It’s been about a week since Flash Memory Summit, and there was a lot of stuff going on. I saw a lot of companies promoting Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) for NVMe, which actually kind of surprised me as the specification isn’t completely finished yet (albeit close).
Even so, FMS wasn’t the only stuff going on in the storage world. NVIDIA announces GPUDirect, NVMe/TCP appliances are released, and Computational Storage all made the news. Plus, all the NVM Express presentations from FMS are available for download.
All of these and more below…
- Storage Media
- Storage Companies in the News
- Industry Associations and Standards
- Webinars and Conferences
- Synology Security News
- Bonus Round
Storage Media
If you’re curious about OpenChannel and Denali drives, you can check out SNIA’s Podcast on the subject.
ATTO has decided to create a white paper on a comparison between NVMe and SAS. Needless to say, I found their conclusions surprising and, ultimately, wrong. I know the guys at ATTO, and to be frank I’m quite disappointed that they would publish this.
At FMS there were two different technologies that seemed to start getting more and more attention. The first is Zoned Namespaces in NVMe, and the second is Ethernet-Connected NVMe drives. The latter subject is worthy of its own article, because there is a world of difference between Ethernet-connected Object drives (which many people have heard about), and Ethernet-Connected NVMe drives (which people assume they understand, when in fact there are some very fundamental technological and practical differences). Stay tuned.
How do you know when technology has moved out of the theory-ware into the realm of reality? When the analyzer companies (who always have to be ahead of the game) support it. Teledyne-LeCroy just announced their 50GbE/64GFC analyzer.
Storage Companies in the News
You may have heard that Amazon has scooped up E8, a NVMe storage startup. I’ve been following E8 for quite a while, and it’s good to see that they’ve found a home at AWS. Since Amazon bought Annapurna Labs in 2014(?, or was it 2015?), they’ve been making a lot of progress integrating their technology into the platform. I hope that E8 gets as good of a shot.
- Here’s theCUBE’s take on the acquisition.
- IDC also has a Technote available (note: Behind a membership paywall).
The other shoe has dropped with respect to the NVIDIA purchase of Mellanox: NVIDIA GPU Accelerators get a direct link to Big Data. Using NVMe-oF, of course.
HPE has acquired MapR, which is used in Big Data and Analytics platforms. This is quite a big deal for a lot of customers – especially ones who do not use HPE for Big Data.
Looks like Symantec has managed to attract Broadcom after all.
Pavilion Data has raised an additional $25M in Series C. They have established themselves as a leader in the high-performance all-NVMe appliances, and it’s good to see they’re gaining some traction with investors.
Well, that didn’t take long. This is the first NVMe/TCP storage appliance that I’ve seen so far; not surprisingly using LightBits Labs technology (they were the prime authors of the spec).
Industry Associations and Standards
SNIA Education Library: The recently launched SNIA Educational Library includes educational white papers, webcasts, tutorials, videos, presentations from past events, podcasts and more. And now the library boasts over 2,000 assets. You can tailor your search terms on criteria like keywords, publication date, author, event, or technology focus area to get the information you want. No library card needed! Check it out here.
Online SNIA Dictionary: The Online SNIA Dictionary is now searchable by term with permalinks that get you to the right definition every time. You can also filter by context and letter. Check it out to find over 1,900 vendor-neutral definitions thoroughly vetted by SNIA experts. Want to contribute to the SNIA Dictionary? Learn how you can submit term.
If you happen to work for a NVMe vendor, you should check out the UNH-IOL/NVM Express webinar on Testing Compliance.
The SNIA standard for a logical container format called the Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) v1.0 has now been published as an ISO standard. This new ISO standard ISO/IEC 23681:2019)enables long-term hard disk, cloud, and tape-based containers a way to effectively and efficiently preserve and secure digital information for many decades, even with the ever-changing technology landscape. Learn more here.
It was a busy week at this year’s Flash Memory Summit. SNIA’s Object Drive Technical Work Group was honored with the Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology Award for is Key Value Storage API specification. Learn more here.
Last but definitely not least, NVM Express’FMS presentations are now available for viewing online.
Webinars and Conferences
Storage Newsletter has a summary of the Flash Memory Summit. You should probably read it sooner, rather than later, as they tend to bury their articles behind a paywall after a few days. They’ve included quite a few links of the major announcements by storage vendors at the show, though, so it’s worth a look.
The Storage Developer Conference (SDC) has published its agenda. I have to say, there will be a couple of Keynotes that will not be recorded or streamed that you’ll probably want to go see. More on this in a little bit, though; you may want to seriously consider attending if you are able. Early-Bird Registration ends Aug. 24. SNIA has set up a SDC Community, where you can meet other attendees, start conversations, and ask questions of the speakers and build your personal schedule of educational sessions.
Speaking of SDC, you can see several of the SDC India presentations on SNIA’s YouTube Channel. Hear from experts on Computational Storage, Persistent Memory, Cloud, Blockchain, IoT and more. Watch them all at the SDC India 2019 Playlist.
The lines are blurring as new memory technologies are challenging the way we build and use storage to meet application demands. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a “Memory Pod” webcast is our series, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage, But Were Too Proud to Ask.” If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand along with the presentation slides. This blog offers answers to all the questions we received during the live event.
Fibre Channel and Security. Speaking of Fibre Channel, the FCIA is hosting a live webcast on “Fibre Channel and Security” on August 27th. Register here to join me with my expert FCIA colleagues, Nishant Lodha for a deep dive into the security aspects of Fibre Channel.
Synology Security News
Curious on how to open up port forwarding to your Synology? From Synology:
| Configure port forwarding for external access to your NAS | |
| Try setting up port forwarding to connect to your devices within the local network. This video will show you how to configure port forwarding on DSM or the router, realizing anywhere access to your NAS. | |
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| DNS over HTTPS: things to consider when you go “private” |
| See what the new “privacy-first” technology means for security and parental controls – and whether there’s a way to have them all. |
Of course, keeping things secure is an ongoing process. Please see earlier Storage Short Takes for additional Synology advisories. Some of those vulnerabilities are still active.
Moderate Severity
Affected: HTTP/2 DoS Attacks
Status: Ongoing
Solution: None yet.
Detail: CVE-2019-9511, CVE-2019-9513 and CVE-2019-9516 allow remote attackers to conduct denial-of-service attacks via a susceptible version of DiskStation Manager (DSM).
References:
- HTTP/2 implementations do not robustly handle abnormal traffic and resource exhaustion
- CVE-2019-9511
- CVE-2019-9512
- CVE-2019-9513
- CVE-2019-9514
- CVE-2019-9515
- CVE-2019-9516
- CVE-2019-9517
- CVE-2019-9518
Bonus Round
Should you repatriate your data back on-site from the Cloud?
Special Thanks: Sophia Meyer, Diane Marsili, and Shawn Kaiser who contributed items to this Short Take