SNIA
, the Storage Networking Industry association is a non-profit organization that is made up of a number of member companies striving to create vendor-neutral architectures and standards throughout the storage industry. Think Dell, VMware, HPE, Hitachi, all the likely names all behind closed doors working for the greater good. Ok – that’s their definition. Mine? Well, I compare it to Rocky III – you know, Rocky and Apollo, sworn enemies teaming up to make the world a better place by knocking out Mr. T. So, I may be a little off with that, but not that far off! Replace “Rocky and Apollo” with some “very big name storage companies” and swap out “knocking out Mr. T” with “releasing industry standards and specifications” and I think we are pretty close.
[symple_box color=”yellow” fade_in=”false” float=”center” text_align=”left” width=””]Just a disclaimer of sorts – every article, comment, rant or mention of SFD13 that you find here has been completed on my own merits. My travel, flights, accommodations, meals, drinks, gum, etc are all paid for by Gestalt IT, however I’m not required or obliged to return the favor in anyway other than my presence 🙂 – Which still feels weird to say 🙂 Well, my presence and possible a little bit of Maple Syrup.[/symple_box]
So, in all seriousness SNIA has been around for 20 years and was formed initially to deal with interoperability issues surrounding networked storage. Today we now see them really focusing on architectures, standards, as well as a slew of education services, training and certifications. Today we can see a ton of work being performed by SNIA around current storage trends such as flash, cloud, object-storage, persistent memory, etc.. You name it, they have some work being done around it. From their website here is a handful of work that SNIA is currently investigating…
- Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI)
- Linear Tape File System (LTFS)
- IP Based Drive Management Specifications
- NVM Programming Modle
- Self-contained Information Retention Format
- Solid State Storage Performance Test Specifications
- Swordfish Scalable Storage Management APIs
Wait! They aren’t selling anything!
Honestly, I’ve never been to a Tech Field Day event where a non-profit organization has spoke – so I’m very excited to see what SNIA will chose to talk about! As shown above they have a broad range of topics to chose from – and by watching past SNIA videos from TFD they can go quite deep on these subjects. It will be nice to hear a vendor-neutral approach to a TFD session. I applaud SNIA for their efforts – it can’t be easy organizing and keeping all of its members in check – and it’s nice to see an effort from a company, be it non-profit or not, looking out for the customers, the partners, the people that have to take all of these storage arrays and protocols and make them all work! As always, follow along with all my SFD13 content here – keep your eye on the official event page here – and we will see you in June!
