New SNIA Technical Work Group

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced the launch of its Computational Storage Technical Work Group (TWG).

SNIA member companies intend to come together to create standards to promote the interoperability of computational storage devices, and to define interface standards for system deployment, provisioning, management, and security. This will enable storage architectures and software to be integrated with computation in its many forms.

The industry is seeing an increase in customer requirements to move compute closer to traditional storage devices and systems. In response, a growing number of data-driven applications have demonstrated that adding computation to the normal storage features of devices and systems can realize a significant performance and infrastructure scaling advantage.

Computational Storage solutions typically target applications where the demand to process ever-growing storage workloads is outpacing traditional compute server architectures. These applications include AI, big data, content delivery, database, machine learning.

“SNIA has an established infrastructure that supports broad member participation and collaboration, producing successful standards and specifications in response to new technological challenges,” said Mark Carlson, SNIA technical council co-chair. “SNIA is pleased to establish this new Technical Work Group to facilitate the use of Computational Storage in mainstream application environments.“

Computational Storage represents a paradigm shift to heterogeneous compute architectures close to storage data workloads which is enabled by standards such as PCIe and NVMe. Future low latency interconnect standards such as GenZ and OpenCAPI are also enabling a peer-to-peer type of architecture or even full OS ecosystems for compute, memory, storage and networking, and will also play a role in the evolution of this technology.

“There are a number of applications that can take advantage of computation being moved closer to data, including disaggregation, encryption/decryption, and OS-capable computation,” said Scott Shadley, SNIA computational storage TWG co-chair. “The activities of this new TWG will help the industry and users understand and better use this new paradigm of computer architecture”.

Founding members in the Computational Storage TWG include: Arm Ltd, Eideticom Communications, Inc., Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.,Ltd, Lenovo Enterprise Solutions, Pte Ltd, Micron Technology, Inc., NetApp, Inc., NGD Systems, Inc., Nyriad Ltd, Samsung Electronics Co. LTD., Scaleflux, Inc., SK Hynix, Inc., Western Digital Corporation, and Xilinx, Inc.