AIOps: The Undeniable Paradigm Shift

AI has entered every aspect of today’s digital world. For IT, AIOps is creating a dramatic shift that redefines how IT approaches operations. On April 9, 2024, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will host a live webinar, “AIOps: Reactive to Proactive – Revolutionizing the IT Mindset.” In this webinar, Pratik Gupta, one of the industry’s leading experts in AIOps, will delve beyond the tools of AIOps to reveal how AIOps introduces intelligence into the very fabric of IT thinking and processes, discussing:

  • From Dev to Production and Reactive to Proactive: Revolutionizing the IT Mindset: We’ll move beyond the “fix it when it breaks” mentality, embracing a future-proof approach where AI analyzes risk, anticipates issues, prescribes solutions, and learns continuously. Read More

Here’s Why Ceph is the Linux of Storage Today

Data is one of the most critical resources of our time. Storage for data has always been a critical architectural element for every data center, requiring careful considerations for storage performance, scalability, reliability, data protection, durability and resilience. A decade ago, the market was aggressively embracing public storage because of its agility and scalability. In the last few years, people have been rethinking that approach, moving toward on-premises storage with cloud consumption models. The new cloud native architecture on-premises has the promise of the traditional data center’s security and reliability with cloud agility and scalability.

Ceph, an Open Source project for enterprise unified software-defined storage, represents a compelling solution for this cloud native on-premises architecture and will be the topic of our next SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webinar, “Ceph: The Linux of Storage Today.”

This webinar will discuss: Read More

Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility Q&A

72% of organizations have encountered incompatibility issues between various object storage implementations according to a poll at our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webinar, “Navigating the Complexities of Object Storage Compatibility.” If you missed the live presentation or you would like to see the answers to the other poll questions we asked the audience, you can view it on-demand at the SNIA Educational Library.

The audience was highly-engaged during the live event and asked several great questions. Here are answers to them all.

Q. Do you see the need for fast object storage for AI kind of workloads?

A. Yes, the demand for fast object storage in AI workloads is growing. Initially, object storage was mainly used for backup or archival purposes. However, its evolution into Data Lakes and the introduction of features like the S3 SELECT API have made it more suitable for data analytics. The launch of Amazon’s S3 Express, a faster yet more expensive tier, is a clear indication of this trend. Other vendors are following suit, suggesting a shift towards object storage as a primary data storage platform for specific workloads.

Q. As Object Storage becomes more prevalent in the primary storage space, could you talk about data protection, especially functionalities like synchronous replication and multi-site deployments – or is your view that this is not needed for object storage deployments? Read More

Namespace Management Q&A

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) recently hosted a live webinar, “Simplified Namespace Management – The Open Standards Way,” where David Slik, Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) provided a fascinating overview of how to tackle the complexities of dynamic namespaces. If you missed the live webinar, you can view it on-demand and access a copy of the webinar slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Attendees at the live event asked several interesting questions. Here are answers to them all.

Q. How are the queues assigned to individual namespaces? How many queues are assigned for a particular namespace, can we customize it and if so, how? What is the difference between normal namespace and SR-IOV enabled namespace? Can you please explain sets domain and endurance group? Read More

It’s All About Cloud Object Storage Interoperability

Object storage has firmly established itself as a cornerstone of modern data centers and cloud infrastructure. Ensuring API compatibility has become crucial for object storage developers who want to benefit from the wide ecosystem of existing applications. However, achieving compatibility can be challenging due to the complexity and variety of the APIs, access control mechanisms, and performance and scalability requirements.

