SNIA on Cloud Storage

Get Ready for Part 2 of Kubernetes in the Cloud

June 7, 2019March 29, 2020 Michelle Tidwell Leave a comment

Michelle Tidwell, SNIA Board of Directors

As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. In addition to decisions surrounding what technologies to use, they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. Storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in week, days or hours but in minutes.

Understanding Kubernetes in the Cloud

March 25, 2019March 29, 2020 Mike Jochimsen Leave a comment

Ever wonder why and where you would want to use Kubernetes? You’re not alone, that’s why the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative is hosting a live webcast on May 2, 2019 “Kubernetes in the Cloud.”

Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes promises simplified management of cloud workloads at scale, whether on-premises, hybrid, or in a public cloud infrastructure, allowing effortless movement of workloads from cloud to cloud. By some reckonings, it is being deployed at a rate several times faster than virtualization.

Composable Infrastructure Q&A

March 5, 2019March 29, 2020 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

On February 13, 2019, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) presented a live webcast, Why Composable Infrastructure? Our goal was to clearly explain the reasoning behind, and the benefits of, composable infrastructure in an educational, vendor-neutral way. We believe our speakers, Philip Kufeldt and Mike Jochimsen, did just that. Now, as promised, Philip and Mike have answered the many interesting questions we received during the live event.

Q. Are composable infrastructure solutions incompatible with virtualized or containerized environments? Will these solutions only serve bare metal environments?

Wondering What’s New in Container Storage?

January 17, 2019January 24, 2019 Alex McDonald 2 Comments

The landscape of containers is moving fast and constantly changing, with new standards emerging every few months. If you wondering what’s new in container storage, you are not alone. That’s why the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative is hosting a live webcast on February 26, 2019, “What’s New in Container Storage.”

In this webcast, Keith Hudgins of Docker joins us as a follow up to his earlier container webcast “Intro to Containers, Container Storage and Docker.” It’s our most popular webcast to date with thousands of views. If you missed it, it’s available on demand and will provide you with some great background information before our February 26^h webcast.

I encourage you to register today for the February 26^th session where you’ll learn:

What’s new, what to pay attention to, and how to make sense of the ever-shifting container landscape.
Container storage types and Container Frameworks
An overview of the various storage APIs for the container landscape
How to identify the most important projects to follow in the container world
The Container Storage Interface spec and Kubernetes 1.13
How to get involved in the container community

It will be live, so bring your questions!

Understanding Composable Infrastructure

January 3, 2019January 3, 2019 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

Cloud data centers are by definition very dynamic. The need for infrastructure availability in the right place at the right time for the right use case is not as predictable, nor as static, as it has been in traditional data centers. These cloud data centers need to rapidly construct virtual pools of compute, network and storage based on the needs of particular customers or applications, then have those resources dynamically and automatically flex as needs change.

To accomplish this, many in the industry espouse composable infrastructure capabilities, which rely on heterogeneous resources with specific capabilities that can be discovered, managed, and automatically provisioned and re-provisioned through data center orchestration tools. The primary benefit of composable infrastructure results in a smaller grained sets of resources that are independently scalable and can be brought together as required. On February 13, 2019, The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative is going to examine what’s happening with composable infrastructure in our live webcast, Why Composable Infrastructure? In this webcast, SNIA experts will discuss:

What prompted the development of composable infrastructure?

What is composable infrastructure?
What are the enabling technologies and potential solutions
Enabling technologies (not just what’s here, but what’s needed…)
An update on the current status of composable infrastructure standards/products, and where we might be in two to five years

Our goal is to clearly explain the reasoning behind and the benefits of composable infrastructure in an educational, vendor-neutral way. We hope you’ll join us. Our experts will be on hand to answer your questions. Register today to save your spot.

Deciphering the Economics of Building a Cloud Storage Architecture

October 11, 2018October 9, 2023 Eric Lakin Leave a comment

Building a cloud storage architecture requires both storage vendors, cloud service providers and large enterprises to consider new technical and economic paradigms in order to enable a flexible and cost efficient architecture. That’s why the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative is hosting a live webcast, “Create a Smart and More Economic Cloud Storage Architecture” on November 7^th.

From an economic perspective, cloud infrastructure is often procured in the traditional way – prepay for expected future storage needs and over provision for unexpected changes in demand. This requires large capital expenditures which slows cost recovery based on fluctuating customer adoption. Giving large enterprises and cloud service providers flexibility in the procurement model for their storage allows them to more closely align the expenditure on infrastructure resources with the cost recovery from customers, optimizing the use of both CapEx and OpEx budgets.

From a technical perspective, clouds inherently require unpredictable scalability – both up and down. If you were to Read More, you’d know that digital marketing, SEO, and graphic design is the least of it.

Building a storage architecture with the ability to rapidly allocate resources for a specific customer need and reallocate resources based on changing customer requirements allows for storage capacity optimization, creating performance pools in the data center without compromising the responsiveness to the change in needs. Such architecture should also align to the data center level orchestration system to allow for even higher level of resource optimization and flexibility.

In this webcast, you will learn:

How modern storage technology allows you to build this infrastructure
The role of software defined storage
Accounting principles that impact CapEx and OpEx
How to model cloud costs of new applications and or re-engineering existing applications
Performance considerations

What the “T” Means in SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies

August 15, 2018August 15, 2018 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) has had a rebrand; we’ve added a T for Technologies into our name, and we’re now officially the Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI).

That doesn’t seem like a significant change, but there’s a good reason. Our old name reflected the push to getting acceptance of cloud storage, and that specific cloud storage debate has been won, and big time. One relatively small cloud service provider is currently storing 400PB of clients’ data. Twitter alone consumes 300PB of data on Google’s cloud offering. Facebook, Amazon, AliBaba, Tencent – all have huge data storage numbers.

Enterprises of every size are storing data in the cloud. That’s why we added the word “technologies.” The expanded charter and new name reflect the need to support the evolving cloud business models and architectures such as OpenStack, software defined storage, Kubernetes and object storage. It includes data services, orchestration and management, understanding hyperscale requirements and the role standards play.

So what do we do? The CSTI is an active group that publishes articles and white papers, speaks at industry conferences and presents at highly-rated webcasts that have been viewed by thousands. You can learn more about the CSTI and check out the Infographic for highlights on cloud storage trends and CSTI activities.

If you’re interested in cloud storage technologies, I encourage you to consider joining our group. We have multiple membership options for established vendors, startups, educational institutions, even individuals. Learn more about CSTI membership here.