Presumptuous, yes, because Ethernet has been a mainstay in enterprises since its early days over 40 years ago. It initially grew to prominence as the local area network (LAN) connection in the enterprise. More recent advances have enabled Ethernet to become a standard for mission critical storage connectivity for block, file and object storage in …Read More

As one Cisco colleague once said to me, “After the nuclear holocaust, there will be two things left: cockroaches and Ethernet.” Not sure I like Ethernet’s unappealing company in that statement, but the truth it captures is that Ethernet, now entering its fifth decade (wow!), is ubiquitous and still continuing to advance at a breathtaking …Read More

Technology continues to advance rapidly. Making sense of it all can be a challenge. At the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum, we focus on storage technologies and solutions enabled by and associated with Ethernet Networks. Last year, we modified the charters of our two Special Interest Groups (SIG) to address topics about file protocols and storage …Read More

Last week we had a large and highly-engaged audience at our live Webcast: “SMB 3.0 – New Opportunities for Windows Environments.” We ran out of time answering all the questions during our event so, as promised, here is a recap of all the questions and answers to attendees’ questions. The Webcast is now available on …Read More

SUSE, founded in 1992, provides an enterprise ready Linux distribution in the form of SLES; the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. As of late last month (October 22, 2013), SUSE announced that SLES 11 with service pack 3 now supports the Linux client for NFSv4.1 and pNFS client. This major distribution joins RedHat’s RHEL (RedHat Enterprise …Read More

In this third and final blog post on NFS (see previous blog posts Why NFSv4.1 and pNFS are Better than NFSv3 Could Ever Be and The Advantages of NFSv4.1) I’ll cover pNFS (parallel NFS), an optional feature of NFSv4.1 that improves the bandwidth available for NFS protocol access, and some of the proposed features of …Read More

Red Hat Enterprise Linux shipped their first commercially supported parallel NFS client on February 21st. The Red Hat ecosystem can deploy pNFS with the confidence of engineering, test, and long-term support of the industry standard protocol.   Red Hat Engineering has been working with the upstream community and several SNIA ESF member companies to backport …Read More

In a previous blog post Why NFSv4.1 and pNFS are Better than NFSv3 Could Ever Be, some of the issues with NFSv3 that made it difficult to implement as a WAN based or data center wide protocol were discussed. The question then becomes; why not move to NFSv4 instead of NFSv4.1? Isn’t that a bigger …Read More

A significant challenge in managing large amounts of data (or Big Data) is a lack of what I like to call “total data awareness”. It’s a situation where you know (or suspect) that you have data - you just can’t find it. When you think about many current IT environments, they are often not built …Read More

As we come to a close of the year 2012, I want to share some of our successes and briefly highlight some new changes for 2013. Calendar year 2012 has been eventful and the SNIA-ESF has been busy. Here are some of our accomplishments: 10GbE – With virtualization and network convergence, as well as the …Read More