In the last few years, Ethernet equipment vendors have announced big increases in line speeds, shipping 25, 50, and 100 Gigabits-per -second (Gb/s) speeds and announcing 200/400 Gb/s. At the same time Fibre Channel vendors have launched 32GFC, 64GFC and 128GFC technology while InfiniBand has reached 200Gb/s (called HDR) speed. But who exactly is asking …Read More

There are many permutations of technologies, interconnects and application level approaches in play with solid state storage today. In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to reason clearly about which problems are best solved by various permutations of these. That’s why the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum, together with the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, is …Read More

The next Ethernet Storage Forum Webcast. “Evolution of iSCSI including iSER, iSCSI over RDMA Ethernet,” will focus on developments with iSCSI - the Internet Protocol standard for transferring SCSI commands across an Ethernet network, enabling hosts to link to storage devices wherever they may be. At this Webcast on May 24th, I will be joined …Read More

Almost 200 people attended our joint Webcast with the Ethernet Alliance: “The 2015 Ethernet Roadmap for Networked Storage.” We had a lot of great questions during the live event, but we did not have time to answer them all. As promised, we’ve complied answers for all of the questions that came in. If you think …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

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

Ethernet networks offer a number of advantages for storage applications. Given the rapid growth of server virtualization, using a highly flexible and mobile network for storage is needed. IP storage protocols offer advantages for today’s and tomorrow’s data centers.

IT as a Service (ITaaS), or cloud services (clouds), was one of the “buzz” topics at SNW this Spring. And industry groups, such as SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative, are beginning to address the standards, policies, and marketing messages that help define what is ITaaS or clouds. Whatever the definition, “cloud” technologies appear ahead of attempts …Read More