Author: Richelle Ahlvers

Scaling Management of Storage and Fabrics

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Composable disaggregated infrastructures (CDI) provide a promising solution to address the provisioning and computational efficiency limitations, as well as hardware and operating costs, of integrated, siloed, systems. But how do we solve these problems in an open, standards-based way?

DMTF, SNIA, the OFA, and the CXL Consortium are working together to provide elements of the overall solution, with Redfish® and SNIA Swordfish™ manageability providing the standards-based interface.

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is developing an OpenFabrics Management Framework (OFMF) designed for configuring fabric interconnects and managing composable disaggregated resources in dynamic HPC infrastructures using client-friendly abstractions.

Want to learn more? Read More

How SNIA Swordfish™ Expanded with NVMe® and NVMe-oF™

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The SNIA Swordfish™ specification and ecosystem are growing in scope to include full enablement and alignment for NVMe® and NVMe-oF client workloads and use cases. By partnering with other industry-standard organizations including DMTF®, NVM Express, and OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group has updated the Swordfish bundles from version 1.2.1 and later to cover an expanding range of NVMe and NVMe-oF functionality including NVMe device management and storage fabric technology management and administration.

The Need
Large-scale computing designs are increasingly multi-node and linked together through high-speed networks. These networks may be comprised of different types of technologies, fungible, and morphing. Over time, many different types of high-performance networking devices will evolve to participate in these modern, coupled-computing platforms. New fabric management capabilities, orchestration, and automation will be required to deploy, secure, and optimally maintain these high-speed networks.

The NVMe and NVMe-oF specifications provide comprehensive management for NVMe devices at an individual level, however, when you want to manage these devices at a system or data center level, DMTF Redfish and SNIA Swordfish are the industry’s gold standards. Together, Redfish and Swordfish enable a comprehensive view across the system, data center, and enterprise, with NVMe and NVMe-oF instrumenting the device-level view. This complete approach provides a way to manage your entire environment across technologies with standards-based management, making it more cost-effective and easier to operate.
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What’s New with SNIA Swordfish™?

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If you haven’t caught the new wave in storage management, it’s time to dive in and catch up on the latest developments of the SNIA Swordfish™ specification.

First, a quick recap.

SNIA Swordfish is the storage extension to the DMTF Redfish® specification providing customer-centric, easy integration of scalable storage management solutions. This unified, RESTful approach provides IT administrators, DevOps and others the ability to manage storage equipment, data services and servers in converged, hyperconverged, hyperscale or cloud infrastructure environments as well as traditional data centers. Read More

Join SNIA at Pure//Accelerate 2019: Austin, September 15-18

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Equal parts education, information, and inspiration, Pure//Accelerate 2019 is where technology and innovation meet. It’s a place to learn about new products, solutions, and integrations. It is a place for technology enthusiasts to explore industry trends, network with like-minded companies, and map out how to stay ahead as the tech landscape rapidly changes.

SNIA Board Member and Chair of the Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group Richelle Ahlvers will be joining SNIA Storage Management Initiative Board Member “Barkz” at Pure//Accelerate on Wednesday, September 18, 2019 from 2:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. for a presentation titled “Reel It In: SNIA Swordfish™ Scalable Storage Management”

By extending the DMTF Redfish® API protocol and schema, SNIA Swordfish™ helps provide a unified approach for the management of storage equipment, data services, and servers. Learn how Pure Storage is using the Swordfish RESTful interface to support the implementation of fast, efficient storage products.

Take advantage of special pricing for SNIA members. Register here.

Join the Conversation at the Open Infrastructure Summit

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Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems.

On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish™, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.” Read More

SNIA Swordfish™ – Your Questions Answered

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The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA’s) Storage Management Initiative (SMI) took on the topic of SNIA Swordfish™ in a live webcast titled “Introduction to SNIA Swordfish™ – Scalable Storage Management.” The replay is available here. SNIA experts Richelle Ahlvers and Don Deel, responded to questions during the webcast. Here are those questions and responses:

Q. You talked about two different ways to add storage to Redfish – hosted service configuration and integrated service configuration. When would you use one configuration instead of the other?

A. The integrated services configuration was added to clarify support with direct attach configurations using Swordfish constructs. If you have a server that has a RAID card in it, and you want to have it use a more complex storage configuration – storage pools and some notion of class of service, you would use the integrated service configuration. The hosted service configuration is used to model non-direct attach configurations, such as external storage arrays, or file services. Read More

A Q&A on Storage Management – These Folks Weren’t Too Proud to Ask!

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The most recent installment of our SNIA ESF webcast series “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” took on a broad topic – storage management. Our experts, Richelle Ahlvers, Mark Rogov and Alex McDonald did a great job explaining the basics and have now answered the questions that attendees asked here in this blog. If you missed the live webcast, check it out on-demand and download a copy of the slides if you’d like to take notes. Read More

SNIA Swordfish is Swimming Fast – Catch Up Now!

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If you haven’t caught the updates on SNIA SwordfishTM lately, please read on because it’s swimming fast! The new SNIA specification offers a unified approach to managing storage and servers in environments like hyperscale and cloud infrastructures. SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) just announced completion of Version 1.0.3. The new version reflects specification enhancements in multiple areas plus a User’s Guide, multiple new use cases and a new document section.

“Because SNIA Swordfish is an extension to DMTF’s (Distributed Management Task Force) open industry Redfish™ standard, it specifies the same RESTful interface and utilizes JavaScript Object Notation and Open Data Protocol to help customers integrate solutions within their existing tool chains,” said Don Deel, Chairman, SNIA Storage Management Initiative. “The SSM TWG members responsible for helping develop SNIA Swordfish represent many of the leading companies in the storage industry today, including Broadcom, Dell EMC, HPE, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Nimble Storage and VMware.”

You can also keep up with the latest Swordfish updates by continually visiting the SNIA Swordfish website. If you’re interested in helping shape the future of storage management by getting involved in the development of SNIA Swordfish, please e-mail storagemanagement@snia.org.

New SNIA Swordfish Specification Enables Scalable Storage Management – A Conversation with the SNIA Technical Work Group Development Team

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SNIA_SwordfishLogoA new SNIA specification offers a unified approach to managing storage and servers in environments like hyperscale and cloud infrastructures.  SNIA on Storage recently sat down with SNIA member volunteers from the Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG), who just announced the completion of Version 1.0 of the SNIA SwordfishTM storage management specification, to learn more. Read More