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The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a
not-for-profit global organisation, made up of some 400 member companies and
7,000 individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA's mission
is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards,
technologies, and educational services to empower organisations in the
management of information. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to
delivering standards, education, and services that will propel open storage
networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit
the SNIA web site at www.snia.org.
See also:-
SNIA
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com
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In September 2008 -
SNIA announced the formation of its
Solid State Storage Initiative.
Unlike the
SSD Alliance ,
which was launched a year earlier in 2007, founding members of SNIA's SSSI
include manufacturers of both
RAM SSDs and
flash SSDs.
There were already over 86 companies actively marketing SSDs in
Q3 2008 listed on
StorageSearch.com by the time of this announcement.
In April 2009 -
SNIA published a new white paper -
"NAND
Flash Solid State Storage for the Enterprise - an in-depth Look at Reliability."
(pdf) It's co-authored by:- Jonathan Thatcher
Fusion-io, Tom
Coughlin Coughlin
Associates, Jim Handy
Objective
Analysis and Neal
Ekker
Texas Memory Systems.
The article contains the best integrated explanation I've seen of the design
trade-offs for error correction schemes and how they affect bit error rates
compared to the raw uncorrected results.
In July 2010 -
SNIA announced the
availability of its
Solid State Storage
Performance Test Specification (version 0.9) for public review. 2
years earlier StorageSearch.com published an article called -
Can you trust flash
SSD specs & benchmarks? - because it had been obvious to me for some
time that oems and magazines which did benchmark testing of SSDs often didn't
know about what I called the "halo effect" which could make some SSDs
look better than they really were
In October 2013 - SNIA started running an
online survey on SSD features
(interfaces, apps etc) - to learn more about the market. |
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| SNIA proposes new standard
for virtualizing SSD implemented memory |
Editor:- January 27, 2014 - It's years since the
first thoroughbred
SSD software horses
were seen to be leaving the stables - but last week - a
standards ORG - SNIA
announced
an effort to bolt these doors with the release of version 1 of what it hopes
will be a new standard called the
NVM
Programming Model (pdf)
Editor's comments:- Currently if
you use SSDs as memory using
PCIe SSDs from
Fusion-io or
Virident, or if you
plan to use memory channel SSDs from
SanDisk - then you're
potentially looking at working in 3 different software environments.
The
viable permutations of hardware and software compatibility levels shrink for
users when they converge at a popular market application level such as
virtual desktops - but explode into crazy unsupportability for 3rd party
software developers as they try to step back from proprietary APIs and hang
onto more general hooks in operating systems which were never designed around
the core class of capabilities offered by low latency SSDs.
Whether
the long term solution to the
current messy
state of ad hoc SSD software lies in adapting current OS's - or maybe in
bypassing old OS's entirely and starting again with cloud level service-like
abstrations in virtualized servers - is interesting to speculate.
In the meantime software developers have to work with existing de-facto software
environments (to generate revenue) and also keep an eye on future standards in
the hope that standardization will reduce their costs (one day in the remote
future).
The SSD software platform and the optimum level of
engagement for vendors is a lottery which will suck billions more dollars from
VCs before it is resolved. And I think that market dominance will be a bigger
part of the solution than a set of committee based standards. | | |
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