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative, together with the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, is working to address the issues of cloud object storage complexity and interoperability. We’re kicking off 2024 with two exciting initiatives: 1) a webinar on June 9, 2024, and 2) a Plugfest in September of 2024. Here are the details: Read More

Edge AI Q&A

At our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies (CSTI) webinar “Why Distributed Edge Data is the Future of AI” our expert speakers, Rita Wouhaybi and Heiko Ludwig, explained what’s new and different about edge data, highlighted use cases and phases of AI at the edge, covered Federated Learning, discussed privacy for edge AI, and provided an overview of the many other challenges and complexities being created by increasingly large AI models and algorithms. It was a fascinating session. If you missed it you can access it on-demand along with a PDF of the slides at the SNIA Educational Library.

Our live audience asked several interesting questions. Here are answers from our presenters.

Q. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) what role will edge AI play? Read More

An Open Standard for Namespace Management

The days of simple, static, self-contained file systems have long passed. Today, we have complex, dynamic namespaces, mixing block, file, object, key-value, queue, and graph-based resources, accessed via multiple protocols, and distributed across multiple systems and geographic sites. These complexities result in new challenges for simplifying management.

There is good news on addressing this issue, and the  SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) will explain how in our live webinar “Simplified Namespace Management – The Open Standards Way” on October 18, 2023, where David Slik, Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, will demonstrate how the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI™), an open ISO standard (ISO/IEC 17826:2022) for managing data objects and containers, already includes extensive capabilities for simplifying the management of complex namespaces.

In this webinar, you’ll learn Read More

Confidential AI Q&A

Confidential AI is a new collaborative platform for data and AI teams to work with sensitive data sets and run AI models in a confidential environment. It includes infrastructure, software, and workflow orchestration to create a secure, on-demand work environment that meets organization’s privacy requirements and complies with regulatory mandates. It’s a topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) covered in depth at our webinar, “The Rise in Confidential AI.” At this webinar, our experts, Parviz Peiravi and Richard Searle provided a deep and insightful look at how this dynamic technology works to ensure data protection and data privacy. Here are their answers to the questions from our webinar audience.

Q. Are businesses using Confidential AI today?

A. Absolutely, we have seen a big increase in adoption of Confidential AI particularly in industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Government, where Confidential AI is helping these organizations enhance risk mitigation, including cybercrime prevention, anti-money laundering, fraud prevention and more.

Q: With compute capabilities on the Edge increasing, how do you see Trusted Execution Environments evolving?

Read More

How Edge Data is Impacting AI

AI is disrupting so many domains and industries and by doing so, AI models and algorithms are becoming increasingly large and complex. This complexity is driven by the proliferation in size and diversity of localized data everywhere, which creates the need for a unified data fabric and/or federated learning. It could be argued that whoever wins the data race will win the AI race, which is inherently built on two premises: 1) Data is available in a central location for AI to have full access to it, 2) Compute is centralized and abundant.

The impact of edge AI is the topic for our next SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) live webinar, “Why Distributed Edge Data is the Future of AI,” on October 3, 2023. If centralized (or in the cloud), AI is a superpower and super expert, but edge AI is a community of many smart wizards with the power of cumulative knowledge over a central superpower.  In this webinar, our SNIA experts will discuss: Read More

Data Fabric Q&A

Unification of structured and unstructured data has long been a goal – and challenge for organizations. Data Fabric is an architecture, set of services and platform that standardizes and integrates data across the enterprise regardless of data location (On-Premises, Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud), enabling self-service data access to support various applications, analytics, and use cases. The data fabric leaves data where it lives and applies intelligent automation to govern, secure and bring AI to your data.

How a data fabric abstraction layer works and the benefits it delivers was the topic of our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webinar, “Data Fabric: Connecting the Dots between Structured and Unstructured Data.” If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand and access the presentations slides at the SNIA Educational Library.

We did not have time to answer audience questions at the live session. Here are answers from our expert, Joseph Dain.

Q. What are some of the biggest challenges you have encountered when building this architecture?

A. The scale of unstructured data makes it challenging to build a catalog of this information. With structured data you may have thousands or hundreds of thousands of table assets, but in unstructured data you can have billions of files and objects that need to be tracked at massive scale.

Another challenge is masking unstructured data. Read More