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

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

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

Data Fabric Q&A

August 21, 2023August 25, 2023 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

Unification of structured and unstructured data has long been a goal – and challenge for organizations. Data Fabric is an architecture, set of services and platform that standardizes and integrates data across the enterprise regardless of data location (On-Premises, Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud), enabling self-service data access to support various applications, analytics, and use cases. The data fabric leaves data where it lives and applies intelligent automation to govern, secure and bring AI to your data.

How a data fabric abstraction layer works and the benefits it delivers was the topic of our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webinar, “Data Fabric: Connecting the Dots between Structured and Unstructured Data.” If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand and access the presentations slides at the SNIA Educational Library.

We did not have time to answer audience questions at the live session. Here are answers from our expert, Joseph Dain.

Q. What are some of the biggest challenges you have encountered when building this architecture?

A. The scale of unstructured data makes it challenging to build a catalog of this information. With structured data you may have thousands or hundreds of thousands of table assets, but in unstructured data you can have billions of files and objects that need to be tracked at massive scale.

Another challenge is masking unstructured data. Read More

Training Deep Learning Models Q&A

May 19, 2023August 21, 2023 Erin Farr Leave a comment

The estimated impact of Deep Learning (DL) across all industries cannot be understated. In fact, analysts predict deep learning will account for the majority of cloud workloads, and training of deep learning models will represent the majority of server applications in the next few years. It’s the topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) discussed at our webinar “Training Deep Learning Models in the Cloud.” If you missed the live event, it’s available on-demand at the SNIA Educational Library where you can also download the presentation slides.

The audience asked our expert presenters, Milind Pandit from Habana Labs Intel and Seetharami Seelam from IBM several interesting questions. Here are their answers:

Q. Where do you think most of the AI will run, especially training? Will it be in the public cloud or will it be on-premises or both Read More

Storage Threat Detection Q&A

April 28, 2023August 21, 2023 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

Stealing data, compromising data, and holding data hostage have always been the main goals of cybercriminals. Threat detection and response methods continue to evolve as the bad guys become increasingly sophisticated, but for the most part, storage has been missing from the conversation. Enter “Cyberstorage,” a topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative recently covered in our live webinar, “Cyberstorage and XDR: Threat Detection with a Storage Lens.” It was a fascinating look at enhancing threat detection at the storage layer. If you missed the live event, it’s available on-demand along with the presentation slides. We had some great questions from the live event as well as interesting results from our audience poll questions that we wanted to share here.

Q. You mentioned antivirus scanning is redundant for threat detection in storage, but could provide value during recovery. Could you elaborate on that? Read More

Survey Says…Here are Data & Cloud Storage Trends Worth Noting

April 7, 2023August 21, 2023 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

With the move to cloud continuing, application modernization, and related challenges such as hybrid and multi-cloud adoption and regulatory compliance requirements, enterprises must ensure they understand the current data and storage landscape. The SODA Foundation’s annual comprehensive global survey on data and storage trends does just that, providing a comprehensive look at the intersection of cloud computing, data and storage management, the configuration of environments that end-user organizations are gravitating to, and priorities of selected capabilities over the next several years

On April 13, 2023, SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) is pleased to host SODA in a live webcast “Top 12 Trends in Data and Cloud Storage” where SODA members who led this research will share key findings. I hope you will join us for a live discussion and in-depth look at this important research to hear the trends that are driving data and storage decisions, including: Read More

Kubernetes Trials & Tribulations Q&A: Cloud, Data Center, Edge

January 5, 2023August 21, 2023 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

Kubernetes cloud orchestration platforms offer all the flexibility, elasticity, and ease of use — on premises, in a private or public cloud, even at the edge. The flexibility of turning on services when you want them, turning them off when you don’t, is an enticing prospect for developers as well as application deployment teams, but it has not been without its challenges.

At our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webcast “Kubernetes Trials & Tribulations: Cloud, Data Center, Edge” our experts, Michael St-Jean and Pete Brey, debated both the challenges and advantages of Kubernetes. If you missed the session, it is available on-demand along with the presentation slides. The live audience raised several interesting questions. Here are answers to them from our presenters.

Q: Are all these trends coming together? Where will Kubernetes be in the next 1-3 years?

A: Adoption rates for workloads like databases, artificial intelligence & machine learning, and data analytics in a container environment are on the rise. These applications are stateful and diverse, so a multi-protocol persistent storage layer built with Kubernetes services is essential. Read More

Scaling Storage to New Heights

February 28, 2022August 21, 2023 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

Earlier this month, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) presented a live webcast called “High Performance Storage at Exascale” where our HPC experts, Glyn Bowden, Torben Kling Petersen and Michael Hennecke talked about processing and storing data in shockingly huge numbers. The session raises some interesting points on how scale is quickly being redefined and what was cost compute prohibitive a few years ago for most, may be in reach for all sooner than expected.

Is HPC a rich man’s game? The scale appears to have increased dramatically over the last few years. Is the cost increasing to the point where this has only for wealthy organizations or has the cost decreased to the point where small to medium-sized enterprises might be able to indulge in HPC activities?
[Torben] I would say the answer is both. To build these really super big systems you