Join Us for 15 Minutes in the Clouds

Everyone is familiar with the term “Cloud” but it’s still worth asking “What is Cloud?”  It can be defined as “networked computing facilities providing remote data storage and processing services via the Internet.” And while that definition is simple (if a little wordy!), the real-world of cloud is complex, dynamic, and ever growing.

That’s why we’re hosting this series which will include brief 15-minute discussions on cloud and cloud related technologies:

  • What is Cloud – terminology
  • Cloud application architecture
  • Cloud data privacy & security
  • Cloud provider storage offerings

At this first talk “What is Cloud?” on March 2, 2022, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will present a brief history of “The Cloud.” If you are a cloud expert, these sessions might not be for you, but for everyone else, this series of short talks might clear up a lot of questions you may have. Join us for a discussion on: Read More

5G Industrial Private Networks and Edge Data Pipelines

The convergence of 5G, Edge Compute and Artificial Intelligence (AI) promise to be catalyst for continued digital transformation. For many industries, it will be a game-changer in term of how business in conducted. On January 27, 202, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) will take on this topic at our live webcast “5G Industrial Private Networks and Edge Data Pipelines.”

Advanced 5G is specifically designed to address the needs of verticals with capabilities like enhanced mobile broadband (emBB), ultra-reliable low latency communications (urLLC), and massive machine type communications (mMTC), to enable near real-time distributed intelligence applications. For example, automated guided vehicle and autonomous mobile robots (AGV/AMRs), wireless cameras, augmented reality for connected workers, and smart sensors across many verticals ranging from healthcare and immersive media, to factory automation. Read More

A Q&A on Big Data in the Cloud

The title of our recent live SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies webcast, “Cloud Storage and Big Data, A Marriage Made in the Clouds” might lead you to believe we were producing a new reality show, but of course, that was not the case. This webcast with SNIA experts, Chip Maurer, Vincent Hsu and Andy Longworth examined modernization challenges related to Big Data and key considerations for storing Big Data as workloads evolve. Our audience asked great questions during the live event. As promised, here are our experts’ answers.

Q: Is there much movement with Open Source Object Storage solutions, such as OpenStack suite – Swift, etc?

A. Yes, there is no shortage of Open Source storage solutions. The decision depends upon your organization’s expertise, reliability, cost, application availability and location, and your overall storage strategy.

Q. What drives organizations to modernize? Read More

Why Use Multiple Clouds?

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 with benefits of increased reliability, availability, performance, and the avoidance of vendor lock-in and/or specific vendor vulnerabilities to name a few. In short, spanning multiple clouds ensures a business does not have all its eggs (i.e. data) in one basket.

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. Read More

Genomics Compute, Storage & Data Management Q&A

Everyone knows data is growing at exponential rates. In fact, the numbers can be mind-numbing. That’s certainly the case when it comes to genomic data where 40,000PB of storage each year will be needed by 2025. Understanding, managing and storing this massive amount of data was the topic at our SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webcast “Moving Genomics to the Cloud: Compute and Storage Considerations.” If you missed the live presentation, it’s available on-demand along with presentation slides.

Our live audience asked many interesting questions during the webcast, but we did not have time to answer them all. As promised, our experts, Michael McManus, Torben Kling Petersen and Christopher Davidson have answered them all here.

Q. Human genomes differ only by 1% or so, there’s an immediate 100x improvement in terms of data compression, 2743EB could become 27430PB, that’s 2.743M HDDs of 10TB each. We have ~200 countries for the 7.8B people, and each country could have 10 sequencing centers on average, each center would need a mere 1.4K HDDs, is there really a big challenge here?

A. The problem is not that simple unfortunately. The location of genetic differences and the size of the genetic differences vary a lot across people. Still, there are compression methods like CRAM and PetaGene that can save a lot of space. Also consider all of the sequencing for rare disease, cancer, single cell sequencing, etc. plus sequencing for agricultural products.

Q. What’s the best compression ratio for human genome data? Read More

Can Cloud Storage and Big Data Live Happily Ever After?

“Big Data” has pushed the storage envelope, creating a seemingly perfect relationship with Cloud Storage. But local storage is the third 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 will be the topic of discussion on October 21, 2021 at our live SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies webcast, “Cloud Storage and Big Data, A Marriage Made in the Clouds.” Join us as our SNIA experts will cover: Read More

Deploying Confidential Computing Q&A

The third live webcast in our SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative confidential computing series focused on real-world deployments of confidential computing and included case studies and demonstrations. If you missed the live event, you can watch it on demand here. Our live audience asked some interesting questions, here are our expert presenters’ answers.

Q.  What is the overhead in CPU cycles for running in a trusted enclave?

A. We have been running some very large machine learning applications in secure enclaves using the latest available hardware, and seeing very close to “near-native” performance, with no more than 5% performance overhead compared to normal non-secure operations. This performance is significantly better in comparison to older versions of hardware. With new hardware, we are ready to take on bigger workloads with minimal overhead.

Also, it is important to note that encryption and isolation are done in hardware at memory access speeds, so that is not where you will tend to see a performance issue. Regardless of which secure enclave hardware capability you choose, each uses a different technology to manage the barrier between secure enclaves. The important thing is to look at how often an application crosses the barrier, since that is where careful attention is needed. Read More

Moving Genomics to the Cloud

The study of genomics in modern biology has revolutionized the discovery of medicines and the COVID pandemic response has quickened genetic research and driven the rapid development of vaccines. Genomics, however, requires a significant amount of compute power and data storage to make new discoveries possible. Making sure compute and storage are not a roadblock for genomics innovations will be the topic of discussion at the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative live webcast “Moving Genomics to the Cloud: Compute and Storage Considerations.”

This session will feature expert viewpoints from both bioinformatics and technology perspectives with a focus on some of the compute and data storage challenges for genomics workflows.

We will discuss: Read More

Extending Storage to the Edge

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 generated 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 other use cases impact your storage strategy?

That’s the topic of our next SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) live webcast on August 25, 2021 “Extending Storage to the Edge – How It Should Affect Your Storage Strategy” where our experts, Erin Farr, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Storage CTO Innovation Team and Vincent Hsu, IBM Fellow, VP & CTO for Storage will join us for an interactive session that will cover:

  • 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

Read More

An Easy Path to Confidential Computing

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.

The next webcast in our Confidential Computing series is “How to Easily Deploy Confidential Computing.” It will provide insight into how data center, cloud and edge applications may easily benefit from cost-effective, real-world Confidential Computing solutions. This educational discussion on July 28, 2021 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 will be Steve Van Lare (Anjuna), Anand Kashyap (Fortanix), and Michael Hoard (Intel), who will discuss: Read More