White Papers: SNIA

Solid state data storage is gaining significant acceptance today. Storage based on Ram Access Memory (RAM) and Flash chips instead of mechanical hard disk drives is earning much greater attention by meeting the market requirements for reliability, performance, and cost more effectively than ever before. Read on.

The SNIA Dictionary contains terms and definitions related to storage and other information technologies, and is the storage networking industry's most comprehensive attempt to date to arrive at a common body of terminology for the technologies it represents. The terms go through a rigorous technical review and approval process by the SNIA Technical Council to assure their accuracy.

In April 2003, the Network File System (NFS) version 4 Protocol was ratified as an Internet standard, described in RFC-35301, which superseded NFS Version 3 (NFSv3, specified in RFC-18132). Since the ratification of NFSv4, further advances have been made to the standard, notably NFSv4.1 (as described in RFC-56613, ratified in January 2010) that includes several new features such as parallel NFS (pNFS).

The energy required to support data center IT operations is becoming a central concern worldwide. For some data centers, additional energy supply is simply not available, either due to finite power generation capacity in certain regions or the inability of the power distribution grid to accommodate more lines. Read on.

Many organisations, driven by the opportunities for significant cost-savings, are considering cloud computing and cloud storage solutions, which take advantage of Web-based technologies to allow scalable, virtualized IT resources to be provided as a service over the network. Not a new technology in itself, cloud computing is a new business model wrapped around existing technologies, such as server virtualization, to make the use of information technology resources more efficient.