The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) today announced that Paul Grun, technology evangelist with the OFA, will present “Storage at a Distance – Enabling Distributed Storage Clouds” at Storage Networking World 2012 in Santa Clara, CA on Tuesday, October 16 at 10:15 a.m.

According to Grun, “The storage cloud is steadily gaining traction in enterprise computing. In the last generation, data was aggregated into pools of storage within a data center through the use of SANs, which yielded important advances in the way data is managed, accessed and shared. In the same way, the notion of storage clouds extends this concept by federating data from distributed data centers into a globally-distributed pool of storage, bringing unprecedented flexibility and reliability and unfettered access to data from anywhere in the world.”

Key to advancing this goal are new network capabilities that allow an application to access remote data as though it were local. In this talk, Grun will describe recent advances first demonstrated at Supercomputing ‘11 in Seattle that apply RDMA technology over a 40Gbps WAN to allow a user to directly access remote datasets. This remote access capability complements RDMA’s ability to efficiently transfer large files over the WAN at wire speeds.

“RDMA is essential for high-performance application processing in the modern data center,” said Jim Ryan, chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance. “One of the OFA’s core missions is to bring vendor-neutral RDMA capability to the enterprise, so we’re excited at the prospect of applying RDMA to storage in the extended enterprise environment.”

Paul Grun has worked for more than 30 years on server I/O architecture and design, ranging from large-scale disk storage subsystems and RAID arrays to high performance networks. Grun serves as a leading technologist and evangelist for the OFA with activities ranging from advancing the state-of-the-art in server I/O to developing new I/O technologies such as RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). In addition to the OFA, Grun serves as an InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) director, where he contributed to the development of the IBTA RoCE spec. Paul's present position is storage I/O architect for Cray, Inc., a supercomputing company that provides highly advanced systems and solutions and world-class service and support to government, industry and academia.

About the OpenFabrics Alliance

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is a 501(c) (6) non-profit company that develops, tests, licenses and distributes the OpenFabrics Software (OFS) – multi-platform, high-performance, low-latency and energy-efficient open-source RDMA software. OpenFabrics Software is used in business, operational, research and scientific infrastructures that require fast fabrics/networks, efficient storage and low-latency computing. OFS is free and is included in major Linux distributions, as well as Microsoft Windows Server 2012 beta. In addition to developing and supporting this RDMA software, the Alliance delivers training, workshops and interoperability testing to ensure all releases meet multivendor enterprise requirements for security, reliability and efficiency. For more information about the OFA, visit www.openfabrics.org.