, AIOps is creating a dramatic shift that redefines how IT approaches operations. On April 9, 2024, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will host a live webinar, “AIOps: Reactive to Proactive – Revolutionizing the IT Mindset.” In this webinar, Pratik Gupta, one of the industry’s leading experts in AIOps, will delve beyond the tools of AIOps to reveal how AIOps introduces intelligence into the very fabric of IT thinking and processes, discussing:

From Dev to Production and Reactive to Proactive: Revolutionizing the IT Mindset: We’ll move beyond the “fix it when it breaks” mentality, embracing a future-proof approach where AI analyzes risk, anticipates issues, prescribes solutions, and learns continuously. Read More

Here’s Why Ceph is the Linux of Storage Today

February 14, 2024February 14, 2024 Erin Farr Leave a comment

Data is one of the most critical resources of our time. Storage for data has always been a critical architectural element for every data center, requiring careful considerations for storage performance, scalability, reliability, data protection, durability and resilience. A decade ago, the market was aggressively embracing public storage because of its agility and scalability. In the last few years, people have been rethinking that approach, moving toward on-premises storage with cloud consumption models. The new cloud native architecture on-premises has the promise of the traditional data center’s security and reliability with cloud agility and scalability.

Ceph, an Open Source project for enterprise unified software-defined storage, represents a compelling solution for this cloud native on-premises architecture and will be the topic of our next SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webinar, “Ceph: The Linux of Storage Today.”

This webinar will discuss: Read More

Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility Q&A

January 26, 2024January 26, 2024 Gregory Touretsky Leave a comment

72% of organizations have encountered incompatibility issues between various object storage implementations according to a poll at our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webinar, “Navigating the Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility.” If you missed the live presentation or you would like to see the answers to the other poll questions we asked the audience, you can view it on-demand at the SNIA Educational Library.

The audience was highly-engaged during the live event and asked several great questions. Here are answers to them all.

Q. Do you see the need for fast object storage for AI kind of workloads?

A. Yes, the demand for fast object storage in AI workloads is growing. Initially, object storage was mainly used for backup or archival purposes. However, its evolution into Data Lakes and the introduction of features like the S3 SELECT API have made it more suitable for data analytics. The launch of Amazon’s S3 Express, a faster yet more expensive tier, is a clear indication of this trend. Other vendors are following suit, suggesting a shift towards object storage as a primary data storage platform for specific workloads.

Q. As Object Storage becomes more prevalent in the primary storage space, could you talk about data protection, especially functionalities like synchronous replication and multi-site deployments – or is your view that this is not needed for object storage deployments? Read More

Edge AI Q&A

November 14, 2023November 15, 2023 Erin Farr Leave a comment

At our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies (CSTI) webinar “Why Distributed Edge Data is the Future of AI” our expert speakers, Rita Wouhaybi and Heiko Ludwig, explained what’s new and different about edge data, highlighted use cases and phases of AI at the edge, covered Federated Learning, discussed privacy for edge AI, and provided an overview of the many other challenges and complexities being created by increasingly large AI models and algorithms. It was a fascinating session. If you missed it you can access it on-demand along with a PDF of the slides at the SNIA Educational Library.

Our live audience asked several interesting questions. Here are answers from our presenters.

Q. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) what role will edge AI play? Read More

An Open Standard for Namespace Management

September 20, 2023September 20, 2023 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

The days of simple, static, self-contained file systems have long passed. Today, we have complex, dynamic namespaces, mixing block, file, object, key-value, queue, and graph-based resources, accessed via multiple protocols, and distributed across multiple systems and geographic sites. These complexities result in new challenges for simplifying management.

There is good news on addressing this issue, and the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) will explain how in our live webinar “Simplified Namespace Management – The Open Standards Way” on October 18, 2023, where David Slik, Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, will demonstrate how the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI™), an open ISO standard (ISO/IEC 17826:2022) for managing data objects and containers, already includes extensive capabilities for simplifying the management of complex namespaces.

In this webinar, you’ll learn Read More