Most IT professionals go to a trade show to learn, after all, knowledge is the stock in trade for our industry. But what about the professionals in the storage eco-system, the individuals that actually create the solutions that IT professionals need – where do they turn? For many it’s the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the storage industry’s standards group and a primary source of what’s new and what’s important in storage. SNIA is putting on the Storage Developer Conference Sept 15 – 18 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This event may be just the place to get up to speed on all areas of storage technology that storage developers need, such as:
Software Defined Storage
Probably no term in the history of IT has created as much confusion as Software-Defined Storage (SDS). In fact, SDS may be the main reason you go to a technical conference this year and SNIA, being the storage industry standards body, is the best qualified to address that topic. Check out these sessions:
“SDS Automation and Orchestration”
“Defining the Software-Defined Technology Market”
or the Keynote “Leveraging SDS to Meet Today’s and Tomorrow’s Infrastructure Demands”
Non-Volatile Memory
While NAND flash is the de facto high performance storage technology, it is showing its age. Improving storage density, already at the sub-20nm level, is getting more difficult and NAND flash endurance, while it has improved markedly, is still a limiting factor. The industry is looking to other technologies to carry the ball, like 3D NAND (already here, actually), phase change memory (PCM), magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM), holographic memory, etc. Be sure to catch this session for your update on new NVM technologies:
“Thanks for the Memories: Emerging Non-volatile Memory Technologies” or
“From ARIES to MARS: Transaction support for Next –Generation Solid State Devices”
Object Storage
Storage systems keep getting bigger in order to hold a ridiculous amount of data, especially unstructured data. Scale out storage today routinely means petabytes in a single system. Object storage is the technology most often used to support these enormous data sets. But did you know that object storage is now being applied at the disk drive level? If you’re involved with object storage, this session may surprise you:
“Kinetic Open Storage Platform”
In fact, traditional RAID methods are pretty much obsolete at these capacity levels and erasure coding is the data protection and resiliency technology of choice in most object storage systems. To see where erasure coding is headed, you might want to attend this session:
“Next Generation Erasure Coding Techniques”
Distributed File Systems
And what about the file system? Distributed file systems are gaining popularity as companies turn their attention to crunching huge numbers of files with Hadoop and other big data applications. For the latest, check out this session:
“Directory Write Leases in the MagFS Distributed File System”or
“Multi-Protocol Support in GlusterFS”
The Cloud
The Cloud is turning the corner and becoming ‘mainstream’ for more and more IT professionals. If you’re involved with a cloud-based solution or are interested in integrating cloud capabilities into your product, these sessions may be up your alley:
“Status to Cirrus: Avoiding Nosebleeds during Upgrades of Cloud Storage Systems” or
“Introducing CDMI 1.1”
Big Data and the Internet of Things
Like the cloud, Big Data analytics is getting deeper into the enterprise. With the advent of machine-generated data and propensity to save everything because it may be useful someday, storage for very large data sets of an enormous number of files is the current challenge for many companies. If you’re involved with system development in this space, you might want to check out some of the sessions like:
“Big Data Storage Challenges for Industrial Internet of Things”
These are just a very few of the technical sessions on the agenda of this year’s SNIA Storage Developer Conference. There are several reasons to attend a trade show and no doubt there are a lot of shows to choose from. But if you’re a storage system developer, this could be the best show of the year.
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Eric is an Analyst with Storage Switzerland and has over 25 years experience in high-technology industries. He’s held technical, management and marketing positions in the computer storage, instrumentation, digital imaging and test equipment fields. He has spent the past 15 years in the data storage field, with storage hardware manufacturers and as a national storage integrator, designing and implementing open systems storage solutions for companies in the Western United States. Eric earned degrees in electrical/computer engineering from the University of Colorado and marketing from California State University, Humboldt. He and his wife live in Colorado and have twins in college.
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