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SFD13 Primer – SNIA

June 7, 2017

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This post is part of the blog series related to Storage Field Day 13 and the Pure Storage Accelerate conferences. Find out the entire SFD13 content, presentations, articles, presenting companies and delegates here.

What is the SNIA? Is it a brand? Is it the acronym for the Super Network Integrated Array? Nope, none of these. The SNIA is the Storage Network Industry Association, a non-profit organization based in the USA whose members are individuals working in the storage industry, most often for various storage vendors.

Role & Mission Statement

The SNIA has, from what I understand, several objectives. One is to provide education services and materials to industry members from a vendor-neutral perspective. Those can be of varied formats, and of course the SNIA also offers certifications and training curricula to its members.

Another objective is to become a trusted authority in the storage industry and contribute to the definition of vendor-neutral technology standards, as well as ensure interoperability between technologies and improve data movement as well as management of storage infrastructures.

They have a really great infographic that depicts what they do at a glance. It’s worth mentioning that it’s possible to become a member of the SNIA – this organization has quite a lot of membership categories, and if you’re someone very active in the storage industry or work for a storage vendor you might want to look at their benefits.

Projects

The SNIA is working on a large variety of projects. From a look at their home page we get an immediate grasp at the breadth of activities they are involved into. A quick sampling shows Long-Term Retention, Software-Defined Storage, Solid-State Storage, Storage Management Initiative and so on.

Two of the SNIA projects that are going to be discussed at SFD13 are the work on SwordFish (a standard for storage management) as well as persistent memory related activities. I’m quite excited to get to hear from Rob Peglar who worked formerly for Micron and is now Senior VP and CTO at SymbolicIO – a company which seems to have impressive tech!

There’s a lot of stuff to be learned on the SNIA pages, the Solid State Storage Initiative page (SSSI) has plenty of information about what the SNIA is doing and it would take a solid amount of time to properly apprehend all the activities that are happening in this and other spaces.

If you want to learn more about RedFish/SwordFish and the Storage Management related activities of the SNIA, I encourage you to revisit this post written by my friend Chris M Evans earlier in 2016.

Max’s Opinion

I had barely heard of the SNIA before, and only in the context of SwordFish / SMI. I believe it’s fundamental for each industry to have a vendor neutral space where all the participants whether they are professionals, vendors, end-users and so on can meet and debate about technologies, protocols, educate themselves and contribute to improvements that benefit the industry as a whole, for the common good of all.

I’m sort of drawing parallels between the SNIA and the IETF (known for its very solid and central role in designing network communication protocols), it seems to be the place where all the big heads, scientists, math people and talented subject matter experts hang out – an impressive crew, as I feel like I have the “brain” of a protozoan compared to them. I’m interested in understanding the influence the SNIA has over the storage industry, and to which projects they have contributed.

From what I was able to read, it seems that SNIA’s role is pivotal and has far reaching activities that go beyond the perceived boundaries of storage vendor activities. The SNIA has for example a SIG (Special Interest Group) that covers NVDIMM devices, and there seems to be some collaboration between SNIA and JEDEC, the organization that sets standards for semiconductors and which has worked among other in setting up memory standards. In this particular light, the cooperation between standardization organizations is a positive sign, and it’s interesting to see how boundaries between technologies, for instance volatile vs persistent (non-volatile) memory are blending, with all the implications related to form factors, protocols etc.

Let’s hope to hear interesting stories from the SNIA at Storage Field Day 13. While we always enjoy a great vendor presentation, the geeks and nerds in us absolutely dig the kind of presentations that are all about the tech, standards and so on. Bring it on, SNIA… and enlighten the mere mortal that I am!

Disclosure

This disclosure is written specifically for the Storage Field Day 13 and Pure Storage Accelerate events. I was invited to the Pure Storage Accelerate and Storage Field Day 13 events by Gestalt IT & Pure Storage. Gestalt IT & Pure Storage covered travel expenses to the event, accommodation and food were also covered for the entire event duration. Transportation from home to PRG airport and back, transportation from SFO airport to the hotel as well as food and accommodation costs (on 10-Jun-17) were covered by me.

I did not receive any compensation for the participation in this event, for which I took unpaid time off to be able to attend (as it is the case with any events I participate to). I am not obliged to blog or produce any kind of content. Any tweets, blog articles or any other form of content I have produced or may produce in the future related to this event is the exclusive product of my interest in technology and my will to share information with my peers. Readers might also want to know that at the time of writing I owned two (2) shares of Pure Storage (PSTG.K).

In line with the concept of freedom of thought/critical thinking I commit to share only my own point of view and analysis about any products, technologies, strategies & concepts I was introduced to.

 

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