I’m always amazed by the vast amount of knowledge being posted online for free download. If you are an IT Professional who deals with Storage (or if you manage one of them), check out the high-quality tutorials just posted online by the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA).
These peer-reviewed, vendor-neutral tutorials, offered by the SNIA Education Committee, cover a variety of very current Storage-related topics. They were delivered live during the recent Storage Networking World conference in Santa Clara, CA (SNW Fall 2012). I delivered one of them and I was also able to attend a few of them in person.
Here’s a snapshot of what they covered, organized by track:
Track: Big Data
- Introduction to Analytics and Big Data – Hadoop (Rob Peglar)
- Protecting Data in the "Big Data" World (Thomas Rivera)
- How to Cost Effectively Retain Reference Data for Analytics and Big Data (Molly Rector)
- Big Data Storage Options for Hadoop (Dr. Sam Fineberg)
- Massively Scalable File Storage (Philippe Nicolas)
- Can You Manage at Petabyte Scale? (John Webster)
Track: Cloud and Emerging Technologies
- Interoperable Cloud Storage with the CDMI Standard (Mark Carlson)
- The Business Case for the Cloud (Alex McDonald)
- Archiving and Preservation in the Cloud: Business Case, Challenges and Best Practices (Chad Thibodeau, Sebastian Zangaro)
- Enterprise Architecture and Storage Clouds (Marty Stogsdill)
Track: Data Protection and Management
- Introduction to Data Protection: Backup to Tape, Disk and Beyond (Jason Iehl)
- Trends in Data Protection and Restoration Technologies (Michael Fishman)
- Advanced Data Reduction Concepts (Gene Nagle, Thomas Rivera)
Track: File Systems and File Management
- The File Systems Evolution (Thomas Rivera)
- SMB Remote File Protocol, including SMB 3.0 (Jose Barreto)
Track: Green Storage
- Green Storage and Energy Efficiency (Carlos Pratt)
- Green Storage - the Big Picture ("Green is More Than kWh!") (SW Worth)
Track: Networking
- Technical Overview of Data Center Networks (Dr. Joseph White)
- Single and Multi Switch Designs with FCoE (Chad Hintz)
- The Unintended Consequences of Converged Data Center Deployment Models (Simon Gordon)
- FCoE Direct End-Node to End-Node (a/k/a FCoE VN2VN) (John Hufferd)
- PCI Express IO Virtualization Overview (Ron Emerick)
- How Infrastructure as a Service (laaS) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) will Change the Data Center (Samir Sharma)
- IP Storage Protocols: iSCSI (John Hufferd)
- Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) (John Hufferd)
Track: Professional Development
- Social Media and the IT Professional - Are You a Match? (Marty Foltyn)
- Reaction Management and Self-facilitation Techniques (David Deming)
Track: Security
- Practical Storage Security with Key Management (Russ Fellows)
- Unmasking Virtualization Security (Eric Hibbard)
- Data Breaches and the Encryption Safe Harbor (Eric Hibbard)
- Storage Security - the ISO/IEC Standard (Eric Hibbard)
- A Hype-free Stroll Through Cloud Security (Eric Hibbard)
- Got Lawyers? They've Got Storage and ESI in the Cross-hairs! (Eric Hibbard)
Track: Solid State Storage
- The Benefits of Solid State in Enterprise Storage Systems (David Dale)
- An In-depth Look at SNIA's Enterprise Solid State Storage Test Specification (PTS v1.1) (Easen Ho)
- Realities of Solid State Storage (Luanne Dauber)
- What Happens When Flash Moves to Triple Level Cell (TLC) (Luanne Dauber)
- NVMe the nextGen Interface for Solid State Storage (Anil Vasudeva)
- SCSI Express - Fast & Reliable Flash Storage for the Enterprise (Marty Czekalski)
Track: Storage and Storage Management
- What's Old is New Again - Storage Tiering (Kevin Dudak)
- Simplified Integration and Management in Multi-Vendor SAN Environments (Chauncey Schwartz)
- SAS: The Emerging Storage Fabric (Marty Czekalski)
Track: Virtualization/Applications
- Virtualization Practices: Providing a Complete Virtual Solution in a Box (Jyh-shing)
- VDI Optimization - Real World Learnings (Russ Fellows)
I would encourage all my industry colleagues to check these out!
To view the slides for each one of the tutorials listed above in PDF format, visit http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/2012/fall. Be sure to check the Legal Notices on the documents about how you can use them.
For more information about SNIA, check http://www.snia.org/. It's also never too early to plan to check the next wave, to be delivered during the next SNW in the Spring.